[Peace-discuss] Our friend in New Orleans Reports

[Jan & Durl Kruse]

> Greetings from the center of the biggest natural disaster in the 
> nation’s history!
> 4/19/06
>
> We are so grateful to all of our friends and family who have sent 
> prayers, good wishes, kind words, genuine concern, and even treats! As 
> most of you know, we evacuated to Houston in the wee hours of August 
> 28th where Craig and his family graciously took us in for the first 
> two weeks of this journey.
>
> When it became clear that this was not going to be the three-day round 
> trip hurricane road trip that we all had accustomed ourselves to over 
> the past several years, we made plans for the next steps. Adam and 
> Minh and Jenni got apartments in Houston and enrolled the kids in 
> school. Christopher went to Atlanta to stay with an uncle and finish 
> his senior year in high school. He comes back every couple months for 
> special occasions and we’re going to Atlanta next month for his 
> graduation. David and Rachel and Zeke and I and three dogs went to 
> Thibodaux, Louisiana – bayou country – and moved in with an old friend 
> who runs the rural office of Agenda for Children and has a wonderful 
> big house and an adjoining apartment and a really big yard! We were 
> truly blessed by the warmth and hospitality that Dianna and Red 
> Constant provided for us for many months.
>
> Each of us went back to work early on in the journey while we also 
> worked on getting our houses gutted and tried to keep up with the 
> latest pronouncements from the Center for Mass Confusion. We put a lot 
> of miles on our cars! Adam relocated his flooded bicycle shop to a 
> much larger building and his business is doing very well. All of the 
> “kids” came back to New Orleans in January when a few of the public 
> schools re-opened, including those that Reina, Haley, and Zeke had 
> been attending. Adam and his family are now living in the upstairs of 
> their house, as are Rachel and David and Zeke.  Jenni and her girls 
> are staying with Bob and Jean Watts. I came back on March 8th and am 
> living in a trailer in Rachel and David’s front yard.
>
> What follows is a glimpse of the landscape here in New Orleans.
>
> *********************************************************************
>
> We’ve been flooded, we’ve been maligned by members of Congress, we’ve 
> been ignored and dismissed by the President, we’ve been brushed off by 
> the Treasury Secretary, and we’ve been trumped by the political clout 
> of our neighboring states. We can’t get paid for the oil we generate, 
> our wetlands are shrinking at a rapid pace, and the Gulf is warming up 
> for another hurricane season.
>
> Jobs are available, but child care isn’t. Neither is housing. The 
> State took over the New Orleans Public Schools because we couldn’t get 
> them open quickly enough. Now the State says they can’t open them 
> either.
>
> Trash pick-up appears to be run by a lottery system, but no one knows 
> where you get a ticket. Fast food joints are paying top dollar but 
> rents have gone over the top. Restaurants are open but menus are 
> short. No housing plus no child care equals no workforce and that 
> means yet another fried shrimp po-boy. (Okay. It could be worse!)  
> Don’t ask us for our address.  We go blank. “You mean where my house 
> is? or where my trailer is? or where I’m staying? on weekdays or 
> weekends?”
>
> Trailers are “in!” Unfortunately, hook-ups are “out.” My trailer was 
> delivered to my front yard on December 2nd and finally hooked up last 
> week. In the meantime, my daughter and her family moved into the 
> second floor of their house, and I moved into their trailer. So I gave 
> the trailer in my front yard to a nice couple down the block with an 
> un-hooked-up trailer. If theirs gets hooked up, someone else will get 
> lucky. It’s called trailer-tagging, but don’t tell FEMA! The rules say 
> you’re supposed to stay where you’re put. FEMA is right up there on 
> our “top ten hit list,” along with the Army Corps of Engineers, the 
> insurance industry, and the people who want to make New Orleans a 
> “living museum.”
>
> Public housing is “out.” Mixed-income housing is “in.” That means 
> about two-thirds of the families that formerly relied on housing 
> assistance to make ends meet now have to find somewhere else to live – 
> in a top-dollar housing market. Real estate developers are salivating, 
> finally within reach of getting their hands on prime real estate 
> formerly “squandered” on poor people of color. Professional planners 
> are having a hay-day. We have plans coming from every direction with 
> no connection, much like what we call “parallel play” in the world of 
> early childhood. I keep wondering if the money we’ve lavished on 
> planners could have been used to make a down payment on a new levee 
> system.
>
> We’ve lost pretty much everything but our sense of humor, our 
> unflagging resilience, and our determination to preserve this place!  
> A few blocks from my house (which is close to where I’m “staying” in 
> my trailer) there’s a very large pothole, about two feet deep and 
> eight feet wide – even bigger than the one a few miles away that cost 
> me about $500 to replace a tire and a rim.  Anyway, this particular 
> giant of a pothole inspired the landscaping inclinations of some witty 
> neighbors. Now dubbed the Broadmoor (neighborhood) Migratory Bird 
> Refuge and Wetlands Reclamation Project, the watery pothole, 
> surrounded by bits of rye grass carefully installed on its levees, is 
> home for a collection of pink plastic flamingos, some tiny living 
> creatures, a toy boat, and a stuffed green turtle. There’s also a 
> guest book to sign and a cautionary sign about not feeding the 
> wildlife.
>
> It’s that sort of stuff that keeps us going! There’s also the fact 
> that we have developed a camaraderie that bonds us together. For one 
> thing, none of us can remember squat! I get my phone number mixed up 
> with my bank account number, and my driver’s license number. When I 
> tell the lady at the bank customer care line to hold while I look up 
> the account number that I’ve had for twenty years, she laughs!  “No 
> one can remember anything anymore,” she says. The nice young man who 
> takes down my information for the housing assistance registry notes 
> the pause when he asks for my phone number and says gently, “Take your 
> time.”
>
> The exchanging of nods and good-mornings as we pass along the sidewalk 
> has escalated even for this City in which nodding and greeting has 
> always been mandatory, but often perfunctory.  When I came back into 
> the City for the first time, with my son-in-law, there was no one 
> here. You could hear the birds singing on St. Charles Avenue. There 
> were no working traffic lights. The only other vehicles on the street 
> were carrying troops from the National Guard. We waved at them and 
> they waved at us.
>
> Every time we run into someone we haven’t seen since before the storm, 
> there’s a reunion scene. Sometimes we forget that we’ve already seen 
> each other since before the storm – or at least we’re not totally 
> sure, so we have yet another reunion – complete with hugs and kisses 
> and “are you back?” and “how’d you make out?” and “how’s your Mama 
> doing?”
>
> Ask us why we stay here and we rise up with one answer – four words:  
> This is our home!
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