strike that

one day, one hundred degrees

I’ve been here less than two days and already I don’t know where to start.

Because first of all, I am in New Orleans. And it’s crazy here. And maybe you already know that, because, well, no shit. But this disaster to me was too big to understand, and too wrong to really believe. I saw the same pictures everyone saw on TV last year, of people waiting to be rescued from rooftops and cars floating down the street. But honestly there are so many pictures like that on TV, month after month, and they’re just pictures. When I visit places I’ve seen in pictures, they’re almost never like I imagined. Which is maybe part of the reason I feel compelled to go places like Bosnia and New Orleans. I feel like these are places I should understand, and the news washes over me as hard as I try to make it sink in.

And second of all, I’m here in a story-laden set of circumstances, in a church full of volunteers who are mostly much younger than I am, having the kind of fun that is both inappropriate and necessary in a disaster area.

And third, our work is intense and uncomfortable and sad and physical, and I want to talk about that too.

But I guess there will be time.

Let me just start where I started, at 6 am in a former church sanctuary now full of bunk beds. Having hardly slept, I got on jeans and ate a bowl of cereal out of obligation. I got my gear. I got in a van. Ten of us drove to a house for a gut.

Houses are not designed to sit in water. When they do, as thousands and thousands of New Orleans houses died, everything in them spoils. The furniture and the carpets and the plaster and the insulation. The walls and the ceiling. It is all ruined beyond repair. The only thing salvageable is the wooden frame and the roof. All the other things have to go.

But all the other things don’t just wash away – they spoil in place. They cling, broken, to the wooden frame. And then mold grows. So gutting a house involves breaking apart all these useless but still-strong pieces and carting them out, leaving only an exterior shell of a house with the frame revealed inside.

It is disgusting, exhausting, and dizzyingly hot work. We wear boots and jeans under Tyvek coveralls, which are bright white paper lined with plastic. And on our heads we wear respirators, goggles, and hard hats. We swing sledge hammers and crow bars and smash everything away, and then with just as much work we empty all the rubble into a big pile by the street. In Louisiana heat. Wearing hats and protective clothing. Inside plastic suits.

And at the end of my first day I was so exhausted that I nearly fell asleep at 8 pm. But also here I am, with forty people I don’t know, and that needs to change. So with faith in second winds I walked out to the front room and glommed on to a going-out group, and six of us went dancing on Bourbon Street, which is still full of bachelor parties and Big Ass Beer stands and barely-dressed couples drinking big frosty drinks in the street.

So that's my first day. Not even. There’s so much. But I have to get back to it.

posted by tortaluga @ 1:10 PM