Abandonment and Community
I’ve been drinking tea this evening.
Earlier today, at the request of the relief camp where we stayed last night, we walked through a house that hadn’t been cleaned yet. We saw the black mold on the walls, embedded in the furniture, and smelled it in the air.
The first half of our walk today was through an area that’s widely contaminated - one of the most contaminated in the area. Those of us who had dust masks used them, others tied bandannas around their faces. Those who were recovering from respiratory illnesses or other allergies rode in the chase vehicles through the area. Our numbers were smaller today than the day before, because a sizable group of our veterans headed straight from camp into New Orleans this morning to spend the day mucking out the house of a fellow veteran. This evening, someone asked me how my throat was holding up, after walking through the contaminated area, and I said I was just fine. Then I realized I was drinking the tea because my throat felt just a bit scratchy. Then I looked over and realized there was a line for the hot water - the first time I'd seen a line for hot tea since I've been here. I still have a lingering hacking sounding cough from the walk this morning. These are the conditions the residents are living in every day, without dust masks. And so the abandonment of our communities continues.
Whether it’s the effects of Agent Orange on our veterans, whether it’s the effects of Depleted Uranium, or on the people in the communities where we’ve dispersed those chemicals, the government reaction is always the same: refuse to admit it, abandon the people affected, and put the burden on the victim to prove it’s a toxic substance. David Cline (President, VFP) likened it to demanding that a rape victim go out on their own to procure a DNA sample from the rapist before the courts agreeing to allow a case to go to trial. And here in New Orleans, contaminants from the storm are left in the environment, and if it affects the residents, so be it. Garbage from mucking out the houses lines the streets, uncollected, in the neighborhood where we’re staying. In other areas where we’ve stayed, we’ve seen the same thing – massive piles of garbage that were put in designated spots, residents were told FEMA trucks would come by to clean it, but the trucks never came.
I didn’t mention this before, but on Day 4, we walked by a huge building – bigger than a normal house, which was destroyed in the floods. There’s nothing unusual in that, not in this area, but this building had a large fence around it proclaiming it federal property. I was aware of the government abandoning communities here, but it surprised me they would leave a government building completely unrepaired. I found out the next day it was the VA hospital.
I retrieved my car and headed into tonight’s camp earlier than the main group. We’re set up tonight at a church again – one in a Vietnamese neighborhood. A young woman who is working relief efforts here gave a reporter and myself a tour of the church. There was a pile of cots upstairs for workers, and she showed us her room – where 4 or 5 people live together on cots, and then the men’s bedroom, where there were even more cots. They had running water for showers, but the shower stalls were rigged up like our outdoor camp showers – blue tarps hung up as dividers. Parts of the roof leak; they have buckets to catch it. Some ceiling tiles are falling apart, one room appeared to be uninhabitable with a partially collapsed ceiling. Damaged floor tiles in some areas had been pulled up by volunteers, and in other areas they remained. Behind the church, there is a fence marked “Police Line, Do Not Cross.” That’s where their food is stored.
It’s stored there, but they aren’t allowed to use it. A nonprofit managed to get them designated as a FEMA distribution center, and supplies that were donated by private entities that were sent to FEMA were shipped to this distribution center. You can see fliers tacked to the containers saying who donated it. Pepperdine University donated one stack, a religious organization donated another. So there is a parking lot filled with pallets of food, cleaning supplies, etc. Because it’s a FEMA center, community leaders aren’t allowed to distribute it. It can only be distributed by the FEMA workers. And no FEMA workers want to work in this community, thus the food sits unprotected from the weather, in the open lot, unused, rotting in the rain and heat, as it has sat now for several months.
The woman showing us around talked about people being threatened with arrest for trying to deliver supplies to this area. This is one of the common themes we’ve heard along the length of the gulf. The police and FEMA are afraid of the people in those neighborhoods, and are actively encouraging relief workers to be afraid of them as well. In trying to figure out why the veterans aren’t afraid of those communities where the police cower in fear, the best answer I can come up with is that these are the communities veterans come from. The military tends to recruit from poor and minority neighborhoods, so those groups are disproportionately represented in the services. I’m not condoning those recruitment tactics, but the reality is that the people who come from those communities aren’t afraid to go back to their own homes. This is what the National Guard was designed to do, to serve their own communities. But instead, we shipped them off to Iraq, and imported outsiders who are scared of the communities that need their help the most. This is one of the primary reasons that National Guard needs to be brought home. They aren’t afraid of a grandmother armed with nothing but a key-lime pie.
link to Day 5:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=691539&mesg_id=691539
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