“You are the true heroes of this disaster…”
This is what we heard after working in the Community Center of St. Bernard Parish for seven hours today. After working in the county which was destroyed the most by Hurricane Katrina it has become clear that this area is one of the districts most in need, and yet it was hard to come across volunteer opportunities. From the moment we arrived to this Community Center, it was truly eye-opening. It took us a few hours to find the location, and in the process we came across more than a handful of boarded-up houses and streets which had been completely shut down, yet this didn’t compare to what we saw once we reached the St. Barnard’s Parish; nearly all of the houses were still in poor shape and most of the families were still very much in need.
I spent a lot of the day working with the family members of this traumatized area. When we first arrived, I had two young children run up to me and immediately started to play hide-and-go-seek and goofing around. Seven year old Heather and six year old Hayden were home-schooled by their mother, but we were soon to find out that they spent most of their time in the center, playing with the volunteers who come in and out of the doors every day in the place which they call home. For the first few hours of the day we colored Lilo-and-Stich color books and played outside on the swing set, and later, they were more than excited to be able to help me bring canned food into the distribution area, where any family from the district could come in to pick up food for themselves and their family. Once they returned home with their mother, I began speaking with some of the older visitors to the center. This was the first account I had with anyone who had truly experienced the storm. One of the ladies, Mary, spoke to me about how she had nothing left after the storm hit and hated to be so greedy by taking the food from the center, but explained, “what else can you do when you had to sit outside on your roof for a few days, hoping that someone would come and rescue you.”
As much as Rosemary’s story resonated with me, I felt the most emotional connection with Stephen. Stephen is one of the directors of the Community Center and had spoken to me on-and-off throughout the day. He recounted to me his experiences from the story, and was very happy to explain the lies that the media portrayed… they had measured the height of the waves incorrectly, they were really much higher than the measurements which the media had reported. Later on in the afternoon, he shared to the group his experiences via DVD, which had been put together from his own pictures, as well as other photographers who had witnessed the storm first-hand. This was truly the most eye-opening experience for me. I had seen many pictures over the course of the past two years, but these made the devastation come alive. I had never had someone account the stories behind the pictures while they flashed in front of my eyes. Stephen began to tell me the story of his escape and how he lost not only all of pets (who were replaced by volunteers throughout the months), but also how he lost his wife, who he no longer had any pictures to remember her by, because his house was completed submerged underwater after the storm. In conjunction with these stories which had already touched me, on the drive home, I witnessed so many more neighborhoods which had been hit extremely hard by the storm. Nearly all of these areas had been shutdown, and very few businesses have opened up nearly three years later. This day was truly moving and I look forward to speaking more with the residents of these devastated communities.