Mississippi on My Mind One Year after Hurricane Katrina
By Raymond C. Offenheiser Oxfam America | October 16, 2006
The Good Deeds Community Center had standing room only when we arrived for the Oxfam America-NAACP town hall meeting with residents of Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., to mark the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. There was energy in the air. Folks had come to listen and be heard. And heard they would be.
What was originally scripted to be a two-hour town meeting—moderated by George Curry, a widely respected African American editor and journalist—turned into a raucous three hours of prayer, emotional testimony, pleas for help, confessions of exhaustion and confusion, and moments of despair.
Among some of the 450 folks in that room were hard-working Gulf Coast residents whose ruined homes and neighborhoods were not part of President George Bush’s anniversary tour through Mississippi. They were folks like Connell Lewis, whose story Oxfam America recounted in its new report on the Gulf Coast recovery, “Forgotten Communities, Unmet Promises.” It’s the story of a man who helped his country by serving in Vietnam, but is still waiting for his country to help him in his time of need. In Katrina’s wake, his house is nothing more than a shell with exposed studs and plywood floors.
Connell Lewis is just one of countless Gulf Coast residents who have waited, month after long month, for government at all levels to deliver on the promises offered in the first days after the storm. In a speech last September in New Orleans, Bush decried the deep and persistent poverty in the region and spoke of the country’s duty to confront it with bold action, charging us all to rise above the legacy of inequality.
But right from the start, the region’s poorest residents had to wonder about that commitment to action. The people of East Biloxi waited six weeks after Katrina before they saw anyone from FEMA or the Red Cross. Some waited three months for a FEMA trailer while they camped out with relatives or in tents or in nearby states. These are the folks who have, with the help of volunteers from all over America, worked uncompensated for months cleaning up their neighborhoods and scraping mud and mold from their homes. They have exhausted their savings and miniscule FEMA allotments. And still they are waiting on the federal dollars promised so long ago to help them rebuild.
We hear that smaller government is better and that the market will provide. But visit some of the neighborhoods in East Biloxi or the ravaged coastal communities in rural Louisiana or the streets of molding, sagging houses in the Ninth Ward, and the reality becomes clear: The market will not rebuild the levees around New Orleans, it will not provide credit to destitute families trying to get back into their homes, and it will not guarantee that their insurance policies are paid against legitimate claims.
Whether in East Biloxi, or anywhere else in the world, the most vulnerable people are the worst affected by calamity and the last to get help. Oxfam does humanitarian work in more than 100 countries, including the US, to change this. As Americans, we can and must make things right on the Gulf Coast. That means working together, with one voice, on a recovery that will allow the region to build itself back better than it was before—to become a place that has enough decent housing and opportunity for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.
Our government has a fundamental responsibility to guarantee the well-being of all citizens in this country. That’s our responsibility, too: We elect the leaders of this government. It’s our job to hold them accountable to the promises that inspired us with so much hope one long year ago. Together, we can rise above the Gulf Coast’s legacy of inequality.
October 16, 2006 |Tags: Gulf Coast, Katrina | TrackBack
Posted by: Billy Shore on October 13, 2006 at 5:09 AM
Post a comment
© Copyright 2006 Sharing Witness. All rights reserved.
What a wonderfully appropriate first post, especially since now that the spotlight of the one year anniversary of Katrina has passed, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are barely in the news.
Hurricane Katrina triggered the greatest outpouring of philanthropy in our nation’s history, setting new records for charitable giving. In the five trips I’ve made to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast since the storm, I’ve seen the difference such dollars can make to those hurt worst. But financial generosity is just one measure of philanthropy. Another is the degree to which we are willing to allow our hearts to be changed. In the long run, the needs of Katrina’s most vulnerable victims won’t be met by changing FEMA, but by changing political will. That requires a more intimate philanthropic engagement: the personal act of bearing witness.
I had two instincts last year while watching the storm and its aftermath on television. The first was to find ways in which the anti-hunger organization I founded two decades ago, Share Our Strength, could raise more money to help. Generating new resources is our core competency, and the demand for resources – food, housing, health care, counseling, etc – was certain to be enormous.
The other instinct was to buy an airline ticket and go to Louisiana as soon as possible. With several colleagues, I did. We had only a vague and unformed expectation of what we’d do when we got there. We weren’t trained or qualified for search and rescue work. And at that stage we did not have any money to disburse. So what could we contribute? Like many other volunteers we did whatever was asked, unloading milk cartons at a makeshift church shelter, making phone calls to solicit supplies, and listening to the stories everyone needed to tell.
What I really wanted to do was see for myself what had happened and how the victims of Katrina were coping. I wanted to go and see and allow myself to feel things about what I’d seen, and then share what I’d felt. I had less of a sense that I could effect change than that I would be changed by what I saw and heard.
That is what it means to bear witness. You “bear” witness because what you experience weighs on you. And one way to accommodate such a weight is to redistribute and share the load.
When something affects us powerfully we often say we have been moved. The literal implication is having started out in one place and ending up in another. In this way being moved means being transformed and personal transformation is what powers long-term social change. It’s what Gandhi meant when he said “be the change you want to see in the world.”
Those of us who went to bear witness ended up bringing hundreds of others to New Orleans over the course of the year to share the experience. Together we raised millions of dollars and organized volunteers who helped re-open a school, fund the food banks, support summer feeding programs, begin the restoration of a fishing village, and find housing for returning employees so that restaurants and other businesses could re-open.
But in the long run these fellow citizens of ours need more than our financial help. They need change: in everything from the way we build levees and protect estuaries to how we invest in schools and economic opportunity. That will take changing hearts. One example, of many we witnessed, was Mark Dunn, the personal assistant to the pastor of Bethany World Prayer Center a congregation of some 12,000 worshipers. He oversaw a massive relief effort that brought 1200 evacuees, mostly African American, into their facilities. Within 27 hours they had marked off spaces for cots and air mattresses, created a meal service, built showers, and shortly thereafter installed banks of Maytag washing machines and dryers.
“This changed my life. I was in the military for 25 years. I was used to getting things done and had a style that was kind of autocratic. That didn’t work here. This revolutionized my way of thinking. What these people needed was love. I must have heard 800 stories of terrible loss and I just sat here and cried. They came here with all kind of walls up. Imagine everything they’d heard about shelters, and being afraid, and having their children here. But love melted them like wax. The walls just came down. I had to look into my heart and find how to do that.”