I Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans

Hello Everyone, and Greetings from Olympia,

Our last week of this trip to New Orleans was our best one.

Davida Finger of the Loyola Law School Katrina Clinic hooked Ann and me up with a family in Gentilly who used their insurance money to rebuild the 5-foot-flooded first floor of their home, but ran out of money before they could finish the upstairs. Miss Ray and Mr Harold Bellanger are in their 80's, and live with their daughter and her son and 18 year old nephew, who just had a kidney removed. The Road Home money hasn't trickled down to Miss Ray and Mr Harold yet, so they all have been scraping wallpaper off the upstairs walls by hand, all of which were damaged when the winds tore off part of their roof. Our son Kevan kicked in a very generous chunk of money for materials, and Ann and I got to lead a team of volunteers to finish the wallpaper removal, texture the walls in preparation for paint, and level and repair the sagging subfloor in the upstairs hall. Ann and I spent Monday pulling up and disposing of the carpet and pad in the hallway, and got a look at the subfloor underneath. It had a high peak that ran down the entire center of the hall, and had several very squishy spots at the sides. On Tuesday, Reggie and several other volunteers joined us to get to work. While Ann and I shimmed and strengthened the floor, they all set about to remove the wallpaper in the other rooms. Miss Ray and Mr Harold's daughter Tania and her son Reggie had spent a lot of the previous week removing all of the wallpaper in the hall so it would be done when we got there to repair the floor. We purchased a wallpaper-removing chemical and special scrapers, and took it along with safety gear to them the week before, and they've been at it ever since. We spent all day Tuesday and Wednesday with this work, and went home Wednesday with the floor completely leveled and set with underlayment in preparation for new flooring, and the walls clear of wallpaper and ready to texture. On Wednesday, we were joined by Eric and Steve, two old Hands On volunteers who now live and work full-time in New Orleans. They provided the expertise to skim-coat the walls to make them smooth in preparation for texture. On Thursday, Nic Bonsell came along with us to show us how to use a texture gun and how to "knock down" the texture once it was applied. I asked a new regular volunteer, Bill, to learn the texture gun, since he was planning on spending the entire summer here to work. By 2pm, we were all finished, and the walls are now ready for paint.

On Friday, Ann and I went back to complete little stuff. We reinstalled the door trim we had to remove in the hall, installed transition strips between the hall and the rooms, and generally cleaned up. We also got to give Miss Ray and Mr Harold a $200 Home Depot gift card as a jump-start on their paint and flooring, compliments of our son Kevan. I had the honor of bringing along a gallon of white paint to finally cover up the orange "X" that was painted on the front of their house. I asked Miss Ray and Mr Harold if they would like to help, and they each took their turn covering up the X that was painted by searchers days after the storm. There we were, 1020 days after the X was painted, finally putting it to rest. It took 3 coats of paint, but I wasn't packing up until none of it could be seen on that home.

For the record, here's what the X read, clockwise from the top:

9-5 (Searched on 9/5/05)
- (No hazards located)
0 (No bodies found inside)
AE (Team that searched)

Now the front of their home just says "4532" (their house number). A great way to end our 6th trip down here. Mr Harold told me that they had been contacted by lots of neighbors before they returned, asking if they were coming back. All of those neighbors said that if Miss Ray and Mr Harold weren't returning, neither were they. The Bellanger home is that home on Feliciana Street that serves as the magnet for others who weren't sure they would return. Today, about half of the homes in their vicinity are either occupied or in the process of being repaired. Lots of Xs are still painted on the outsides of homes here in the shadow of the London Avenue Canal. Hopefully, that white spot on the outside of Miss Ray and Mr Harold's home will serve as another reminder to their neighbors that they too can come home again.

Mary Ellen Bartkowski and Reggie Derman have continued, for some reason unexplainable to us, to open their home to us when we visit, and to treat us like family. We are so grateful to them for their generosity and love. It seems so long ago that the three of us worked together on Miss Rose's siding way back in March of 2007, which led to Mary Ellen leaving her Chicago home to teach at a New Orleans public school.

I've found myself nostalgic in many ways during this past trip. Ann and I invited our pals for a last-evening beer at Igor's, our old hangout on St. Charles Avenue, near our beloved old bunkhouse at the First Street United Methodist Church. I looked around the tables that evening and realized that many of the truest friends I've had in my life were there with me. We saved a seat for Chandra, but Boston was too far to come. Even so, I thought of her that evening, in the humidity of another hot day in that wonderful city in the Deep South, enjoying stories and laughs with Ann and our pals, and I felt that familiar sense that I was home.

Catfish is still $39.99 for a 15-pound box at the Chicken Mart (which still doesn't sell chicken), Gold Teeth are still 2 for $150, Six Flags is still closed, the streets are still ruined, but the city looks better now than it did when we visited in February, when it looked better than it did when we visited in November. Each time we visit, we notice some new signs of life. One time it's the St. Charles streetcar, now fully operational along its entire course, another time it's Charles Brown's home in the Lower Ninth, now occupied and FEMA-trailer free.

Last week, it was a visit by Reggie and me to see whatever happened to the New Orleans East Super Gut that he led in March of 2007 (you can read about it in my 3/18/07 entry "Back Home in New Orleans"). We drove out to New Orleans East to see if we could find it and see what, if anything, had been done to it since we gutted it 15 months ago. The first photo shows our gut pile outside the home, and the second shows what we found last week. Both Reggie and I were pretty taken by the transformation.

And still another time it's a homeowner banging away on a once-decrepit, burned shell of a home on Jackson Street, its new framing now nearly complete, and its wrought-iron circular staircase, once hanging by itself in the air and connected to nothing but the ground, now being used by him and his crew as they rebuild his home. The sign on that stairwell has said, for as long as I've been coming here "I AM Coming Home. I WILL Rebuild".

I now believe it.

My love to all.

David/Dad