Hurting at home

Jimmie Briggs, a NYC-based freelance journalist and author of “Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War,” is now working on a movie about the issue of children in war. In fact, he was in Uganda just days before he was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans for the Target project. I was worried he would be in no shape to head off to another devastated place, but he was eager to go. While there, Jimmie and Natalie Pompilio got some major gutting work done ...

A family connection and desire to lend whatever hand I could led me to New Orleans for a week's time. Like many other Americans, I suspect, the full impact of Hurricane Katrina was lost on me. With each passing day in neighborhoods such as Ponchartrain Park, the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, Lakeview and St. Bernard's Parish, my awareness grew tremendously as did a sense of anger and frustration.

After arriving on a Wednesday, I toured the most debilitated areas with Times-Picayune staff photographer Rusty Costanza on Friday. I couldn't help repeating to myself and eventually aloud, "This is not America, this is not America." I vividly recall watching the immediate images of the storm and its aftermath on cable television networks and feeling like I'd been in that place before, the images of the people begging for outside attention and relief seemed all too familiar. I wanted to believe that what I saw on TV and on newspaper Web sites was one of the developing-world countries in which I often find myself.

Having made my first post-Katrina visit to New Orleans and the surrounding areas, I can only question my country's state of being, how so many people were allowed to remain homeless, displaced and with the feeling they've been ignored, overlooked. Many neighborhoods feel like graveyards, with many homes wiped clean from the concrete slabs on which they rested or had been ruined beyond saving.

Following a weekend of gutting homes with Picayune staffers such as Costanza, Suzanne Stouse and Renee Peck, I asked to visit the paper's downtown newsroom and was allowed to speak with nearly a dozen editors, writers and photographers about the impact of the storm on their lives personally, the paper, and the community at large. It was all very informal, of course, but I'd like to believe that the days I spent sitting in the cafeteria or at various desks was of some comfort and benefit to those with whom I met. It seemed to me that having a colleague affiliated with Dart come and talk -- but more importantly, listen -- was greatly appreciated. One of my most memorable conversations was with Features editor James O'Byrne, who stopped working to share the havoc created in his life, as well as his process of coping. Like everyone else I met at the paper and in the larger community, he was candid about his emotional state and general feelings.

In the days since returning to New York from New Orleans, I can't get the place out of my head, but then again, I don't think I should. Already, I am planning my return to gutting and I continue to speak by phone with the colleagues and new friends I met in the Times-Picayune newsroom. I figure that if I can't make an effort to support and advocate on behalf of the voiceless and forgotten in my own country, then I shouldn't be going overseas to do it.

--Jimmie Briggs