Friday, February 25, 2011

 

Today was the last work day for the UMass volunteers with LowerNine.org. The PNOLA group had their last day on Thursday, and was going to tour the Make It Right work area and the memorials I wrote about yesterday.

Our last time at LowerNine.org headquarters was bittersweet. It has been a long, exhausting week, but an incredibly rewarding one. It was sad to think that we were leaving the volunteers and homeowners many of us had formed close bonds with. Many alumni I spoke with said they also wanted to see the progress on the homes they worked on and hoped to come back and see the final results someday.

Like our bunk beds at HandsOn, the storage shed at LowerNine.org was covered in messages from previous volunteers. I couldn’t help but smile as we looked for blank space on the shed to leave our own marks. The work isn’t finished yet in the Lower Ninth Ward, but here at LowerNine.org headquarters and across town at PNOLA, there are long-term staff and volunteers. Other volunteers from around the country and the world came there before us, and there will be hundreds more after us. The work will continue as long as there are volunteers who care enough about this neighborhood and its people.

Our  group had a barbecue  in the afternoon with some of the PNOLA staff and AmeriCorps volunteers. We surprised Kevin with a small gift and also thanked Mary Custard ’82, ’87, who helped drive us around town, and Denny Bro ’74, who lives in the New Orleans area and helped coordinate events for us, such as the Rock ‘n Bowl outing.

Kevin Fleming from the UMass Alumni Association pitches in with some painting. Kevin was our trip coordinator and helped make everything happen.

Kevin has handled everything on this trip with a warm spirit and unending enthusiasm. He has taken a lot of good-natured ribbing from all of us, and handled any snags in the plans with patience and a smile. It’s not easy organizing more than 30 people on a daily basis and driving between different locations every day across an unfamiliar city, especially with a GPS that doesn’t always get it right. We were so lucky to have Kevin with us, and it wouldn’t have been the same without him.

The barbecue was also a great time to reflect on the week with others. We were embraced and constantly disarmed by the generosity and warmth of the people of New Orleans. The best stories from our experience came from meeting people in the neighborhoods, such as Shelby Wilson and Robert Green.

Judy Kelly ’74 said the homeowner they worked with brought them cold drinks, gumbo, jambalaya and king cake over the course of the week that they worked on her home. The homeowner also shared stories about living through Katrina and told the group that she still has nightmares and periods of depression.

“She really opened up to us,” Kelly said.

Kelly said the homeowner invited a relative who works at the New Orleans Times-Picayune to come and read some of his poetry. He gave the volunteers autographed books and posters of his work. The homeowner offered to email all of the volunteers and keep them posted on her home’s progress.

“It brought tears to my eyes,” she said.

Andy Michaud ’68 and Judy Kelly ’74, look for a blank spot to sign on the UMass Alumni T-shirt. The shirt will be placed on the wall in the HandsOn New Orleans Bunkhouse alongside shirts left by other volunteer groups.

Kathy Kelley ’07, said the homeowner she worked with, Mr. Warren, was wonderful. Warren told the group that he was in the Superdome during the storm and temporarily moved to  Texas before coming home. The floodwaters submerged his home in about 8 feet of water. Kelley said Warren was terrific, bringing them cold drinks and ice pops one hot afternoon.

John Ferrante said earlier this week he got to attend a house reopening at PNOLA, where the family who was moving in was present. Ferrante said a little girl in the family was incredibly excited by the cake at the press conference. Combined with being able to move home, she said that it was like having a birthday party, he said.

A T-shirt signed by UMass alumni lays on the grass.

Josh Rhein ’08, said one morning, while at a job site, some teens who were walking by on their way to school stopped and thanked him and other volunteers. Rhein, who came to New Orleans for Alternative Spring Break as an undergraduate in 2007, said the neighborhoods still looked fairly empty then and volunteers were still doing early work, such as gutting houses. Today, more people have moved back into the neighborhoods, and the work is more focused on the final steps of homebuilding. Seeing the residents come back and begin rebuilding a sense of community made this trip more fun and rewarding, Rhein said.

“It’s nice to see the progress, but there’s still a long way to go,” he said.

There’s still a long way to go.

It’s a sentiment that came up repeatedly on our last day. Despite the progress we had made on a few houses in our short week in New Orleans, it was still a small imprint on the sprawling redevelopment efforts that are  ongoing six years later. I think many of us were satisfied with what work we could complete, but finished the week still hungry to do just a little bit more. We longed to spend a few more hours on the front porches and stoops  listening to and sharing stories with neighbors. We wanted just a little more time painting, caulking, drywalling, whatever it was going to take to help take away the sting of that awful storm and help people get their lives back. We wanted to drink in the strength of the people of the New Orleans who experienced things we will never be able to understand, who still find the courage to keep fighting each day to rebuild. Resilience, love and hope live here in the neighborhoods of New Orleans.

The work may not be finished yet. But this community and volunteers will keep going until it is done.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Joanne Burke from the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation came and gave a presentation on the waterways in the area and the long term environmental impact storms and man-made development has had on them.

The basin makes up one-fifth of the state of Louisiana. Burke said what happens in southern Lousiana and the Gulf Coast region affects the rest of the country. She said 33 percent of the commercial fish harvested in the lower 48 states comes from Louisiana’s coastal zone, and 95 percent of the fish spend part of their lives in the coastal zone. About 80 percent of domestic oil and gas comes from offshore drilling in this area.

When the BP oil spill happened in April 2010, Burke said there were some minimal effects on Lake Pontchartrain. She said they were checking the lake every week see where the oil was and how much was left. Burke said one of the ways we can help restore the waterways around the basin is to rebuild marshlands to keep the soil from eroding further. This will improve the local environment and help with the flooding situation, she said. Burke encouraged everyone to contact their senators and representatives and ask them to support bills that will protect and provide funding for the basin. To read more about saving Louisiana’s coast, check out the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation’s Web site at www.saveourlake.org.

After Burke’s talk, we went to Rock ‘n Bowl, a huge warehouse type of building with a bar, bowling alley, live music and gigantic dance floor. We knew we were in for something special when we pulled up to an overflowing parking lot, with people and cars jockeying fora space. Geno Delafose and a zydeco band played to a crowded dance floor while many of us bowled. Although some alumni were reluctant to step onto the dance floor, it wasn’t long before most of our group joined in.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Today those in the LowerNine.org workgroups got to visit the heaviest-hit disaster area, where the levee was breached, and the memorials to the victims. It wasn’t originally on the schedule, but our intrepid and unflappable leader, Kevin Fleming, from the UMass Alumni Association, was kind enough to pick us up and take us there.

One of the Make It Right homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. The homes are equipped with solar paneled roofs and are environmentally sustainable.

Make It Right, a non-profit founded by actor Brad Pitt, has been building homes in the area around the levee. The homes are environmentally sustainable and affordable for residents who formerly lived there.

Walking around the development was surreal. Compared with the job sites where we have been working for the past few days, it looked like a new cul-de-sac in the suburbs. It was completely empty land waiting to be built with new homes. Although the new homes are beautiful and a hopeful sign of things to come, I couldn’t help but feel an ache and sadness knowing what had happened there.

We were standing on hallowed ground, where hundreds of innocent people were swept away by floodwaters and drowned.

We were standing in a place where people climbed onto rooftops, and where some died waiting for help.

This land was once a neighborhood like any other in the United States. It was a place where people raised their families. It was a place where families and neighbors celebrated holidays, birthdays, and weddings together. It was a place called home. Many of the people who lived here will never return. And those who do will always be haunted by the  pain and suffering their loved ones endured. New houses and a new community can be built, but  some things  will never be the same.

A view down North Derbigny Street in the Make It Right development in the Lower Ninth Ward. At the end of the street is the levee wall that was breached by the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina.

When another part of our group visited the Make It Right homes, they ran into homeowner Robert Green. Green invited the group into his home and told them his story, which he has shared numerous times with the press and national talk shows such as Oprah. Green’s house faces the levee and was in the direct path of the storm surge. Andy Michaud (’68) said Green told them about how he and his family tried to leave the Lower Ninth. After sitting in gridlocked traffic for a long time, Green realized they probably wouldn’t be able to get out. Around 4:30 a.m., the barge hit the levee,  and as the water rose more than two stories, Green climbed onto the roof with his family. Michaud said Green told them how the house moved off its foundation and floated about three blocks from its original location. Green lost his mother and 3-year-old granddaughter in the storm.

Make It Right homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. Make It Right was founded by actor Brad Pitt and is doing work in the area right next to the levee wall that broke during the storm.

While a new home was built on his lot, Green lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer  brought onto his property. All that remains of Green’s original house is the concrete steps, which are a few feet away from his current home.

Michaud said  Green can still see the levee wall from his second-floor porch. Green thanked the UMass volunteers for coming to New Orleans to help rebuild.

“It was so nice to meet someone who went through it and appreciated our help,” Michaud said.

The memorials sit in the center of the median strip at the foot of the drawbridge leading into the Lower Ninth Ward. One is a large stone with the fleur-de-lis on one side and an inscription on the other dedicating it to the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

On the other side  is a part of a frame of a house, with chairs circling it and several pillars. That part of the memorial didn’t have any markers explaining its symbolism. After searching the Web for it, I came across the original architectural renderings from

A view of the memorial to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the neutral zone in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Stull and Lee Inc. The quotes mentioned in their drawings are not on the final memorial. It said that the blue pillars rising from the ground represent the height of the floodwaters in various locations. The chairs surrounding the small, wooden house frame represent the family members and others who were lost.

 

Thursday, February 24, 2011

A LowerNine group worked on mold remediation inside this house which has been gutted for restoration.

Today I helped out with mold remediation on a home just a few hundred yards from LowerNine.org’s headquarters. The interior of the home had been completely gutted, so it was our crew’s job to go over all of the wooden beams and studs with mold remediation chemicals. We used a mixture of bleach, water and JoMax, a strong anti-mold solution, and wiped the beams with rags.

It’s the first time this week that I’ve worked on the interior of a home.I It was strange to see all of the exposed beams, leftover broken lights, and molding bathroom fixtures. Marsha Alter and I wondered who lived there and what their Katrina story was. We guessed by the size of the house that a small family might have lived there. It was overwhelming to think that whoever lived there lost everything  in the house. Furniture, photos, family heirlooms, anything physical that connects us to our past,  washed away. All that remained was the dark, wooden frames of this house. It was humbling and sobering to think about.

Many of the PNOLA work groups have been assigned to the same house for multiple days. The UMass volunteers with PNOLA have been doing things such as caulking, grouting, painting, drywalling and priming sheetrock.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The exterior of the HandsOn New Orleans Volunter Bunkhouse. This was home for a week for 24 UMass volunteers.

Living in the HandsOn New Orleans volunteer bunkhouse at 3321 N. Banks St. is kind of like going to overnight camp. We took over the entire second floor of the bunkhouse, with eight people sleeping in each of the three rooms. The wooden bunk beds were nestled close together, and we didn’t have a lot of room for our luggage. Previous volunteers scribbled messages in markers and pens on the bunks, and some groups wrote messages on T-shirts that lined the walls and hallways. Along with names, years, hometowns and colleges were inspirational quotes about service and inside jokes shared between previous volunteers. We had a daily chore board where we signed up to sweep and mop the floors, do

A portion of the kitchen and common room area in the HandsOn New Orleans bunkhouse.

the dishes in the kitchen, and clean the bathrooms.

As adults, it’s been several years, if not decades, since most of us have been in a housing situation like this, so it was both funny and frustrating at times. When we all returned from our job sites each afternoon, there was this mad dash for the two bathrooms that the 24 of us shared. There have been a few occasions where we overwhelmed the water heaters, and those taking later showers didn’t have hot water.

One of the bunkrooms in the HandsOn New Orleans bunkhouse.

The students from Montreal who were staying downstairs sometimes came upstairs to use our bathrooms and also borrowed things from the kitchen. We were close to an international incident a few times, over things such as mugs from the kitchen and lawn chairs. Overall, we all got along  pretty well and could usually laugh at ourselves when small things bothered us. We truly became a small family, good- naturedly poking fun at each other for snoring and waking others up when returning home late at night. Volunteering and living together as a group has been a lot of fun so far. I would definitely stay in the bunkhouse again for a service project like this. On second thought, ask me again tomorrow after I’ve had another freezing cold shower.

Part of our group stayed at the India House Hostel, a few blocks from the HandsOn house. I don’t know what went on there, except that at some point a jambalaya song was written. From the looks of it, I can tell they’re becoming a tight-knit group and having a great time living together as well.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

UMass volunteers wait for their assignments outside of the LowerNine.org headquarters on El Dorado Street in the lower Ninth Ward.

My group moved from Shelby Wilson’s house to another location today, where we did some painting. LowerNine.org volunteers said homes in New Orleans usually need about three coats of paint because of the humidity. We got to help with the primer stage on the front porches of Miss Shirley’s home. Another part of our group went to work on LowerNine.org’s community garden.

Along with meeting Wilson and Miss Shirley, one of the cool things about being at job site was getting to know the long-term volunteers. These volunteers commit weeks, months, and sometimes years of their lives teaching and working alongside mainly unskilled volunteers on the job sites. At LowerNine.org, quite a few of these volunteers had New England ties. LowerNine.org project manager Eric Sussman, who gave us assignments each morning and coordinated operations between sites, is originally from Newton and studied at Hampshire College. Sumner Fernald Richards IV, an on-site volunteer coordinator, is from Maine. Some of the LowerNine.org volunteers we worked with hail from other countries such as France, Belgium and Germany. We’re sharing the HandsOn volunteer bunkhouse with a group from Concordia University in Montreal this week.

LowerNine.org volunteer job site leader Dylan Awalt-Conley carefully paints around a security camera on a porch.

Dylan Awalt-Conley, 18, went to Concord Academy in Concord, Mass. He was one of the job site leaders at Miss Shirley’s house. He fell in love with the city when his high school took a trip to New Orleans for a service project, and wanted to come back to continue in the rebuilding efforts. He has since graduated and is doing various service projects in his gap year before going to Wesleyan University.

Awalt-Conley lives in LowerNine.org’s headquarters with a few of the other long-term volunteers. Living in the neighborhood that they work in is important, he said, and he feels the community really trusts them for that reason. Awalt-Conley said the Lower Ninth is a tight-knit community where some families have lived for generations.

Awalt-Conley said he feels residents have been neglected by the government, and that

media coverage of the everyday rebuilding efforts has also slowed down significantly. Although he was about 13 when Hurricane Katrina hit, Awalt-Conley said he has seen  media reports from that time and is disappointed with the coverage. He said he remembers  news reports repeatedly referring to people in the Superdome as refugees. Awalt-Conley said the word is usually associated with people in other countries experiencing a disaster of some kind, and it felt odd that it was used for people here. This was happening in our country, he said, and we all needed to do something to help.

“They’re not refugees, they’re Americans,” he said.

Awalt-Conley said the media portrayed the Lower Ninth as a slum. Before Hurricane Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward had a higher rate of homeownership than the city as a whole. It was a poor neighborhood, but a vibrant one where everyone took care of each other and people took pride in their homes. He said he worked with one homeowner who summed it up well, saying, “We’re poor, but we’re living the American dream.”

The strong and friendly attitude of the people in the neighborhood and their tenacity to rebuild is part of what brought Awalt-Conley back to help. He said there is much more work to be done than just rebuilding homes, including rebuilding schools and improving the education system. Before Hurricane Katrina, there were six public schools in the Lower Ninth Ward. Now, there is only one elementary school. Awalt-Conley said most children in the neighborhood are bused to far-off charter schools. Some students take the bus as early as 5 a.m., and don’t return until 6 p.m. or later.

In the hours we spent painting, we talked about a variety of subjects, from the  rebuilding efforts to mundane movie trivia and music. We’ve all been having a lot of fun with the job site leaders we work with.  The UMass volunteers at PNOLA job sites have had members of AmeriCorps as their site leaders. The AmeriCorps chapter currently at PNOLA is from Denver.

Monday, February 21, 2011

A street view of Frenchmen Street where UMass alumni Charlie Hadley and Bill Knecht hosted a reception for volunteers on Monday.

This evening, local UMass alumni, Bill Knecht ’65, Charlie Hadley ’64, ’67G, and Carl Flygare ’80, hosted us at Suite Jazz on Frenchmen Street for a reception. We had jambalaya, gumbo, okra and King Cake, a cake served around Mardi Gras. The suite had a large balcony that overlooks Frenchmen and is across the street from a music club called the Spotted Cat Music Club.

It was a gorgeous night to  enjoy a meal together on the balcony and people-watch as music wafted up from the clubs below. The food was prepared by Café Reconcile, part of the local non-profit Reconcile New Orleans. It works with youth ages 16 to 22 in severely at-risk communities to make positive changes in their lives through life-skills and job-training programs. The Café Reconcile branch helps students learn food service skills.

Part of the fun of this trip is meeting alumni from all over the country and world. We come from places such as Washington state, Washington D.C., Georgia, Illinois, Tennessee, Florida, Toronto,  and of course, our beloved Massachusetts.

King Cake at the UMass volunteer’s reception on Monday night. The cake is a Mardi Gras tradition and has a small plastic baby baked inside. Whoever gets the baby has to buy the next King Cake.

At our community meeting last night, I could already feel the love everyone shared for the university and our love for service, which brought us all to New Orleans. Many of the alumni swapped stories about campus life when they were at school. It’s weird to think there were once dorm moms and curfews. For many alumni, it’s even more awkward to go back now and see new buildings rising out of the ground. But it’s a “good” awkward, because it means the university is thriving and changing, as all world- class colleges do. It means new experiences for the next generation of UMass students,  who, like us, will someday be alumni who look back and say, “Remember when…”

Monday, February 21, 2011

Shelby Wilson came home to find a tree straddled across her kitchen.

The memories of the storm that ripped through every layer of her life and community are still fresh years later.

“To a lot of people, Katrina was just the other day,” she said.

Wilson knows people who died in the storm and others who died

Shelby Wilson(left), homeowner, shows alumna Susan Morgensztern '71, how to crack open a fresh pecan. UMass volunteers helped Wilson with paint scraping on Monday.

after it. Some are still “cracking up” from it all, she said. Some people have built new lives in other places and aren’t coming back. Others want to come back, but can’t, for various reasons.

For better or worse, Shelby decided to come back and rebuild her home after the storm. A part of our group working with LowerNine.org helped her scrape paint off her double-shotgun house today. Wilson’s home sits at the end of Chartres Street, less than 300 yards from where the Mississippi River bends and meets the Industrial Canal.

Wilson,  an art director for a national communications company before the storm, said she remembers saying goodbye to her co-workers in the parking lot the Friday before Hurricane Katrina hit. It was the last time she saw most of them.

She evacuated to Mississippi and came home a few weeks after the storm to several feet of water and mud in her home, along with a long list of other damages. Six years later, most of the interior of her home has been rebuilt, and now the focus is on restoring the exterior.

Wilson said it took a lot of her financial resources to rehabilitate her house. Luckily, insurance helped her cover some of it. Insurance helped cover rebuilding costs for many homeowners, but those who had not finished their mortgage payments had to use their insurance money for that.

“So what do you fix your house with? Nothing,” she said. “There’s something terribly wrong with that.”

Wilson’s workplace was  destroyed during the storm. She said she was at the peak of her career as an artist who designs outdoor billboards. Everything she had professionally, her digital and physical portfolio of work, was gone. Her company offered to move her to Nashville, but she wanted to stay in New Orleans and try to rebuild with her family. Since then, Wilson said she has been pretty much unemployed. She is trying to learn new technology and design programs to keep her skill set fresh and to rebuild her portfolio.

Although  many other homeowners returned to rebuild, Wilson said many of the houses in her neighborhood are abandoned. She said it’s hard to say whether her neighborhood will bounce back or get worse.

“A lot of what happens to the neighborhood in the future is dependent on what happens to Holy Cross,” she said.

Holy Cross School, is a Catholic all-boys school that once had a campus of about 30 acres in the Lower Ninth. After the storm, the school moved to Gentilly, La. Wilson said all that remains of the school is a historically registered administration building. The National Institute of Health considered building on the land, but Wilson said they couldn’t get matching funds from the city for the project. So for now, the land remains empty, and neighbors are hoping for positive investment in the site.

One problem that predates  the storm, that neighbors are still fighting today, is the decades-long struggle with the Army Corps of Engineers over widening the Industrial Canal. Wilson said the Corps wants to turn the area into an industrial corridor, which would force many residents of the Lower Ninth out of their homes to create a floodplain. The residents  who stayed would have to deal with heavy metals and toxins dredged during construction, Wilson said, and the 10-year closure of one of the two bridges that leads to the Lower Ninth. Wilson said a number of neighborhood groups, such as Citizens Against the Widening of the Industrial Canal, have dealt with this for 40 years. Wilson said she believes this has made developers reluctant to invest in the Lower Ninth.

The stump from the tree that fell on Wilson’s kitchen is still in her yard, six years after the storm. So is an old claw-foot bathtub that was also in her home.

The storm destroyed her home, her career, her neighborhood and affected her life in ways the vast majority of us will never be able to understand. But in those hours we spent alongside Wilson, we saw a spirit of strength, hope and resilience. It’s something a lot of the UMass volunteers have felt  from the people we’re meeting and working with.

It’s not about what Katrina did to Wilson or others in the Lower Ninth. It’s about how to overcome this tragedy and move on to build an even better community.

Monday, February 21, 2011

We got our first glimpse of the Lower Ninth Ward this morning as we crossed the Industrial Canal. From the bridge, you can see the houses built by Make It Right, with their colorful, modern-looking designs and solar-powered roofs. The neighborhood nearby is bordered by a long concrete wall,  built to protect the area from water in the canal. I remember seeing water lapping and threatening to spill over that wall in news coverage during the storm.

A view of the concrete wall at the edge of the Lower Ninth Ward from the bridge. This neighborhood was in the direct path of the storm surge and barge that broke through the wall and flooded this area.

This week, we’re working with two  non-profits engaged in rebuilding efforts, LowerNine.org and Phoenix of New Orleans. At LowerNine.org headquarters on El Dorado Street, development director Lauren Paul  gave us a quick introduction and history of the ward. LowerNine.org is a non-profit long-term disaster recovery group. All of the homes LowerNine.org works on are standing structures that need rehabilitation. The organization has a few full-time staff members and volunteers who serve as job site leaders, supervising and working with volunteers such as those in  our UMass group. It takes LowerNine.org and the volunteer work crews an average of six months to complete work on a house. Since its founding, LowerNine.org has finished 45 homes and has 300 families on a waiting list.

The Lower Ninth Ward, the largest of the city’s 17 wards,  is about two square miles. It was the hardest-hit part of the city and has had the slowest recovery since the hurricane. The ward is bordered by three bodies of water, including the Industrial Canal, where the storm surge hit and flooded the area, sweeping many houses right off their foundations and completely destroying others. Paul said Hurricane Katrina didn’t actually make landfall in New Orleans, but hit Chalmette, La., which is miles from the city.

In the Lower Ninth, a 25-foot storm surge pushed a barge into the wall that protected the ward from flooding. Paul said 80 percent of the flooding that took place in New Orleans occurred in the Lower Ninth, and that 100 percent of homes were rendered uninhabitable. All of the homes had to be completely gutted. On El Dorado Street, where LowerNine.org has their headquarters, the water was at least five and half feet high, she said. The ground level in the ward has changed because of the debris and sediment that built up after the storm.

“This neighborhood was completely destroyed,” Paul said.

The federal government has provided some assistance, but Paul said it isn’t nearly enough to meet the demands  of rebuilding the city. Paul said residents are incredibly thankful for the volunteers who have come in to help.

“Ask anyone in the city … Ask people who rebuilt this city and they will tell you it’s people like you, it’s the volunteers,” she said.

Driving through the neighborhood to our work site, the contrast between the Mid-City neighborhood, where the HandsOn house is located, and the Lower Ninth Ward was striking. Although Mid-City still needs assistance, the Lower Ninth still has the longest way to go in terms of recovery. We saw standing homes with roofs completely caved in. Weeds and bushes breaking through broken windows of abandoned homes. Tiny walkways and a few concrete stairs leading to large, empty lots that once contained homes. Many of these homes still have a large, spray-painted X’s with numbers rounding the spokes. Two LowerNine.org job site leaders told me that the authorities left these marks while inspecting houses after the storm. The numbers and their positions on the X’s all have meanings attached to them:  the number of dead bodies or dead pets found inside the home,  how high the water level was.

We also saw brightly colored homes with perfectly manicured lawns and new fences. We saw kids playing on the front steps of newly shingled houses. The amazing thing is that, on each block, the homes  are not all restored, or all destroyed. These homes all coexist in a hodge-podge of development.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

The last UMass alumni are slowly trickling into the city today in preparation for our weeklong stay in New Orleans. Some alumni arrived yesterday and were able to do some sightseeing and settle into our accommodations at the HandsOn New Orleans Bunkhouse and at India House Hostel. Those who arrived early were treated to a tour of the French Quarter with Christine Ewy, a UMass alumnus, and her husband, Bob. Christine, who grew up in New Orleans, published a book “Why People Live in New Orleans.”

UPDATE: Christine Ewy was kind enough to provide all UMass volunteers with a copy of her book. Thanks, Christine!