Day 6

New Year’s Day (another long one from Barbie)

Yesterday was not a workday for Hilltop. Sunday mornings are set aside for folks to go to church if they wish, and also to give the staff a morning to sleep in. Many people, including us, left the Center at Rowley School and headed to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve. I was needing a day of rest and relaxation as the work we’re doing is, as Sarah put it, physically, spiritually and emotionally draining.

We spent the day eating our way through the wonderful sights and sounds of the French Quarter. Our first stop was to my favorite place to start my day, Café DuMonde. There we had beignets and café au lait. AHHHH, how sweet it is! Literally – there was powdered sugar coating the patio area where we sat. We headed on up the street and stopped to hear the Paulin Bros. playing pure Dixieland jazz. From the trombone, tuba, drum, clarinet and whistle came the most alive and spirit-filled music I’ve ever heard.

The whole afternoon was a festival for our senses…sights, sounds, textures, tastes and smells (ahh, the smells! Nothing compared to the muck we’ve been smelling all week!). Lunch was a feast and the rest of the day was spent admiring the shops, art, and the passion for a good time the people in NOLA (New Orleans, LA) have! We saw street performers, masks and costumes, the VooDoo Museum, painters, tarot readers and just about everything you can imagine.

The French Quarter is about 10 miles from Chalmette where we’ve been working and staying. In many ways it seems as far away as California is. Almost all the shops were open and doing a bustling business. People smiled, danced and sang just the way they always have. Since the Quarter is built on the highest ground in the area, the damage it received was only from Katrina. The breaking levees had no impact on this area. Hurricane damage is, in a regular time, difficult enough to come back from. But on the surface it’s as though Katrina had no real effect here.

That is, until you begin to gather the stories of the people who seem so fine. Our server for lunch thanked us for volunteering to come and help them. (Every time someone has found out why we are in the area they have graciously and several tearfully thanked us for being here.) As her story unfolded we found out that she had lost everything to Katrina. Her house is gone, and she says she’ll never have enough money to rebuild. She is quick to add that in reality she lost nothing of true importance because she and her son both made it to safety and are okay. However, in this 17th month after the storm and surge, they are still living in a hotel trying to make ends meet.

We talked with the waiter where we ate dinner (OKAY, I warned you we ate our way through the day!!!) Having spent time in California, he knows of our “2 -3 minutes of terror” in an earthquake. He went into great detail about the 12 hours of absolute panic and fear he lived through. He didn’t know if he would live, how everyone he loved was managing, or at what second his house would fall down around him. Happily he only suffered a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of damages. However I don’t think he will ever fully recover or trust the way he once did.

We rang in the New Year and went back to our hotel. As others slept, Sharon and I debriefed the days we’d spent together and did a bit of digging on the internet. Actually we did more than a little, we went circuitously through the government (parish, state, federal) response to Katrina, and on back to 1965 and Hurricane Betsy. It was just after that hurricane that a similar storm surge breeched the levees in the exact same area we’re in. We read some of the transcripts of conversations with LBJ and other information about the follow-up to the disaster.

After our sleuthing and fact finding, when our eyes were drooping and our words made absolutely no sense, we lay down for a much-needed rest. We awoke this morning and headed straight for Café Dumonde and more beignets. It was here that we heard Dr. Saxtrum play. He was out on the walk by the Mississippi river and he was playing a single saxophone. He was playing it mellow and slow just like he should after such a big party the night before! It was exactly what I needed to hear. We of course talked to him and heard his Katrina story, but since it’s almost midnight I’ll need to tell it another time.

Just remind me – it’s a story about two men (both in their 70s), two pit-bulls, a fat woman, a pick-up truck, two cats and a pot-bellied pig! If you ask, I’ll tell it…not nearly as well as our new friend James, aka Dr. Saxtrom did. After all, it’s his.

With much love - Barbie