Pia Wilson reports
It's not like I haven't seen broken homes before. My hometown is right next to Newark, NJ. There's plenty of broken-down houses there. I've seen it in the South too. My Grandma Lisha Mae lived in a two-room shack with a tin roof, down in South Carolina. She raised my father and his six brothers and sisters there, in abject poverty. So, I know what broken homes look like. But I still wasn't ready for what I saw.
Like everyone, I'd heard the horror stories of the Superdome. I'd seen the images of people desperate to escape the raging hurricanes. And, like everyone else outside of the area, I thought the Coast — New Orleans, in particular — was well on its way to recovery. I had seen the pictures of Mardi Gras in New Orleans' French Quarter. Everyone seemed to be doing fine. I mean, it's 18 months after the storm. In New York, that's a lifetime. So, when my colleague, Priscilla Ramos of WHY's National Hunger Clearinghouse, and I proposed going down to do a poverty review and analysis of the region, I thought we were going to make sure that low-income people were remembered in the recovery process. I wanted to take note of what was going on and analyze how the region could rebuild with a mind to abolish the poverty that had existed there for decades. I thought the Gulf Coast could become the most progressive area in the country by turning the tragedy of Katrina into an opportunity to fight poverty. I know now, having come back from the Gulf Coast just a week ago, that the opportunity to be innovative and forward-thinking about fighting poverty may not come for years.
18 Months Later: This is New Orleans?
We had been warned to stay out of the Lower Ninth Ward, Priscilla and I. It's too dangerous. Too desolate. Someone had just come back from New Orleans and said that outside the French Quarter and the Garden District, it looked like a Third World country. So we got our hotels in the French Quarter and promised to stay safe like the good girls we are. And when we got down to the city, we went to see what New Orlean's "Ground Zero" looked like as soon as we could.
It did look like a Third World country. A war zone. It didn't look like Newark. It didn't look like Grandma's shack. It looked like a bomb had gone off somewhere. There were rows of houses missing. Of the homes left, so many were sitting in ruins, looking as though Katrina had hit only the day before. "This is New Orleans?" I thought to myself. "A year and a half later, and this is New Orleans?"
The first time we went around the Lower Ninth, we were with the non-profit organization Common Ground Collective. Common Ground was working in the Ninth Ward mere days after Katrina. As part of our poverty review and analysis, Priscilla and I had set up interviews with different organizations, and Common Ground was one of the first organizations on our agenda. We would later hear from others around the city that if Common Ground and Acorn hadn't been there, the city would have done away with the Ninth Ward altogether.
Through our visits with Common Ground and Acorn and the other non-profits, Priscilla and I got a serious education about the politics of the recovery, and we plan to complete a detailed report about the area in upcoming weeks. Throughout our stay, we heard disturbing stories from the people on the frontlines in this battle to keep an already marginalized population from being wiped out. To me, at least, there seems to be one running theme amongst politicians all along the Gulf Coast, New Orleans in particular: Get rid of poverty by getting rid of the poor people. They didn't make the storm, but they're sure going to take advantage of it.
Of all the stories Priscilla and I heard, the things that stuck out most in my mind were:
- there's a waiting list for children to get into public school
- children were being served lunches so cold that there was literally ice on them
- there's a growing suicide rate amongst the elderly population
- evacuees are losing homes that have belonged to their families for generations because of something as simple as not having the grass cut on their property
I'm here to relay these stories. That's one thing the people we encountered on our trip kept asking us to do: let people know what's going on down here. Priscilla and I and the rest of the team at WHY have plans to do that and much more in the coming weeks and months, and we will keep you informed of the grassroots organizations doing the bulk of the recovery work.
As I write, I'm reminded of my Grandpa Sam. He used to live in Alabama, where he was a farmer, and when my brother and I would visit in the Summer, he'd sit in the rocking chair on the porch with us on his knee. When the trucks would pass by, he'd wave at the drivers and they'd wave back and Grandpa Sam would say, "Go, tell it." He was talking about the Gospel. Go, tell it. I'm talking about the Gulf Coast.
