Back to Tulane: Tearing down a house, New Orleans style
Destroying something with just the primitive tools in your gloved hands should be cathartic, but I didn't really feel that way. For some reason, putting the blunt end of an ax through three sheets of drywall doesn't release the tension when you find you are standing on a pile of teddy bears.
We weren't just destroying blank walls. People actually lived here. They didn't move out; they fled for survival. The kids didn't come back. They live with their mother up north somewhere. All the stuff here was abandoned, sitting wherever the floodwaters dropped it: Ninja Turtles half hidden under a pile of insulation, the board game Hungry Hungry Hippos facedown on the floor with a roach scurrying around the back of it. Even the hippos aren't hungry enough to eat that.
It was depressing being inside the house and looking at all the damage, but when I was outside, I had a good time. There was a simple reason for this: the people who live there. The lady from the tent across the street came over and asked if anyone was going to feed us. We told her we had sent people, and our lunch should be coming shortly. Half an hour later they had not returned, and she and her son brought a bunch of food: all kinds of candy, energy bars, canned food, and granola bars.
These people lost their homes. They live in trailers and tents. They have lost pretty much all that they had. But still they were more than ready to give us what little they had left. They were grateful that we came to help. It was amazing how positive they were about their situation.
They all seemed to want to stay in New Orleans but had different plans for the future. The man whose house we tore down planned to rebuild. A student in our group asked how high off the ground the new house would be. From his perch on the roof, where he had been helping remove shingles, he jokingly held his left hand about a foot above the apex. If his house had been that high for this storm, the house would have still had about nine inches of clearance above the water level. The water rose higher than his house. But he came back, and he is going to rebuild.
Despite his upbeat attitude, you can tell he is losing a lot of memories as this house becomes a pile of studs and drywall. One of my friends found a photograph of his kids that hadn't been washed out by the waters. The man was overjoyed to see it. It was one of his daughters at her second birthday party. The child is an adult now. For all we know, this is the only picture he has left of her at such a young age. As I stepped over two photo albums whose pictures were all washed out, I could see plainly that a lot more was lost than found.
Volunteer work is supposed to be rewarding, and in some ways it is. But when I got home after a long day of work, I didn't feel like a better person. I was touched by the kindness and optimism of those we had helped, but I felt more sympathy for the nice people who had to go through this disaster the hard way than satisfaction for any sort of achievement on my part. I put an ax through his wall; he is the one who has to put up new walls. And not everyone is trying to rebuild. The next-door neighbor has given up on getting his house back up. He is just going to stay in his FEMA trailer until the 18 months run out, then buy the thing and stay there. He didn't seem to be upset about this plan, but it is still pretty sad to see a guy who couldn't have been older than 30 giving up on getting his home back forever. I am going to keep on doing this, for a variety of reasons, and maybe after I have put in more hours I will feel that I have made more of an impact, but for now I am just left in awe of the dramatic extent of the damage in the areas outside the city and what kind of effect it must have had on the people who once called this place home or still try to.
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