I received this email from one of my mother's former students at Georgetown University. Her personal account details the continued gross incompetence of FEMA....SIX weeks post Katrina. Louisiana and Mississippi still need our help and our attention. People are still without shelter, clothes, food and water.
Please read this letter and understand that people in need are still sleeping under tarps while FEMA workers get nice air conditioned tents and warm meals.
SICK. derelict. sabotage? All three, if you ask me. Just read the letter....
7 october 2005
new orleans, louisiana
people keep asking me when i will be sending an update, when i will
write my next journal.....i can't promise to write too much right now,
but i want to at least ease everyone's fears a bit and share some info.
well.....in all the different projects and places i have worked, i don't
think i have ever slept so little or worked so hard for so many hours
each day. it is constant -- since the moment i got here -- just this
gaping hole of need that we are all scrambling, just scrambling to fill.
the emotional intensity of this disaster, combined with the gross
neglect of the government, have combined themselves into a twisted look
of blank anxious fear, shock and weary resignation -- this is the look
shared by those who have lost everything in the storm, those who lost a
child or a home or a friend.....and perhaps it is this look that weighs
the experience more than any amount of heavy lifting or climbing or
driving or organizing that i do each day. it is this look, the
hurricane katrina look, that pierces me a dozen or more times each day
as i work side by side with those who have lost everything in the storm
to help rebuild their lives and the lives of their friends and
neighbors.....
people who come down here to volunteer seem to sink into this 'black
hole' once they arrive here -- calls are rare and the phone lines are
difficult; updates sporadic and disjointed......those who are outside of
this 'black hole' find themselves trying to sort through bits and pieces
of informtion to get a full picture of what is going on......the
mainstream media seems to have moved on to the next 'big story', and
declared the disaster over.
meanwhile, the folks who evacuated and were shipped off all over the
country are starting to trickle back to new orleans, seeing their homes
(or what's left of them) for the first time.....showing up at our center
with 'the look' on their face......and we load them up with supplies,
talk and listen and give them some time to process......but the need is
so great, it always feels like what we are doing is so small, so so
small.....
what this whole thing has made more and more clear to me is the absolute
inability of centralized authority structures to respond to crisis, and
the absolute ability of humans to reach each other with compassion and
solidarity, DESPITE the obstacles put in place by bureaucratic
structures and organizations purporting to help. there have been some
incredible coalitions -- surprising mutinies.....we've had national
guard soldiers sneak supplies out of their warehouses so we could
distribute them directly to people, we've had amtrak police sneak ice
for our clinic from their stash, red cross volunteers who defected and
joined our ranks.....so many many examples of people trying to get
supplies to the people who need them -- even if they have to defy orders
from above in order to do it. why do the organizations that are set up
to distribute aid to people make it so difficult for the people to get
it?? could it be a problem with the style of organization itself?
one of the people who founded the common ground clinic, who is also a
good friend of mine, has said that she founded the clinic under the
premise that the way we, as a movement, have been able to organize
medical care during large convergences and protests could be applied to
this emergency situation. the main focus of this style of organizing is
that it is consensus-based, non-hierarchical, and that it places the
patient in the position of being an empowered individual (even a hero of
sorts, in this type of situation), and not a powerless victim to be
tended to by an 'expert' doctor. this way of organizing the clinic has
been wildly successful -- the common ground clinic has served hundreds
of people a day for the last six weeks, while FEMA and red cross have
just barely, over the last two weeks, begun to even offer anything in
this area, let alone come close to serving the number of people, with
the quality of care, as common ground clinic.
well, i suppose i will have more time to theorize about the efficacy of
anarchist/decentralized models of organization during a time of crisis
when and if i actually step back from this whole thing and examine it
that way. as for now, i am simply doing it, living these decentralized,
non-hierarchical ways of organizing relief in a crisis situation.
here's an article on what i did last night:
http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/130638/index.php
and today i talked to three different people who had lost their mothers
-- one man's mother was buried under the rubble of their home, and he
has been living down the street under a tarp, wearing the same clothes
since the hurricane.....he started to cry when he started talking about
his mother buried under the mud.....
the audio is at http://neworleans.indymedia.org
then i went to the FEMA base camp for the city of new orleans......it
made me feel sick to my stomach....we drove in the main entrance,
telling the military guards that we were looking for a FEMA
representative (we were, and still are, trying to get them to bring some
port-a-johns near the 'welcome home' kitchen in washington square park).
we got some vague directions from the soldiers and were waved inside
to park. we then walked around this absolutely surreal scene of
hundreds of enormous air-conditioned tents, each one with the potential
of housing 250 people -- whole city blocks of trailers with hot
showers......huge banks of laundry machines, portajohns lined up 50 at a
time....a big recreation tent, air-conditioned, with a big-screen
tv.....all of it for contractors and FEMA workers, NONE of it for the
people of new orleans.
we never did manage to find an actual FEMA representative to ask our
question to, but we did talk to a couple guys who were staying there,
who told us that the tents were pretty empty, not many people staying
there.....and that "we don't combine with the evacuees -- we have our
camp here, as workers, and they have their camps".....and when i tried
to explain my experience with people who had lost their homes -- how we
had to literally drive two sisters to LAKE CHARLES three hours away,
because there were no shelters any closer, everything was either shut
down or full. they could house thousands of people there at this FEMA
base camp, thousands of new orleans citizens could live there while they
rebuilt and cleaned their homes in the city. but instead, due to the
arrogance of a government bureaucracy that insists they are separate
from the 'evacuees', and cannot possibly see themselves mixing with them
and working side by side on the cleanup, these people are left
homeless.......like the poor man i talked to earlier in the day, living
under a tarp with his mother buried under the mud of their
house......why can't he live in their tents???? oh it makes me so sad
and mad to see so much desperate need, and then just blocks away to see
this huge abundance of resources not being used.
I have seen no FEMA center that is actually providing any aid for people
-- I have been to this main FEMA base camp and three others in new
orleans, and each of them have signs saying "No public services
available at this site/Authorized personnel only".
it's so different from how we are working at the common ground
collective, or at Mama Dee's in the city, or the other community places
that people are starting up -- where neighbors are helping neighbors,
people just helping each other.......if an elder needs their roof
tarped, or a tree removed from their house, we send a team over to work
on it -- but then maybe that elder helps us out, by driving one of our
volunteers somewhere in their vehicle or picking up supplies for us. we
help each other -- it's so different when we are all human together,
instead of a militarized, razor-wired, fenced-in compound like the FEMA
camp that keeps out the people in need and keeps the contractors and
workers inside.
the communities we are helping do still need many things -- including
volunteers for the cleanup effort, clearing out black mold and debris
from flooded areas (some of which has been left untouched for the last
six weeks. check http://www.commongroundrelief.org for a list of needs.
we also need volunteers to help us with legal research -- if you are
interested in donating a hew hours of internet time, send me an email.
One other thing people can do from afar is to go to
http://www.extendthedeadline.org and sending a message to FEMA to extend
their deadline for hurricane survivors to apply for emergency aid (it
has been near impossible for people to get through on the one phone line
FEMA provided to apply for the aid, and FEMA has cut off the deadline to
apply).
-j