Hurricane Katrina Recovery Team Journals: Gargi Royysircar - Disaster Shakti - Multicultural Center for Research and Practice - Antioch University New England

Hurricane Katrina Recovery - Team Journals

Katrina Recovery Team from Antioch
Left to Right: Anders Goranson, Claire Dunnett, Stephanie Miller, Kate Airey, Alison Roy, Vanessa Partridge, Michael Brodeur.

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March 7 and 8, 2006
Katrina Note, Gargi Roysircar

March 7th, on the eve of our departure for Katrina recovery work, e-mails flew between me and Dr. Cerecie West-Olatunji, a faculty at the University of Florida and formerly of Dillards University of New Orleans (NOLA). She is also a NOLA mental health practitioner and has been employed by SAMSHA to treat hurricane survivors in the Katrina aftermath.

Through Cerecie I was connecting with Laekecia Cohen, a practitioner who has been contracted to provide mental health service to the staff of an upscale family-owned hotel in New Orleans. Plans that I had been working on for a semester were materializing at 9.00 p.m., March 7, the evening before we left.

Laekecia had arranged for me and my student team (called Team Shakti) to do supportive work with hotel staff members the day after we arrived in NOLA. Many of the staff members were in the hotel when Hurricane Katina hit, and they could not leave the next four days until the National Guard evacuated them. The hotel staff became the first responders to the guests and to each other. Cerecie also connected me with Dr. Zarus Watson, a counselor educator of doctoral students at the University of New Orleans. Cerecie and Dr. Z wanted me and Team Shakti to visit the Lower 9th Ward, the Irish Bayou, St. Bernard’s Parish, and Lake Pancho Train so that we could see the Katrina devastation for ourselves and bear witness to the pain of New Orleaneans.

These practitioners like many New Orleaneans believe that the media have underrepresented the truth of the levee catastrophe. They hope that we will tell the other side of the story. Such last minute dialogs and decisions occurred after months of planning e-mails that waxed and waned.

I have learned that community linkages take a long to build and fail when local leaders are not sufficiently engaged in a university-led community outreach project or do not feel that their needs have been heard and that they have a stake in the matter. I was excited that I was trusted by three African American practitioners to work within their New Orleans communities. I and my Team Shakti students had already registered to participate in the clean-up efforts by Common Ground Collective, a volunteer organization in NOLA. Our Katrina Recovery project goal is for me and my students to participate in a diversity of relief efforts.

It was around midnight. I packed, knowing that I needed to carry lighter clothes, but had no time to sort these out. A suitcase quickly filled up with stuffed toys, art materials, jump ropes, and donated medical supplies, as well as personal hygiene items. Vanessa Partridge, a Team Shakti student, collected the latter donations from AIDS Services for the Monadnock Region in Keene.

My book pack grew heavy with a laptop, video camera, Katrina-related papers and educational materials, and a dissertation proposal. I slept a couple of hours, sent my dog off to her baby sitter’s house, did a quick clean-up of my house, and left for Logan with Shakti students Anders, Claire, and Vanessa who are from New Hampshire and Vermont. I felt bad that I had not talked long with my son when he had called me the previous two nights. I would need to catch up with him in my travels.

In the plane, I paid my bills, answered a pretest questionnaire package for my and Team Shakti’s study on relief volunteers. I wondered whether my matched partner, who is not a relief worker, would follow the timeline for the self-administration of tests. I revised a Katrina Trauma Questionnaire that I have been developing with my dissertation students.

The past 48-waking-hours had consisted of juggling and balancing many tasks. But I got a break from Jetblue that served us good snacks and beverages, which was unlike my experience with major air carriers. At the NOLA airport, we picked up from Budget one of the last available vans, which Anders of Team Shakti had the foresight to reserve in advance. Anders drove us off in a red van that can seat 12 people.

Claire is our appointed navigator. We arrived at the Center of Jesus the Lord, a charismatic Catholic church, which rented us rooms for $75.00 per single room for seven days. Allen Miller, Shakti student Stephanie’s father, knew the pastor, Rev John Capuci, from when the reverend was in Massachusetts. Much thanks to Mr. Miller for arranging this low-priced accommodation of excellent quality. We have air-conditioning, several showers and bathrooms, and a living room with television. Our individual rooms, however, are snug and sparsely furnished, as one might expect in a religious retreat center.

The Center is conveniently located in downtown NOLA within walking distance from Bourbon Street and the French Quarters. We are sharing the living quarters with mostly long-term African American residents who work in hotels but have lost their homes owing to Katrina. Darnell Anders, the Center’s coordinator, invited us to attend Sunday mass, which I certainly will because I want to participate in a Southern charismatic church service. I had never expected a Catholic church, with mostly White members, to follow the charismatic tradition.

March 9, 2006
Katrina Note, Gargi Roysircar

We were at Common Ground Collective at 7:45 a.m. to be assigned to work crews. There was an assembly in front of St. Mary’s school that serves as Common Grounds’ distribution center, communal living space, and dining and recreation halls. I looked up to the second and third floors of St. Mary, which looked trashed and no longer useable. These higher levels were occupied for several weeks by 200 hundred residents of the 9th Ward as they escaped from their flooding houses and streets.

St. Mary’s stands among rows and rows of severely damaged houses and piles of rubble, which might look like an end-of-the-world Hollywood film set, but definitely not like the United States of America. Hundreds of college student volunteers from all over the country have arrived to do clean-ups during the spring break. Their youth, clothes, hair, and rallying speeches reminded me of the college movements of my time in the late 1960’s.

As Anders, Claire, Stephanie, Alison, Kate, Michael, and Vanessa went to suit up in their protective disposable gear and collect equipment to gut a house, I went to sit on St. Mary’s front steps beside a middle-aged couple who in the present environment were unusually stylish and whom I presumed to be the parents of some kid.

It turned out that Barbara and Bob Baldizar are from Meredith, New Hampshire. They have retired and downsized their business life (they did not even have a business card) to follow philanthropic pursuits, their current social action being to represent NH fundraisers to Common Collective.

Having served as a democratic senator in NH, Barbara knows all the political “bigwigs” of NH and Washington, DC and is hoping to get Brian Williams or George Stephanopoulos to cover Common Ground as a major story. I wondered about the likelihood of my connecting with a New Hampshire powerhouse in the devastated New Orleans 9th Ward with no running water, electricity, or a safe house. On second thoughts, my chances of meeting the Baldizars in NH seem even more remote. Our paths crossed because we created today a common ground for ourselves.

Late afternoon, as I left the Women’s Center tired, feeling down, and wondering how I would get back to St. Mary’s and re-unite with my Shakti team, the Baldizar’s in their red auto screeched to a halt right in front of me and shouted “Keene.” I got a ride to St Mary’s and wandered into Anders and Claire who were picking up bottles of water, a sledge hammer, boxes of cheese nips, and cold soda to take back to their demolition site. I learned that Team Shakti had made fantastic progress in gutting an elderly woman’s house in Lakeview, with some impressive contribution from small Stephanie Miller who crashed through drywalls with a sledgehammer.

At the Women’s Center I listened to two women describe their horrific dislocation from the 9th Ward. They lived under bridges in human and animal filth, swam alongside snakes, slept in abandoned cars, and were trucked off by the National Guard who pointed guns at them and separated them from their children. The children were sent off in other trucks. These women, who barely had anything, were asked to pay $800.00 for rent in Houston by women who arrived at bus stations to offer them their homes.

One woman got back her son and returned to the 9th Ward, but she did not know how to take care of son. She attempted suicide and the driver of a passing car saw her throwing up from the open window of a car. He rushed her to the hospital. This woman now lives, is happy to have her son return to the normalcy of school life, and she cooks and answers the phone at the Women’s Center. Both women have health problems like injuries, pain, hypertension, and diabetes.

I cleaned up the garage at the Women’s Shelter, which has blue tarp for walls and the roof and has a dirt floor. Here large numbers of donated toys were strewn around in dust and grime. There were boxes of unopened books and toys. Carpets were rolled in one corner. One couch was someone’s bed and there was a sleeping bag at another corner. These two sleeping areas are used by men at night who serve as security. I picked up garbage, swept the dirt floor, and unrolled the carpets. I created play areas for the children: for reading, for drawing and coloring, for playing with stuffed animals, for boy games, and girl games, etc.

It was a full day, but I left feeling depressed. I wondered why the women at the shelter did not join me in cleaning up their garage. Did they not want to build a play area for their children? Would they not feel stronger and better if they had joined the work crews to gut houses in their neighborhood? Then I corrected myself. I had never been traumatized by a mighty 3-4 level hurricane that whistled like a kettle for 12 hours, to be re-traumatized by the man-made leaking levies, to suffer ongoing traumatization of living amidst human refuse, being forcibly separated from my son, having guns pointed at me at my own home, being moved to a another state, and, then to being exposed to a pretend-rescue by money-grabbers. Repeated trauma is demoralizing. It can make you ill. One more thing--relief work should be done in teams like Team Shakti and not alone.

Gargi Roysircar, Disaster Shakti-Katrina Recovery

March 9, 2006
Katrina Case, Gargi Roysircar

Team Shakti and I provided supportive listening to the staff of an upscale family-owned hotel in New Orleans. Both the human resources director and the hotel’s mental health practitioner had lost their houses to the Katrina flooding, as well as experienced the evacuation from and return to New Orleans.

Now, the hotel staff members had grown into a family in their collective sharing of grief, problem-solving, and recovery. Those who were in the hotel during the hurricane recalled how they weathered the storm together and saw the glass windows in the hotel bar burst open. They used the metaphor of “being in the same boat” and referred to biblical figures, Noah and Moses. The staff members felt blessed that they had made it through. Universally we heard them say, “I’ll always be in debt to this hotel.” A few staff members lost their jobs in local area universities and found employment in the hotel. Some individuals have sought therapy, while others have joined focus groups.

At this stage of recovery, the staff agreed to the human resources director and mental health practitioner’s joint suggestion that I and Team Shakti listen to the staff at individual and group levels. From the narratives we heard, I developed the following composite case that includes the experiences of both men and women, African Americans and Whites, and who were approximately between the ages 30 and 65. The case represents similar themes in staff members’ narratives on their experiences of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The composite profile is intended to give anonymity to the speakers.

All the speakers, while strong and firm in voice, sometimes dried their tears and made finger movements and hand gestures that reflected their tragedy and anxiety. This composite profile does not represent the grief and loss of many other hotel staff members. Other composite profiles might portray different themes of suffering and strength.

Case of John
John had dealt with Hurricanes Ivan and Betsy. After Betsy, John told himself that he would never evacuate again. But Saturday, the day before Katrina came on shore, he said he was getting out. He left with friends in a caravan of cars, which was stopped at the bridge by the police. A friend, who is a volunteer sheriff, showed his badge, and the caravan was allowed to move on. Unknown people on the highway shared their food and water with John’s group. A family in a country farm emptied gasoline from their machines so that near-empty gas tanks could be filled up.

John made it to Lafeyette to seek shelter with relatives. He listened to the news and heard that the 17th Street canal at Lakeview had breached. John lived a few blocks away from 17th Street. John stayed away for a month and kept communicating with the hotel he worked in, not knowing where everyone was and he had heard about body bags. He was “numb.” His family kept him busy. He felt a need to gain control of his life. He contacted FEMA for a trailer. He went to the Salvation Army to get clothes. He obtained unemployment payments. From the Social Security Office, he got food stamps. From a church, he picked up food to contribute to the family dinners. Every morning John got up to think of an action plan for the day. He knew he had no control over the post-Katrina environment in New Orleans, but he wanted to be accountable for himself with the help of his faith.

On the internet John saw as “sort of a blur” the roof of his single-storied house. Two to three weeks before he got back, he realized that he had water in the house. He learned that his house had been 4 ½ feet of water. As John returned through Mobile, he saw brown oak trees, brown bushes, and uprooted trees alongside highways. John, a gardener, found “everything was dead.” He said that unless people “ride around and see it, you don’t understand. You can watch it on T.V. and then turn it off and do something else. But, we can’t. We live it.” John cried all the way home.

There was no grass in his yard. The flowering shrubs were gone. There was a “funny smell in the air,” which he soon learned was the smell of mold. He was in total shock because “you see all your personal things are all over.” The bed and furniture had moved and, at first, it was difficult to see these because “you don’t expect to see your mattress hanging from the ceiling rafts.” John was able to save some things, clean them, and pack them away. He put everything else on the street. He said, “Everything you’ve enjoyed is gone. It was hard at first, but got easier after each discarded load.” John didn’t get power till two weeks before Christmas. He feels comfortable in Lakeview-now that it’s coming back.

All his plans for the future, he felt, were gone. Before Katrina, his goal was to pay off the house by Christmas 2006 and retire in four years. After Katrina, he hoped to move back into house from the trailer by Christmas 2006. He was starting off from A to Z and said, “It’s stressful. It’s a wait and see right now; next time I’m getting out.” He said his friends were gone, but he still kept in touch with friends in Texas. It was good for him to get back to the hotel. There he found colleagues and staff that could relate with him “going through what you are going through.” This included dealing with the utility company that billed him for the three months he had no electricity; dealing with his mortgage company that demanded three months’ payment all at once in January when he had no house. He was paying mortgage based on the previous value of house, not on its current value.

A lady’s house was moved by the winds into the neighbor’s house. Insurance would not cover this damage because she did not have collision insurance. If people had flood insurance, their blown-off windows would not be covered because they did not have “wind” insurance. People, who were under-insured or inaccurately insured, fell through the cracks. They became homeless and lived in shacks on their property with no water, electricity, or sewage. Or they lived in tent cities.

John emphasized that he and the people he was referring to were not homeless people. They were homeowners who had built equity on their homes or even had paid off their mortgages. Before the storm they were living alright; post-storm, they were destitute. John is questioning everything he feels--questions about God, faith, and spirituality--wondering why. He said, “What makes people angry is that it was a human-made disaster and that the government isn’t helping more. It was a barge that hit the levee that breached the lower 9th Ward levee.” John always trusted that the system would work, but now realizes it doesn’t. John is praying and hoping that what happened to the city will make the city better and stronger as it rebuilds itself. He continued, “We’re going to rebuild New Orleans whether the government helps us or not. I get furious when people say that we shouldn’t rebuild New Orleans.”

John corrected people’s impression of local lawlessness. After the storm looters were from outside Louisiana. These looters were from debris-removal teams and other outsiders who would steal from second floors of houses. It was as though the outsiders had lost their personal and social norms when coming into a community in disorder. However, during the storm the looters were local people. John said that there were stories going round about Green Berets killing local looters and dumping bodies in the river. John said that people in New Orleans have a strong sense of community—“we are families; we are good people.” He said that the media were accustomed to covering the fun and exotic atmosphere of New Orleans. Without any excitement to fall back upon, the media are portraying decay and decadence. John asked, “Can the media see us as human beings who are going through a hard time?”