Jenka's journal

on the building up and tearing down of walls...
jan. 7 2005
washington dc

it's hard coming back to 'the other world' from new orleans. i'm continually amazed at the level of ignorance so many people -- even progressive, thoughtful people -- have about the situation in new orleans. how many levees broke, the fact that there is a BARGE sitting on top of a neighborhood in the lower ninth ward, the fact that people's homes in one area (the poor area) are being bulldozed, while in another area (the rich area that was flooded), the homes destroyed are being rebuilt with huge insurance payments received by the owners....

and i find myself having to answer the question, "SHOULD new orleans be rebuilt? is it worth it?" -- a question that wasn't even a question down in new orleans. there, it is simply a matter of how.....how much money, how much time, how much effort will it take to rebuild.......whereas here, in washington and elsewhere, the question, months later, is still IF new orleans is worth rebuilding. my dad gave me a book, called "why new orleans matters", which is the answer of one new orleanian to that question (his answer, by the way, is an emphatic YES, new orleans should be rebuilt). i find it incredibly insulting that the displaced new orleanians who find themselves in temporary housing situations around the country after being abandoned and left for dead by their local, state and federal government, are having to answer for that very government's neglect. to me, the very question itself points to a 'blame the victim' mentality that is all too prevalent in our society today. here is a city of people, mainly african-american, who have always been ignored (at best) and brutalized (at worst) by a government that has made it very clear for the last century and a half that it DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THEM. so now, to add insult to injury, they are being confronted with the question, "Why should we rebuild YOUR town?"

in new orleans, that is not even a question. instead, volunteering there is a frenzy of activity -- cleaning, gutting houses, churches, community centers, defending the poor from eviction and the uninsured from property seizure....building up a community base by providing the necessities and the tools needed to piece back together fragments of shattered lives and homes..... the question seems almost irrelevant (and certainly irreverant)....and reverberates with a patronizing tone that insults the very people i have been working with hand in hand every day for the past several months.

what we do need to do, however, is to demand that the levees be rebuilt stronger and the wetlands be restored so that the city can continue to survive.
(see this speech by the dutch ambassador when he visited new orleans several weeks ago, on how and why new orleans can rebuild:
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?disc=231355;article=1189;title=REBUILDING%20LOUISIANA%20COALITION%20Discussion%20ListSERVE )

the last journal i sent out was quite a while ago. a lot has happened since then -- it's been a very difficult time. first, we lost the battle to stop the evictions at louisburg square apartments, a case which was a showcase of blatant corruption, dirty dealings and unabashed greed on the part of the landlord.....the landlord a realty company owned by leonard samia of boston, a man well known to tenant-rights advocates there, a man voted 'slumlord of the year' by the angry tenants association in boston just last year. despite all our best efforts inside and outside the courts, the old boys network of jefferson parish sheriffs, judges, landlords and contractors managed to push the tenants out. well......hopefully we can win in a lawsuit against the landlord and the sheriff's department in which we expose their dirty dealings in a federal court, but still.....it is very disheartening to lose in court after we fought so hard to help these tenants keep their (undamaged) homes.

things were looking up in the ninth ward, where we started a media center and a radio station (we are broadcasting on the internet now, since the local FCC decided they didn't like the fact that we were broadcasting emergency and relief information on the FM band without a license -- even though in a time of crisis, unlicensed broadcasting for communication and relief purposes IS allowed). we also have a distribution center, mobile clinics, a community center, a gardening/bioremediation project and a fledgling childcare cooperative starting. a number of other projects are getting started in other areas of the city - st. bernard's parish, where a rainbow family kitchen has been feeding people with hot meals and a new distribution and relief center has started, in plaquemines parish and houma, where relief centers are beginning and thriving.....it was almost feeling hopeful in the midst of the mud-stained wrecked and damaged neighborhoods......

but all of our efforts will be in vain if the levees are not rebuilt, and rebuilt properly, with the (freely offered) oversight of skilled dutch engineers (the dutch, by the way, have been at the business of dyke-building and flood control since 1300, so they have a little bit of experience). so when senator stevens deliberately sabotaged the passage of the levee-rebuilding act in congress by adding on a last-minute pork-barrel amendment -- the controversial drilling for oil in the arctic national wildlife refuge -- saying cynically, "new orleans can get their money to rebuild the levees when we can drill in the arctic refuge".......it just makes all of our efforts seem so fruitless and wholly inadequate to stand up to the vast, corrupt and greedy power-empire made up of people bent on filling their pockets by any means that they can.

and on december 10th, one of our volunteers, meg perry, died in a bus accident -- a beautiful, caring, brilliant, courageous volunteer and activist that devoted herself to this relief effort with her whole heart. i hope that anyone reading this, whether you knew meg or not, will look at this memorial page:
http://www.peoplesfreespace.org/hurricanerelief/?p=24
to get to know her a little better, and to realize what a devastating loss her death is to the relief effort, to our community, to her home community in portland maine, and to the planet that she worked so hard, in so many ways, to save. she devoted herself to alternative energy, and drove a group of volunteers down from maine in a vegetable oil powered school bus.....she was working in new orleans on the bioremediation project, to bring compost, organic compounds and necessary minerals back into the soil of new orleans to help it grow again. her energy and sense of hope was inspirational to everyone who knew her, and even though i only got to know her for a short few months, she was an inspiration to me too, and gave me a burst of energy to continue this work each time i got to talk with her. death comes so unexpectedly sometimes.....it's just hard to lose a jewel like meg when she is so young, only 25. it hurts to see someone so magic and inspiring slip away like that...

....for some reason i keep thinking of rachel corrie, who died in palestine in 2002 standing in front of a doctor's home to protect it from the israeli bulldozer that ran over her and killed her. i know the circumstances are very different -- rachel was engaged in civil disobedience, while meg was involved in relief work (albeit on her way to a protest to demand the right of return and justice for new orleanians when she was killed) -- rachel's death was much more controversial, the derogatory accusations and insults toward rachel came from all over (even the left) when she was killed; whereas the media haven't been disrespecting meg in that way -- except for fox news, which called her a 'drifter' in their coverage, without even finding out who she was or what work she was doing (we're demanding a retraction from fox for that insulting drivel they dare to call 'news'). but in so many ways, these two young women who were killed 'in the line of duty' so to speak -- serving the least well off of society -- remind me of each other. there is a video of rachel when she was in the fifth grade, speaking in front of her school about the problem of world hunger and saying "40,000 children a day die of hunger -- we can change this. those children in those other countries, they are just like us....they ARE us." and in a way she proved this when she went to palestine and stood with the palestinian people in the civil and non-violent struggle for freedom from brutal occupation and the seizure of their land. she became one of 'the others' in the eyes of the american media, who either ignored or insulted her in death. but in rachel's eyes i saw, as i saw in the eyes of meg perry in the few chances i had to look into them , that there are no 'others', we are all one human family, and we better find a way to work this out. all these struggles, all this injustice, all this fear people have of each other......we need to overcome this ongoing system of fear that is dividing us and destroying us.....we need to realize that we are all in this thing together. we need to see each other, especially 'the other', as human. what makes tom hurndall (a young british volunteer who was killed in palestine walking children to school in 2002) more important than the children whose lives he was protecting? why does the death of rachel corrie create so much more media than the death of little chukri dawoud (a ten year old boy killed on his front steps in palestine around the time rachel was killed)? what makes any of us more important than anyone else?? i'm tired of all the division and destruction....

why ask dividing questions like 'is new orleans worth it?'? the entire country of the netherlands is built on a flood plain, most of it below sea level, but no one is questioning the fact that the netherlands exists! it has been devastated several times by massive storms that broke its levees, but the people rebuilt, and rebuilt stronger, safer and better. obviously the engineering and technology are available to rebuild new orleans...besides the fact that it is home to hundreds of thousands of people, most of them black, most of whom have never lived anywhere else -- it is these people's home. and slowly but surely, they are coming back home. even the massive destruction caused by the levee breaks and subsequent flooding of the city can't keep these resilient new orleanians away. but the local police, the federal government and the insurance companies are doing their best to keep the poor people from feeling welcome when they come back home. with police brutality and harassment, evictions and denials of aid money from insurance companies and FEMA for many poor people in new orleans, coming home to a destroyed home and attempting to rebuild is an impossible dream for many of the poorest new orleanians. hopefully, with some of our work, we are helping a little to make that impossible dream possible.

working in the poorest areas of new orleans, we are also subject to some of that police harassment. so many of our volunteers have been stopped, questioned, frisked, insulted, detained, handcuffed and arrested, for no other reason than for being in the poor neighborhood, or for observing police behavior as they harass someone else. just the day after meg died, we were having a memorial service in the community garden where she had been implementing the bioremediation project in the flooded seventh ward of new orleans. the memorial service was pretty much over, a few people were still there, sharing songs and stories and getting ready to leave....it was about 6:00 in the evening. suddenly a police car rolled up and a very aggressive police officer ran up to one of the mourners, who was talking on his phone near the street, grabbed him and threw him down on the hood of the car and handcuffed him. when two of us very somberly approached and asked why our friend was being detained, we were forced to put our hands on the hood and be patted down by this officer, who then shoved and kicked my friend (who happened to have been in the accident with meg the day before and had a head injury with 13 staples from the accident). the rest of the people remaining at the memorial service were then brought over and patted down with their hands on the car, and three other cars with 7 more officers arrived, with their guns drawn and laser sights pointed at people's heads (including one pointed at the head of a thirteen year old kid)....eventually we were all released with no apology, and the only explanation given for grabbing my friend originally was that he was 'walking around in an unlit area' -- a charge that is totally ridiculous because, one, the area was lit, and two, there was no curfew in effect at all.....why did they grab him? why did they detain the rest of us? there was no crime committed, nor even any semblance of an attempt on the part of the police to say that there was a crime committed. the only reason he, and the rest of us, were detained was because the police felt like detaining us. it came as a harsh reminder that, even in our time of loss, we would not be left in peace by the new orleans police. and i wonder just how many people face this situation -- discovering the bodies of loved ones in the wreckage of their homes, only to then be harassed by police for being in that area of the city. it seems that every person who has come back to the city has had at least one interaction with the police -- none of them positive. just last week the police shot a mentally ill man in broad daylight and killed him. the police tried to say that the man had a weapon and was threatening them.....but a videotape of the incident shows that the man's 'weapon' was a tiny 3 inch pocketknife, and he was 15 feet from the nearest officer, and backing away, when he was shot.

do we not have the capacity as a human community to come up with some way to assist a mentally ill individual who may be acting irrationally? is our only solution to shoot them? to kill them? oh my family, my people.....
we can do better than this.

so now i go to palestine, to work to bring down the literal and figurative walls that are growing with each day higher and higher in that place. and i hope when i return to new orleans, the walls to stop the water from invading the city will be built up strong enough to protect it through a thousand more hurricane seasons. tearing down walls in one place.....building them up in another......i just hope it is enough -- of course it is not enough, i am just one person, but my latest hero, the martyr meg perry, said in september before she came down to new orleans, "get enough people together and you can move mountains". well, come on people.....we got some mountains to move.

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