I mentioned in my earlier post that the St. Bernard Parish-area residents who used the community soup kitchen in Chalmette needed to tell their stories. Unlike my team member Chris, who wound up at the soup kitchen, I didn’t meet that many local residents, but I did meet the homeowners of two of the three homes I worked on, plus the bus drivers who brought us to and from the sites, Paul and Gerard (or, more accurately, “Gerahhhd”). I also met Mary, who lived across the street from the third house we worked on and insisted, STRONGLY, that we use her trailer’s bathroom rather than go down the street to the port-a-potty.
The homeowners from the first home had built their place 35 years ago and were helping us to gut it. They were in their 60s, and since they’d been involved both in the construction and the gutting (and before we got there), they’d already made peace with what we were doing. Thing is, they didn’t get emotional until they started talking about the neighbors and friends they missed because they had scattered (the HOs were in Baton Rouge).
The second set of homeowners had not been in their house in months when they walked in on us on the second day of our demo (and the third day of the house). They were in their late 60s, had grown up in the neighborhood along with most of their friends, and their daughter and grandson had lived nearby. They owned show horses and had been in Jackson, Miss., at a horse show when the hurricanes hit. The wife had a heart attack a week after the storm and spent five weeks in the hospital in Jackson, and had been told not to go near their house because of the mold.
They told us that one of the few things they’d salvaged from the house had been their wedding album, which had also been one of the few things they’d salvaged after Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago (they’ve been married 47 years). They told us that for all the months that their stuff had been in their home, sitting there, it was difficult to let go, but once they saw the stuff on the curb, it was much easier, almost cathartic.
Mary told us that she’d been denied a FEMA trailer at first because one of her houses (she owned two on the street) had been determined to be livable. However, when she asked when that determination had been made, since she hadn’t let anyone in her houses to inspect them, the FEMA people said 9/3. So Mary said, “Did someone swim in? Because the house was under 10 feet of water on 9/3.” Turns out FEMA had done a flyover and determined that any house with a roof was livable regardless of what was in it. Mary finally got a FEMA trailer after getting her Congressman, Bobby Jindal, involved (my sister had a similar experience in 1995, when her Navy base housing went up in flames while her husband was not only out to sea but underwater on a sub, and she was dicked around and blamed for the fire (even though it was due to faulty wiring) until she called her senator in Hawaii, Daniel Inouye. Within 16 hours, her husband’s sub was ordered to surface and he was on a flight home, and she was in front of the commandant, explaining why she went over his head (um, because she was a civilian and had rights and her friend was in the house when the fire started)).