A place forgotten

Lena Jakobsson arrived in New Orleans April 19, after spending weeks in the Bahamas covering the Anna Nicole Smith story for Court TV. What she found in New Orleans, by contrast, was a place that seemed forgotten, she said. Here are her observations:

Thursday 3:30 p.m.: Sitting in one of those white rocking chairs at the Charlotte airport, waiting for my NOLA connection, drinking a Starbucks. 5:50 p.m.: I have wandered along Magazine Street, settled on Dick & Jenny’s for dinner, and am at Winn Dixie (my first!) picking up coffee and wine for the Dart house. Fuel for the body, fuel for the spirit. 10:45 p.m.: All is well on Annunciation Street, and I head to bed.

I sleep like a rock. I meet Coleman Warner at noon Friday for my tour, and things change. Suddenly there are miles of gutted strip malls, abandoned homes, and the closet of a FEMA trailer where Coleman’s daughter has slept for the last 18 months. I’m not so much struck by what’s gone, but what’s still there; clothing on the steps of abandoned homes, a shard of something that says “Deluxe Edition” on the foundation left behind when the house above it was swept away.

Ruined clothes strewn on steps of an abandoned house.

I keep thinking, “Why is this still sitting here? Why has no one picked this stuff up?” I’ve thought about why this was my first impression. I grew up in a neat and orderly place (Sweden) where things are done by the book and punctuality is held above all else. My parents were orderly – and, yes, on time. I’m about to turn 38, am neither neat nor punctual, have spent nine years covering mostly murders, and I know by now that life is not always neat. But there is an overwhelming feeling to all of this of having been forgotten; people left to wait for help that never came, lives stuck in limbo, and houses spilling personal effects left behind to sit … and sit … Who should be picking them up?

Maybe the Swedes, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to get my mind around this.

Lena Jakobsson (right) with Gerry Queen.

There is no Muckraker’s project this weekend; the plan fell apart somehow, and instead Sharon Schmickle, my fabulously interesting roommate, and I join a neighborhood revitalization project and pick up trash for a few hours before Suzanne Stouse and Natalie Pompilio – those bottomless wells of enthusiasm and good cheer – find us a more challenging task: putting up sheetrock with a group of Texas Baptists. The house belongs to Gerry Queen. She takes a photograph of each of us for an album of the volunteers who have pieced her home together bit by bit: She says, “I’ve had the whole country working on my house, and Canada!”

Mrs. Queen is prone to hugging, and laughing. I have no idea whether the bathroom I worked on will ever pass inspection, but I think I did alright, under the watch of my new friend from Texas, who between carpentry tips threw in the occasional thought on finding Jesus, just in case there was hope for me still. (There’s not; I didn’t have the heart to tell him.)

Sharon Schmickle with Gerry Queen.

Jakobsson hanging sheetrock.

Before I know it, I am catching a cab back to the airport. I am left with impressions of some of the people who have come together here. People like Natalie, who is pouring all of her energy into this project, and scores of volunteers, like those Texas Baptists, who drive through the night to build for others. And, sure, moldy walls are torn down and new ones slowly go up – Mrs. Queen says she doesn’t get impatient: “Ain’t no use in trying to rush things!”

But the abandoned homes sit, block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood, and one can only imagine what their former inhabitants are going through. It’s vast, and has a feeling of permanency.

-- Lena Jakobsson

Lessons from New Orleans

Julia Lieblich turned her experience in New Orleans into a teachable moment for the students in her journalism class at Loyola University Chicago.

After years of traveling as a journalist, I went to New Orleans as a journalism teacher. When Times-Picayune city editor David Meeks gave me a tour of the devastated neighborhoods, I made mental notes about what I would say to my students more than a year and a half after the levees broke.

“What should I tell them?” I asked David, as we drove through the Lower 9th Ward.

“Tell them it’s like Berlin after the war.”

What I did tell my students at Loyola University Chicago -– many of whom had already volunteered in New Orleans –- was the story of the Times-Picayune journalists and the Dart Society's own Natalie Pompilio, who stayed in the city to report the story. They read reporter Brian Thevenot’s vivid account of those first days in American Journalism Review (ajr.org). And I told them about how David paddled two miles in a kayak to save his dog. (As David says, pet stories sell.)

The students responded enthusiastically:

“I found the determination of these people to get a newspaper out to their people and the world to be the most beautiful story of all, especially since these reporters were not obligated to stay, and the story obviously took a toll on them,” Karen Homsi wrote in a reaction paper. “I just hope I find something I am as passionate about.”

Wrote student Ashley Kaufman: “Instead of sitting at home and wishing there was something we could do, it’s important to remember people like Thevenot and Meeks and take the initiative.”

Many of us in the Dart Society have been struck by the generosity of David, Natalie, T-P photographer John McCusker and many others who have been willing to tell their stories again and again to let people know that this was a man-made disaster and that it will be years before houses are rebuilt and psyches healed.

John even offered to speak to my students. Ashley Williamson, a student in my human rights reporting class, interviewed him on the telephone about the lack of parity in mental health coverage. He talked to her about losing his home and seeing the wreckage -– and his subsequent depression and battle with insurance companies.

“After getting treatment for PTSD and medication for depression, McCusker began to feel better,” she wrote. “Then the unimaginable happened. He found he wasn’t covered.”

The photographer who had covered the early days of Katrina was denied the care he needed to survive.

“McCusker slipped into his uninsured depression,” she wrote. And Ashley learned a lesson about life after the storm.

-- Julia Lieblich

Project is 'Immersion 101'

When NPR reporter Michelle Trudeau agreed to join up on the New Orleans project, everyone was thrilled. She brought a bit of grace to the scrappy mission and showed how much she cares in numerous ways. “She is LOVELY,” Muckraker Suzanne Stouse wrote of Michelle. So is her essay.

I had never been to New Orleans before. I’d of course watched the coverage of Katrina on television -- about the Superdome, the people trapped on the bridges, the helicopters rescuing folks off the tops of homes. But I’m not a news junkie, so frankly, I watched only sporadically. And, I admit, after a week or two, in late August, early September, 2005, as coverage diminished, I moved on to other things. You know how it is -- family, work, next project around the house.

Then I received the invitation from the Dart people to go to New Orleans and help gut homes. I was very surprised by the call: New Orleans still needs help? A year and a half later? This stunned me. I wanted to see this for myself. Sign me up! Deirdre did her magic getting us all coordinated and ticketed, and I found myself jetting across the country from southern California to New Orleans, Thursday, March 22nd.

Debris outside a destroyed house in the Lower 9th Ward

First impressions on the way into town by cab from the Louis Armstrong Airport: poor, disheveled, industrial, flat, bleak. But as I traveled further into the city, the tones change. There are ancient live oaks reaching down over the streets, giving shade and welcome, blazing azaleas, dark pines, old stately homes, porches out front, wide boulevards with “neutral zones” of green cool between. Color and elegance and history. The cab delivers me to 4748 Annunciation, across the street from a barren lot with a dozen FEMA trailers. I let myself in. The place is clean, comfortable, inviting; goodies to eat on the kitchen counter; beer, cokes, water in the fridge. I am the only one staying at The Dart House this particular weekend.

Later, toward early evening, my cell phone rings. It’s John McCusker, a photographer from the Times-Picayune. “Welcome to the world’s favorite disaster zone,” he says cheerfully.

“I’ve never been here,” I tell him.

“Well, good, then you won’t know the difference.”

We talk about plans for the evening: “We gotta get you something to eat, and then go hear some jazz,” he tells me.

I’m in good hands, right from the start.

John takes me out to a local restaurant where I am introduced to char-broiled oysters, etouffe, bread pudding. All New Orleans specialties. We talk about what he went through during Katrina, and his experiences during the 18 months of post-Katrina. His recovery, at so many levels, has been slow and painful. John drives us through the French Quarter, heading toward “The Palm Court,” a favorite jazz spot of his. As we enter, John is greeted with great gusto by the musicians, standing at the bar, taking a break after their first set. John talks shop with them over a beer -- his knowledge of jazz is deep and passionate. Later, the musicians go back up on stage, pick up their instruments, tune them for a moment, and then start to play. Really play. Clarinet, trumpet, piano, drums, bass, trombone. All swinging and plowing the grooves.

Times-Pic photographer Kathy Anderson on the front stoop of a house the Muckrakers gutted.

Friday morning Kathy Anderson, a photographer with the Times-Picayune, picks me up at the Dart House. We head to the Ninth Ward –- an area that over the centuries has sunk to 11 feet below the water line. And it was here that the levees broke. We drive slowly along the remaining rutted roads. It is complete devastation. Leveled. Like it has been bombed till flattened. There are now just concrete slabs, the bare foundations, scrapped to the bone, where neighborhoods used to exist. Whole communities, blocks and blocks, no longer. Now a desolate moonscape. It doesn’t seem possible: just a short drive from where I’d sat listening to jazz the evening before. Here, this twilight zone of destruction. I can see no signs of recovery. No revival. No returning.

Saturday is a day of work –- gutting a house. Organized by the master, Suzanne Stouse from the T-P, founder of “The Muckrakers,” a group of volunteers from the paper who are helping in the recovery, gutting homes so families can begin to rebuild. Our group drives to a poor but fairly intact neighborhood. There are children, cars, street signs, sidewalks. FEMA trailers outside several houses along the street -- a good sign: this community is coming back. The house Suzanne targets for help is owned by a young man, early 30’s. When the levees broke, water rose up the first floor. He and his family fled to the second floor, waited for help there for five days. No one came. Finally, the young man and his uncle walked waist-high through the flooded streets the several miles to the Superdome to get help. His uncle, though, got a deadly infection in his leg from walking through the contaminated water, and had to have his lower leg amputated. Now, 18 months later, the young man and his family are still living in a FEMA trailer parked next to his house. He says he tried to gut the house himself, but it was just too much for him. Our work group is about 20 strong. With crowbars, hammers, sledgehammers, wheelbarrows, it takes most of the day to complete the gutting. The interior of the first floor is now just a shell. Bare struts and supports. Ready, though, for the owner to begin building anew.

I came to New Orleans to be educated about what had passed here. To see how the city had been laid waste. And to see how it had recovered. What I had not expected to see is so much devastation a year and a half after the storm. New Orleans seems severely and permanently altered –- physically, socially, psychologically. Whole neighborhoods no longer exist; and it seems unlikely they will recover. Over 1,500 of its citizens have died. Over 1.36 million of its citizens are dispersed around the United States. The loss of communities, of a culture, of a heritage unique in America is tragic and painful to witness. I thank the Dart Society for making it possible for me to witness this, and for making the commitment to never forget New Orleans. And I thank my brave colleagues at the Times-Picayune for taking me in and sharing their stories and their lives in New Orleans. They are a group of extraordinary survivors who have lived through the worst with courage, grace, and resiliency. I will return in a heartbeat if they need me.

-- Michelle Trudeau