Drop me off in New Orleans . . .

We are just now rolling off our week in New Orleans, and making our way north and west through Baton Rouge and rural Louisiana. It will be difficult to say enough about our experience in New Orleans, but impossible to keep quiet!

We came into the city at a blistering pace, averaging better than 22 MPH and cycling like we could outpace the heat and humidity. We couldn't, of course, but after 70 odd miles we found in the French Quarter some great seafood and hospitality, and an opportunity to get a good rest and watch the USA's first World Cup Match. After personally putting down a big bowl of seafood gumbo and two shrimp po'boys, I and our small group wound our way through the French Quarter. Decked out in our Bike and Build kits and accelerating with every break the traffic, we drew more than a few shouts and quizzical looks; with a few war whoops it came to me that this was the closest I might ever get to what American GIs felt as they marched into Paris. On Sunday we had a day off to soak up the city, take in its wooden street cars and brass bands, and ask each other whether we had crossed some invisible border into country unmarked on any map or globe. [The best answer to that, of course, is that, singular as it is, a city like New Orleans belongs only in the good ol' US of A]

From that experience of the city's unique character and jazz-driven energy, our first build day in the Ninth Ward was something of a shock. Driving over the bridge into the city, it's easy to see where the levees broke and floated homes for blocks and blocks. What had been a bustling part of the city remains a checkerboard wasteland of abandoned homes and bulldozed lots overgrown with thick grass. Even those that are being slowly renovated and reinhabitated still bear the spray paint marking of the National Guard sweeps after Katrina, with the date, TFW for toxic flood water, and the number of bodies found there.

The 9th ward, impoverished though it was, acutally had a 95% home ownership rate before Katrina. From an affordable housing standpoint, this would be a major success story for any low-income community. Though the media may have focused on the more destitute families affected by the storm, the neighborhood contained in reality a high number of working people earning enough to own their own home, and realizing that opportunity. After the storm, these people not only lost their single major investment but often had to find and pay for new housing while budgeting mortgage payments and taxes on a home that was underwater for three months. Road Home, a federal program designed to give $150k grants to hurricane victims to held them rebuild and return home, saw most of the funds designated for New Orleans residents ferreted away by corrupt contractors. Less than 25% of 9th Ward residents have returned to their homes, and among all of the storm survivors there is an unnaturally high death rate, as the stress and trauma of evacuation and the ongoing dislocation in their lives and among their families continues to take a toll. This was related to us by Mac, a 9th Ward resident who returned and poured his resources and his time into created the 9th Ward Village, a community center designed to give residents a unified voice, and bring people home. Mac was one of the more inspiring we spoke with. He spoke of losing the home he had worked to purchase, and over a dozen antique cars which he worked to refurbish and kept. These things were his pride and joy, and he described for us the crisis of identity and feelings of worthlessness he fought after they were literally all washed away. Still, he, like others we spoke to, called Katrina the best thing that ever happened to him, the kind of eye-opening experience which, though destructive, is also powerful enough to radically re-orient one's life. He described his work at the community center as fulfilling the purpose he had not yet found, and his words will stick with me: "The higher power don't make no mistakes, and you do have a purpose. It's like a light that you've seen your whole life, but that has only just then come on for the first time."

We spent just two days building in the 9th ward before being shifted to another site in East New Orleans, helping a guy we knew as Jeff rebuild the interior of a home he had purchased just 12 days before Katrina, which hit days before his homeowner's insurance could take effect. He wanted to move to East New Orleans after one of his twin sons was killed by a stray bullet in the 9th Ward, and was when we met him working six days as week to manage a Dollar General while supporting an extended family, and putting himself through college to teach elementary school. Because the organization we were volunteering with, the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, had lost funding to continue their rebuilding program, Jeff did not have a site supervisor who could help provide the tools and supplies needed to get all the sheetrock up and prepped for painting, not to mention handle installation of cabinets and appliances that Jeff has to purchase with the little income he can spare.

Those circumstances made our work frustrating, since without sufficient tools and organization our energy and willingness to work felt wasted, though we knew the need for those things was so great. Still, it did highlight why it is we ride. If the attention, resources, and organization to tackle the affordable housing crisis and the effort to rebuild the Gulf Coast from Katrina already existed, there would be no reason for us to do cycle. We'd just drive from build to build.

What we are trying to do, though, is first to let people know that these problems exist, and that even though national attention has receded the Gulf Coast will be rebuilding from Katrina for the next two decades, despite recession-drained under-funding and a new environmental and economic disaster creeping along their shores. That these people have to face these twin disasters is almost beyond comprehension, and as our site supervisor in the 9th Ward (donating his time and materials to help his childhood friend's mother get her home back) showed us photos of his weekend fishing haul (probably 100lbs of catfish and saltwater stock) it was apparent that, for many in New Orleans and along the coast, the oil crisis will be just as painful as Katrina. He had related to us without flinching how he fled with his family, lost all their possessions but their clothes, and spent several months working full time to make both housing payments, and then working at his own home into the wee hours of each morning so that his family could move back in and they could return to something like a normal budget. But when I asked him whether he thought enough was being done to stop the spill and face the clean up, his face twisted: "If they wanted to plug up that well they coulda done it. We put a man on the moon 40 years ago. But they know if they cap it then they can't get at it, and there's a lot of money there. A lot of money, so they'll just make people suffer."

For us New Orleans was a city of extremes, with more excitement that we are likely to get all trip, an indefatigable joy that floats on its vibrant musical culture, and a deep and painful wound that will now see more salt than care. If that seems a hard place to leave it, then I would say the same about our departure from that wondrous place.

Love from the road,
Luke

**This post goes out to Heather McGuiness, a good friend in DC who supported my participation on this trip! Thanks Heather, and to all of you who have donated!**