Living and Investing in France Conferences
Ruth was pleased once again to join Adrian Leeds and the Living and Investing in France team to help with the cultural transition for Americans looking to make their Parisian dreams come true. San Francisco was the setting for the fall conference, and this delightful city was a perfect backdrop. Ruth even got to commute to the conference site via cable car!
After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, everyone was determined to bring the conference back to New Orleans to provide much-needed revenue for struggling local businesses. Ruth stayed on for a couple of days after the conference and did some volunteer work. Here is her report:
New Orleans, May 2006
I wasn't born in New Orleans, and I've never even lived there. So I can't claim this city as mine in the sense that I can claim, say, Milwaukee or London. But I love this city in a way that does not yield to rational explanation. I'm just another willing victim of its magic. And it IS my city in the sense that it is part of my heritage as an American. New Orleans is one of this country's gifts to itself and to the world. It holds a part of our collective soul. It's mine, and it's ours.
There's nothing I can say that will add to the mountain that's already been written and is still waiting to be written. The wounds that hurricanes, criminal neglect and incompetence opened here are still raw. Even after you've seen all the photos, the sheer scope of the desolation is beyond imagining. House after house, block after block, street after street after street and on and on and on. The ugly black smears show how high the murderous water came up: well over my head in many places. Everywhere in the devastated neighborhoods are strange, sad souvenirs of the lives that were lived here: a woman's shoe (and you see a woman coming up the steps to this house, happy, with a shopping bag, eager to show off her purchase to her family), half of a CD (you see people on this lawn at a summer barbecue dancing to the music), a photo of somebody's wedding (you see the groom carry the bride over this threshold), part of a broken toy car (you see a Christmas tree in the front window of this house,
an excited child tearing open his gift), piles of indescribable debris.
They are still finding bodies in some of these buildings, nine months after the hurricane hit. People are living in trailers on their front lawns, and the new hurricane season starts tomorrow. Some have given up, decided to stay in the places they evacuated to or move somewhere else. Those with insurance and a little money in hand have been able to rebuild, knowing that reimbursement is on the way. But so many people are back and working to rebuild their homes and their city, and they are so brave. Banners everywhere herald "Renew, rebuild, rebirth" and "New Orleans Renaissance". Lawn signs announce:
Café du Monde with Leah Chase, daughter of
founders of Dookie Chase |
And some parts of the city are back to normal - or as back to normal as New Orleans knows how to get! On my first evening, I attend the 7th annual Hamster Derby at a gay bar in the French Quarter with friends. Every bar in New Orleans knows what a kir is, only here the default is kir royale. The hamster derby is a car race: miniature plastic Volkswagens have a hamster wheel built into the chassis, so that as the hamster runs, the car moves. We turn in our cash for Hamster Bucks and place bets, with all the money going to an arts organization that suffered hurricane damage.
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Many of the legendary jazz clubs, shops, bars and restaurants are open and as delicious as ever (not Dookie Chase just yet, but they're working on it). Coffee and chicory wash down beignets again at the sugar-sticky tables of Café du Monde, and a saxophone somewhere on the other side of Jackson Square wails "You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans". Bells ring from St. Louis cathedral steeple. The only appropriate toast is, "G-d bless New Orleans". |
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Café du Monde-floor covered in sticky
sugar. Back to normal! |
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Sunday morning, up waaaaay too early, I drive out to Elysian Fields (Champs Elysées) to meet the team from ACORN. 7:30 and it's already close to 90o with 90% humidity. I crank up the air conditioning along with a gospel station on the radio of my rental car (a white Mustang with Texas tags). Sitting on the steps in front of the building are a couple of dozen folks from all over the country, mostly college students, here to help in the recovery of the city of New Orleans.
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A young man named Caleb from San Francisco who works for Toys in Babeland, a feminist sex toy company. A New Yorker called Mike who is in New Orleans for a meeting with college students and their parents about careers in journalism. A lawyer from San Francisco, lots of college kids from Massachusetts on spring break.
We form up a couple of convoys. My team heads out to Gentilly, where we are deposited in a war zone. Debris everywhere, lawns overgrown into miniature jungles, remains of houses and lives. We meet Geraldine, whose house we are here to gut. She and her family are living in a FEMA trailer on their front lawn. Her daughter is due home today after major surgery.
Our ACORN team lead, Billy, hands out Tyvek jumpsuits, work gloves, dust masks and goggles. Some of the more experienced crewmembers show us how to rip out the armpits and crotches of our suits to make them a trifle less stifling.
After suiting up, we tour the house as Billy and Geraldine explain what needs to be done: remove the paneling in the living room and bedrooms, tear out the sodden acoustical ceilings, remove the plaster from a moldy bedroom closet, crack out the old bathroom tile and pull out the sink and toilet, gut the kitchen (fortunately, the refrigerator is already gone - the toxic refrigerators of New Orleans are legendary).
It's a cute little 1920's bungalow - or was, until nine months ago. Geraldine and her family moved in two days before Katrina hit.
 Billy hands out crowbars, ladders, hammers and water bottles, and we get to work. The paneling is a complete bear. It's that ugly faux-wood 1960's stuff: pure Brady Bunch. Only it's put on tightly enough to resist-well, natural disaster. You have to get a crowbar under an edge in order to pry it off, and this is next to impossible. We discover that by wedging in the straight end of a crowbar and hitting it with a hammer, you can sometimes pull the edge. Best bet is to try from the bottom, along the molding. Geraldine has asked us to try not to damage the molding if we can, and we do a pretty good job, especially considering how much more difficult this makes the task. Everyone feels we need to respect the fact that we've just walked into the home of a total stranger with the intent of causing damage-even though the damage we're causing is a necessary prelude to
rebuilding.
After pulling my panels off and dumping them on the refuse pile at the curb, I face off with the closet. Nothing complicated here, just bang in with the claw end of a hammer and work your way across as the plaster cracks off. I expose the lath, and check with one of the ACORN guys that this is in fact what I should be looking at if I am doing the job properly. Stop every once in awhile to sit in the shade, let our heart rates get back to normal and drink a bottle of cold water (just as well we're sweating it all out since there's no place to go to the bathroom). Shovel out the debris when it gets too thick and keep going.
Lunch break. Eat a dubious sandwich that has been heating up on the front seat of my rental car all morning and chat with Geraldine and the other volunteers. Looking around the neighborhood and realizing that the devastation goes on for miles and miles, it seems so little to be gutting just one little house. But as Geraldine's thanks and "G-d bless y'all"s remind us, it's the world to one family.
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The Ruth Mastron Memorial Closet
- ready to rebuild! |
| Finish up the closet. The worst of the mold is down towards the bottom where the waterline was. As I crouch sideways on the floor to get a purchase on the hammer, my legs remind me that we're not 20 years old anymore. When all the plaster's down, shovel it out the window to a waiting wheelbarrow.
Join a lawyer from San Francisco in the back bedroom. Standing on a ladder, she pries off the ceiling tiles, which hit the floor with a sodden thud. I gather them up as we work our way across the room and pitch them into the wheelbarrow. Every few feet, pop outside to empty the wheelbarrow and start again. |
Meanwhile, the kitchen crew has hauled the stove out to the curb along with what's left of the cabinets and the drywall. The only major task unfinished is the bathroom, and there's already five people in there with no more room, so the rest of us shovel and sweep out the rooms we've completed. The toilet makes its way out to the curb as we strip off our soaked Tyvek suits that are now papier-mâché and dump bottles of cold water over our heads. My hair is white with plaster and in spite of my dust mask my nose is running black. We clean up our discarded water bottles and add more trash bags to the mountain by the curb.
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Next morning, head out to ARNO in Harahan where there is a special animal shelter for four-legged Katrina survivors. My first impulse is to load all the kitties into my car and take them home to Oceanside, but instead I concentrate on cleaning out cages in the quarantine area, setting down fresh newspaper and being careful to disinfect my hands between cages to prevent cross-contamination. All of the cats here are having medical treatment for various ailments, and they are all so adorable it breaks your heart. A couple of mamacats with kittens, and a couple of cats who are obviously spooked when I open the cage door, so I speak softly in French (all cats speak French, since it is the only human language which is almost adequate to express their natural superiority), telling them that they should take their medicines and concentrate on getting well so they can find new can openers (aka, human families).
One of the volunteers is a vet tech known affectionately as the Cat Nazi. She has a somewhat abrupt manner, but she has found homes for 80 kitties in the Boston area and is taking them there in a few days, so there's really nothing more to say. As far as I'm concerned, she can be as abrupt with me as she wants.
Then I'm paired up with another volunteer, Robin from Wausau, Wisconsin. The back of her rental station wagon is loaded with animal food, gallon water bottles and aluminum and plastic pans. I load my three huge bags of cat food on top. We are given a list and map of feeding stations that have been set up in the devastated area around Elysian Fields and Marigny. It's no small feat to find our way around an unfamiliar area with lots of the street signs missing, but we are encouraged to see folks working on their houses. Some of them invite us in to see how far they've come and share their triumph.
We set out feeding stations - aluminum roasting pans full of food and water - under houses, on porches and in other sheltered locations. Many abandoned animals have already been picked up, turned in or simply died somewhere. One of the added horrors of Katrina was that rescuers refused to evacuate pets along with their people, which resulted in animals being left behind to fend for themselves, and in some cases, people simply refusing to evacuate without their friends.
The US Humane Society is working to pass legislation to prevent this from happening again. The Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (PETS Act), S. 2548 and H.R. 3858 passed by a landslide in the House. Encourage your Senators to vote "yes" at https://community.hsus.org/campaign/FED_2006_PETS3. And check out www.hsus.org/hsus_field/hsus_disaster_center/ for useful information about keeping your own fur babies safe in an emergency.
Robin and I set out food and water, making our way into abandoned garages, stepping through the jungle of untended yards, picking through piles of debris. It is wretched hot and steamy. We check the stops off on our list, asking people we see if they have noticed any abandoned animals in the area. When we see animals, we note the place, number and descriptions so that teams can try and catch them later to take to the shelter.
The afternoon wears on, and we're running out of water. We try to refill from the outside faucets of some of the abandoned houses, but most of the taps are dry. When we finally find running water, we are so excited we start jumping up and down and soaking each other. The water runs brown for a few minutes, so we wait until it's clear, then refill all our bottles and keep going. All told, we service about 35 or 40 stations before I head to the airport, sweaty and dirty, for the long flight home.
I can't say enough about the amazing people running these organizations on something less than a shoestring. They're still there and volunteers are still coming - and still needed. Think about spending a terrific few days enjoying all the city has to offer (and helping to support restaurants, bars, clubs and other businesses), and perhaps adding on a day or two as a volunteer. If that's not possible, a donation of any size will help more than you can imagine:
Update: The American Library Association is the first organization to hold a major conference in New Orleans since the devastation of Katrina. Yay, librarians! Many participants also did volunteer work while in the city, helping to repair libraries and bringing donated books and other materials. If you are involved in planning meetings or conferences for your company or other organization, please consider bringing your group to New Orleans. You will have a fantastic time and bring much-needed dollars to local businesses. And consider some volunteer work while you're there!
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