I just returned to Seattle after a week-long service project in New Orleans. Our group worked on homes in the Gentilly and Upper Ninth Ward areas of the city, north and east of downtown. We managed to get to the French Quarter a couple of times, since the trip wasn’t all work and no play. (That just wouldn’t go over well in the Big Easy.)

I was glad to do this. It was the first time I’ve done several things–hanging Sheetrock on a ceiling, nailing siding on a house, mudding and sanding and priming walls, laying ceramic tile. I was glad to make a small contribution to the cause. The homeowners we worked with are proud of their city and see their return home as a way to honor their heritage. After all, New Orleans is a city where generations of families spanning three hundred years have chosen to stay and flourish. To move to Houston (or Seattle, for that matter) in the wake of a hurricane is a momentous decision for a New Orleanian. The culture of the Crescent City is not big on the notion of diaspora.

And yet, I had a divided heart about our work. The map below, from 1728, roughly thirty years into the history of New Orleans, shows how the city was wholly confined to what we now call the French Quarter. There’s high ground around the Quarter, hugging the north bank of the Mississippi, but fully 80% of New Orleans was devastated (or completely destroyed) by Katrina. And that 80% was built on drained swamps. When you walk up to a levee, you can see the river (or Lake Pontchartrain) standing high above the streets and neighborhoods behind you. It’s unsettling. It’s not unreasonable to ask why–even in light of the great heritage of the New Orleanians who long so desperately to come home–we rebuild here.

One of my work partners was insightful about it. She said that it’s obviously much harder and less sensible to build houses below sea level, but it’s not really an unusual thing for humans to do. Across the world we’ve built cities in the unlikeliest of places–scorching desert, frigid tundra, and atop earthquake fault lines, to name just three. New Orleans is no different. It’s harder to build here than, say, Lincoln, Nebraska. But not everyone wants to live in Nebraska.

Whatever my thoughts and feelings about all this, it was gratifying to go to another part of the world and lend a hand. And I also had this thought: it may not have been as much about the actual work as much as simply being present with our fellow citizens in New Orleans. A catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina is a once-in-a-century body blow to a city, and whether or not you want to lay bathroom tile, your simple presence (and yes, the money you spend on a sazerac), is treasured.

But if you’re like me, you won’t go until later in the year. It is *muggy* down there right now!

Like This Article? Please Bookmark It!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.