Rebuilding New Orleans

“It’s good to be a college professor,” The Accountant mumbled from the couch in our hotel room at Olivier House.

“Why?” I asked, amused, “because you don’t have to do hard labor every day of the year?”

While The Button is on vacation in Thailand with her Dad, we decided to head south to New Orleans to volunteer for an organization called Rebuilding Together. After the first day of work on the job site, we landed back in our hotel just about as filthy and exhausted as I’ve ever been in my entire life.

Rebuilding Together (“RT”) specializes in rehabbing (rather than new construction) damaged homes that belong to the disabled and elderly. Many of their clients in NOLA live in homes that are considered historic, so the city won’t allow them to flat-out demolish. That’s where RT, and volunteers like us, come in.

1239 St. Ferdinand was built in 1904 in the St. Roch area of town, and was turned over to RT to use as a halfway house of sorts for their clients. When volunteer crews are working in a house, very often the elderly residents don’t have a place to stay while the work is being completed. So this building, once it’s rehabbed, will house clients in need.

It was a complete gut-job. We went down to the (often rotted) studs, and there was drywall dust and debris everywhere. I spent quite a bit of time one day clearing debris from the alley, and found a stash of perfectly undamaged white ceramic tiles piled near the foundation. And I couldn’t help but wonder about the history of the house. Were the people who lived there about to retile a bathroom when the storm hit? And while you’re at it, why WAS the alley a logical place to put a used toilet?

Bob Whitacre, project manager for one of our local Habitat for Humanity houses in Ann Arbor, would have been proud that I salvaged every one of the intact tiles – enough to perhaps do a nice backsplash.

There were about 25 people working at 1239, most from RT affiliates in Monterey and St. Louis, with a few other scattered odd-balls like The Accountant and me. Lisa, our House Captain, is a building inspector from San Diego, and like Bob Whitacre she was cool, level-headed, and good with volunteers. I want to be her when I grow up.

(This is Lisa’s very, very old Chihuahua. Perhaps Chihuahuas are required for a builder’s license in southern California.)

Many who haven’t been to New Orleans since the storm ask "what's it like down there?" And I tend to focus on the "French- Quarter-is-open-for-business" message. That's because I don't think it can be overemphasized since tourism is so vital to the local economy.

That said, perhaps some perspective best comes from a local resident. I subscribe to a number of New Orleans-based blogs, and this post by Laureen at New Orleans MetBlogs articulates my own reaction after this most recent visit. As we drove around the city, it seemed a crazy juxtaposition of incredible examples of the rebuilding, can-do spirit contrasting with areas that look like something from the Discovery channel show "Life After People."

"We started to see a difference last Fall, " Richard Fisk, owner of the Bombay Club in the Quarter told us. "Long about November, we really started to see things change."

Life is often defined by our ups and our downs. And while New Orleans has certainly suffered a lifetime of downs in the last 34 months, maybe moving forward the ups will start to have more impact, and be more visible.