By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
For many of the 600 Jewish young adults who took three days out of their busy lives to visit New Orleans, it was likely a brief — if not emotional — foray into a world to which they hadn’t given much thought after the initial outpouring of support in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The trip, held March 15–17, featured tours, small-scale building projects, and local speakers under the auspices of United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization for local federations. It was called TikkuNOLAm (the NOLA is shorthand for New Orleans, La.) and sponsored locally by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s Young Leadership Division. With five representatives from the Seattle area, this area’s contingent was the largest in attendance.
What struck Rebecca Hyman of Mercer Island was what had changed since the first volunteer rebuilding trip she had made to the area, in 2007, nearly two years after Katrina forced the failure of the levees that had been intended to keep the town from flooding. After many homes became submerged, the resulting mold made them even further unlivable.
There were “less FEMA trailers and less houses that needed to be torn down,” Hyman said. But that didn’t mean the areas they visited were any more revitalized.
“There definitely weren’t more houses or more people back in most of the areas we were in,” she said.
During Hyman’s first visit, she had spent her time gutting flooded-out houses and working in churches and animal shelters. That was in contrast to this trip, in which the group spent one day on volunteer projects and much of the rest of the time touring the area and hearing speakers who had either been in New Orleans during the hurricane or come to the city afterward, and been forced to make tough decisions in tough times.
One, the president of Tulane University, said his school “was on the brink of dissolution after the storm hit but, in the aftermath, decided to make [three] key decisions that changed the fate of the institution and the city as a whole,” wrote local trip participant Matt Titelbaum in a blog on Jew-ish.com about his experience. “Just one week after the storm hit, they decided that: they would continue to pay faculty and staff for as long as possible; they would ask other educational institutions to accept their students for one, and only one, semester; and they would open up for spring semester four months later.”
Once the group left the comfort of the convention center and got their hands dirty, they got noticed.
“We got a lot of press coverage when we were there because we were such a large group,” Hyman said. “I think it was in the news report they said that we were one of the largest groups to come down and volunteer post-Katrina. That was a good thing for the Jewish community to get some positive press.”
YLD director Cameron Levin, who also participated on the trip, talked about how their buses would drive by houses that still stood, gutted and vacant, open from front to back, and what had disappeared along with those homes’ inhabitants.
“Being in a spot where such tragedy and horrific things happened,” Levin said, “there were just a lot of different emotions going on for me. You feel helpless, you feel like you can’t do enough, you feel remorse and feel grief for the people who passed away there, and you also feel sad for the community that’s gone.”
Like Hyman, Levin had seen the direct effects of Katrina. But unlike Hyman, Levin had never been to New Orleans. Prior to coming to work at the Federation, she had worked for the Seattle Archdiocese, Western Washington’s Catholic community, in the refugee resettlement department. But when Katrina hit, and the trickle of Louisianans to the Puget Sound region became a flood, Levin was asked to manage the Archdiocese’s response to a new phenomenon: Refugees from their own country.
“They were really [upset] because no one was helping them,” she said. “The government was not responding. They had nothing anymore.”
But the initial response here was one of disarray.
“There was no protocol. The state didn’t do anything,” Levin said. “They were calling us for help.”
Having worked with these displaced people, Levin said she knew seeing the area for the first time would be emotional for her.
“It was definitely full circle,” she said. “We were in this clunky tour bus going around into the ninth ward, and people were getting out and looking at these devastated homes.”
The abandoned homes still had X’s spray painted on them to show how many people and animals had died there, she said.
When the group did its building project in one of the region’s parishes, Levin said she spoke with the parish president on a slab of concrete that had once been the local high school’s women’s gymnasium.
“Half of it’s gone,” she said of the school. “Wiped away, gone. Just rot. Fifteen feet [up], you could see the water damage of where it was…annihilated, all the layers of the building
infrastructure.”
The volunteers built a fence and picnic tables and painted murals for the school. When Levin asked the parish president if there was real value in their work, he answered positively.
“‘You probably saved us about four months of labor,’” Levin said he told her, “‘because there are not a lot of people coming down helping.’”
There aren’t a lot of people coming back, either. Though a report by the Greater New Orleans Data Center notes that contrary to most of the rest of the country, the area is adding jobs and the number of residents is creeping upward, the region is home to only 74 percent of its pre-Katrina levels.
Titelbaum wrote that the New Orleans residents who stayed or returned are now doing for themselves what the people and entities who continually broke their promises to assist them have not:
“The one thing I heard…time and time again is that the folks here are tired of waiting for the government to do right; members of the community are really taking matters into their own hands, shaping their own destiny, and making it happen,” he wrote.
For Hyman, the most important part of the trip was the opportunity to do something for people who she thinks may believe they can be easily forgotten so many years later.
“This has been almost four years now. They’re still doing the same thing: Trying to rebuild,” she said. “I think that going down there, showing them that the rest of the country hasn’t forgotten them, wanting to help out, I think that’s really
important.”