About 50 Ephs are or will be in the Gulf Coast this spring break, helping to clean up and rebuild after hurricane Katrina. I’m in Biloxi with about 15 current students and a few alums, and we’re demolishing houses, scraping mold, building things, and anything else that needs doing. I’ll be cross-posting my blog posts about my experience on EphBlog. I’ll start with my entry from yesterday. The other entries follow in reverse chronological order; I’ll post new ones as separate entries in the days ahead.

Building and surveying

Yesterday I worked on building a ramp for what will be a clinic in a town outside of Biloxi, near the border with Alabama. I painted some boards white, and then I cut strips of tar paper, and then for a very long time, I hammered “joist hangers,” which are these metal things that help to hold the joists up. The joists are the boards under the walkway that go perpendicular to the direction you walk, and the joist hangers help to hold them to the edges of the walkway. Each one had 10 nails, which I nailed in. This took me a very long time. Eventually that was the only thing left to do, so the two men and the other Williams student (a boy) hammered the rest of them in with me, which took only about 10 minutes (it took me a few hours to do the first half). My arm was kind of tired from hammering for a few hours.

After we got back I went for a short run. It was very hot out, and I got to this intersection where there were cars and cars for a long time so I couldn’t cross, so I went home. My parents and I went out to dinner for the third and final time, this time to a catfish restaurant. We talked to our waitress, and she had lost her whole house and everything. After dinner we went to their church, where we listened to this guy pray and give a sort of a sermon about how God was showing through the people who were working there and such. The real reason we went was so we could watch this DVD made by a local news station about the hurricane. It showed the issues the citizens were concerned about before the hurricane, the interviews with people about what they thought was going to happen in the days before the hurricane, and then the news coverage of the rain and wind during the storm (the roof got blown off the news station building) and of the aftermath.

Since this area is very Christian, and Christians don’t like casinos, there was a law that said you couldn’t have casinos on land, so the building with slot machines would be floating, and the hotel and restaurants and shopping and all would be on the land directly adjacent. During the storm, the casino boats got floated up with the 25-foot tidal surge, and when the water receded they came down in places other than where they had started. One in particular broke in half; half came to rest in the middle of the highway, and the other half on top of a very old house, Something Manor. (You can’t see the house at all.) In order to remove the casino barge from the highway, they imploded it with explosives.

I realized I gave a shorter account of that before; this is to tell the whole story.

The video had these 911 calls from people in their attics when the water was rising and they had nowhere to go. “That’s why there was a manditory evacuation,” said the operator, “our crews can’t reach you.” “I know you can’t do anything,” said one woman, “my mama and I are going to die; I just wanted you to know.” (There are sound psychological reasons, of course, for her to call 911 and just let them know; I am only surprised she called 911 instead of her other close family and friends.)

Today I did “survey,” which means we walked around a part of East Biloxi with flyers advertising this community meeting that will happen next week. This is a time for the citizens to come together and discuss what they think should happen in East Biloxi, rather than just listening to the mayor and others tell them what will happen. Some people actually said they were very interested in the meeting and would definitely go. Some invited us into their houses and talked with us for a while, sometimes because they were lonely and wanted someone to talk to, and sometimes because they really wanted to tell us what they thought should happen in Biloxi.

This one woman told us, “don’t ask me what I think of the people in New Orleans.” So naturally I asked, “what do you think of the people in New Orleans?” She thought it was ridiculous that they were getting all of the attention and help when they had gone and built their city in a bowl. “They built their house in a ditch, and now they want all this help?” She gave the example of when she was in a fabric store, and she was buying a particular fabric to cover some of her chairs. “I really like that material,” said another woman, “and that’s the last of it. I should get it, because I’m from New Orleans.” The woman thought this was preposterous, and there was no way on earth she would yield to a demand with such a ridiculous justification. “They don’t do anything for themselves,” she said. “We rebuild slowly, because we’re doing it all for ourselves.” Her house was all cleaned up because she and her family had done a lot of work on it.

She invited us in, telling us that her husband was Santa Claus. It turns out that they had 12 children, and now have nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. She was happy to know that we were in college, telling us that we can do anything as girls, and if anyone ever tells us otherwise, we should go do it! She said she had done everything, especially when someone told her she couldn’t. She had danced on television many times, was a costume designer, wrote a novel, and wrote articles in magazines. When someone told her she was too old and her hands didn’t work well enough to use a computer, she went and learned it, and now, four years later, people ask her how to use the computer. She gave us each a copy of the magazine in which her article appears, which is a free periodical called “Senior Scene.”

The interesting thing about today was trying to figure out if someone lived in various houses. At each property, we had to either decide that no one lived there, or knock on the door and either talk to someone and give them a flyer, or leave the flyer in a place where it wouldn’t blow away. There was often a house that looked somewhat inhabitable, with a FEMA trailer beside it. We would knock on the trailer first, then on the house, because people with trailers had them for a reason. But what about just houses? Maybe people lived in the ones that didn’t look very good at all. Unless there was clearly no way to enter the house (wires or pipes across the gate, a big pile of debris in front of the only door) or the house was clearly uninhabitable (spray painted “do not demolish,” indicating that the person was out of town, or all of the windows were gone and the house was off its foundation) we had to assume that maybe someone lived there, and left a flyer. It was kind of scary to go to these houses that looked like a haunted house, with dried mud and rubble on the doorstep and no sign of life, dust on the windows and maybe barred entrances, and knock on the door.

Anyway, we survived. Tomorrow I shall rescue stray animals and deliver animal food. Rebecca would be so terribly proud.

(P.S. the text box for the title has not been appearing, which is why my posts have had no titles.)

(The above is cross-posted from here.)

Monday, March 20, 2006

The first thing I did today, after eating breakfast, was to call Exeter and try to get them to hire me immediately. They didn’t (or, I suppose, couldn’t), so I accepted the job at NMH. So I’ll be teaching geometry and coaching running at Northfield-Mount Hermon summer school this summer, about an hour from Williamstown.

Today we first went to a house where there was a dead tree in the yard that would fall on the house at the next storm. One of the guys climbed up in the tree and cut pieces of off of it with a chainsaw and the other people pulled the pieces away with ropes so they wouldn’t hit anything (him or the house). We cut them up and brought them over to the side of the road where someone would pick them up.

Then our group split into two, half to do interiors and half to plant sunflowers. I went to plant sunflowers. We went to a place called “Harmony House,” which is built on the first piece of land in Mississippi ever owned by a black person. It has the only old-growth forest in Biloxi, and the only organic farm in Biloxi, and sort of the only small piece of nature in Biloxi. Since it was all messed up by Katrina, we are trying to fix it up.

Previously they had made this big patch of dirt shoveled up and loose so that we could plant things in it. We planted about 10 packets of “mammoth” variety sunflower seeds. The idea is that sunflowers clean the soil, so after a year of sunflowers, they can plant a garden there again. They had an herb garden before. Also, there will be beautiful sunflowers, which are really nice to look at. So we planted lots of those, and watered them, and put hay on top of them.

In the back there was a path through the forest, and it was a boardwalk with boards, and trees fell on top of it. So the three people who had used chainsaws before cut up trees with chainsaws, and the person who hadn’t (me) carried the pieces and put them in the bucket of the tractor. It took a lot of trips.

When I got back I took a shower outside. The showers are enclosed, and there are some with hot and cold water, and some that are just On or Off. I had one with temperature changes. After the shower I read my book, and then my parents came and we went out to dinner again, Mexican this time. It was nice. My mother had laryngitis. We will go out tomorrow night again, becuase it is their last day here tomorrow, and they leave on Wednesday. Tomorrow I will do something with wood and trees again.

(The above is cross-posted from here.)

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Today I did “home improvement,” which meant that, along with four other Williams students and a class of ’75 Williams alum and her daughter, we swept the main hall where we eat, and swept and vacuumed the stairs that go to the loft where we sleep. That occupied most of the morning. This is because there was a lot of dirt, and also because we had some issues with the vacuums (both of them) pushing air out instead of sucking it in. (We took it apart and put it back together and then it worked.)

After a lunch of PB&J, we went to the grocery store, where we bought a tremendous amount of food very quickly. This is because we were buying about 10 different things, just in tremendous quantities. We got 100 pounds of potatoes, a whole box of green peppers, 6 bottles of A1 sauce, and 50 T-bone steaks, for example. This is because the organization has been saving up its food money by scrimping on meals for the past few weeks, so that they could spend a lot on this dinner and have a really good meal.

I helped to wrap up the potatoes and corn in tinfoil to grill, chopped peppers and onions, and helped smash peanuts and cut canned pineapple for ice cream sundae toppings.

The bad thing about this fancy meal is that I didn’t go to it, because my parents took me out to dinner. (They have been here since Wednesday, working with another nonprofit volunteer organization — the Lutherans instead of the Methodists.) First we drove around on the road right next to the beach, and looked at the destruction.

Basically the first few floors of everything are rubble. They are either the bare iron bars of the framework because everything has been cleared out, or they are reinforced concrete hanging by the reinforcing bars. The bottom floors of everything are grey and broken. There were some very old homes on the water, and some of them are just completely gone — there is a concrete slab left, and you have to guess that there was a house there — and in other cases the top floor and the columns are still there and the inside is all washed out and grey.

All this rubble washed into the ocean, so there is all this junk in the ocean. You can’t put your boat in because you might hit something, either sunken or floating just below the surface. They have these special machines that drive in the water and scoop up the junk onto the beach. So there are these big piles of junk by the waterline that have been scooped out of the ocean.

There was this five-story casino that floated because there are some rules about what can be built on land and what can’t (woo hoo, marine policy!). In the hurricane it got washed out of the water, across the highway, and toppled onto its side. A five-story building! Now it just looks like a gigantic pile of rubble, with the floors perpendicular to the ground instead of parallel to it.

That whole road along the beach was a thriving place for business. Now all the buildings are either washed away, reduced to rubble, or cleared out. There was a whole strip mall that is ruined, motels that just look like floors and floors of empty matchboxes, etc. And it goes on for the whole coastline.

On the bright side, we had a nice dinner at a Japanese place. Tomorrow I will do trees. It will be most excellent.

(The above is cross-posted from here.)

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Arrived in Biloxi
This morning we left the Williams club in NYC at 4:15, and flew to New Orleans, where the parents of two current Williams students drove us to the organization in Biloxi. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were met by Zach ’05, who I knew was working down here but I had no idea he was working with the same organization in the same place where we would be.

It turns out that there is this big building and we get to sleep inside. I borrowed a tent from Colin and set it up, but it is actually moldy smelling because it was damp and I think just sitting there damp for a month, so I probably won’t sleep in it (people sleep in tents inside for privacy; I could sleep in it outside to be hard core). We didn’t have to do anything today because the work crews were already long gone when we got here in the afternoon, and also we got up at 3:00 Mississippi time, so we had the afternoon to check out the area.

As we drove from New Orleans to Biloxi, we saw a lot of the destruction. The highway went through these rather nice housing developments, some big buildings with lots of units inside, and some neighborhoods with single-family homes. They look very nice until you realize that they are all uninhabited because they were sitting in water for three weeks. The Williams dad who drove us said that when you drive through that area at night, it’s completely dark.

There’s a long highway bridge over Lake Ponchatrain. The lake is really big; it was kind of windy today, so there were whitecaps. It didn’t look particularly polluted, but I suppose it is very much so.

Everywhere there is debris, but just small debris, like bits of paper and stuff on the ground. It might just be that it’s a dilapidated area; you can’t really tell. But there are a lot of places where things were clearly blown off because of the storm. We were driving along the highway and all these billboards, the board part was gone and so it was just the frame, and then the frame was tilted way up in the air. There were many of these.

I learned two phrases today: “blue roof” and “FEMA trailer.” If your roof is unstable, FEMA puts a blue tarp on it to stabilize it until they can get it fixed; this is called a “blue roof.” A FEMA trailer is a trailer (like a mobile home) that they give you to live in if your home is uninhabitable. You put it in your yard. Apparently they are very small inside.

The organization here seems to be a very good one. Lots of people have been here for months. They live in tents outside that are very homey and customized, even spray-painting the outside. There are big government-surplus green tents that people set up individual tents under, for even more protection from the rain. Apparently it will rain tonight with an electrical storm.

The Williams parents were really nice. They took us to a coffee shop and bought whatever we wanted, since we had a weird eating schedule today (breakfast at the airport at 6:00 east coast, 5:00 gulf coast time). The dad was a Williams alum, so he was happy to know about what is going on there, like anchor housing (he thought it was the dumbest idea he had heard) and the destruction (he hadn’t heard about it) and the focus on athletic tips (he thought it was a very odd focus for Williams to care whether their sports teams won or lost). In any case, I was glad that they were there to take us where we needed to go; it was a spot of organization in a bit of a disorganized mishmosh.

I was surprised that the Williams Club in NYC was not as posh as I thought it would be. The people working there were certainly not all Williams alums, and the rooms were just like regular motel rooms. My alarm clock did not work; my light was not plugged in; my door handle and lock didn’t work very well. But they provided soap, shampoo, etc. and there was a leather folder explaining about the Williams club with free stationery, so in some ways it was quite nice. And of course, we got to stay there for free (most people sleeping on the floor in a conference room on the top floor).

We will have dinner this evening, and go out and work tomorrow. The jobs are “Interiors” (gutting the insides of houses, sometimes carrying out all of someone’s stuff), “Mold” (scraping and ammonia-ing walls), painting, debris (clearing it out) surveying (looking at houses to see what needs to be done), and trees. We split ourselves into teams, and each team is assigned to a job (Interiors and Mold have five times as much work as the other four). It should be exciting.

(The above is cross-posted from here.)