Long-time Plenty donor Mike Wells, (left) donated his Ford Tioga Arrow motorhome to Plenty for the use of our hurricane relief volunteers in the Gulf. Plenty volunteer and building contractor, Tony Sferlazza who had been helping with building projects at Pine Ridge, drove the motorhome to Louisiana where he has been working in and around the Bayou Indian community of Chauvin and, more recently, the Bayou Liberty Relief camp in Slidell, LA. Thanks Mike and thanks Irene Romero and the Gary Rhine (Rhino) Katrina Rebuilding Fund for supporting this work. (photo by Chante Pierce)

Lower 9th Ward. New levee wall where barge came through in background. Sign on car says "Tourism here is Profane."

I have just returned from the Gulf and can verify all the horror stories we have been hearing from our volunteers and seeing in the media. Whole neighborhoods are reduced to rubble. Block after block after block, in New Orleans and towns like Pass Christian along the coast of Mississippi sit empty. Hundreds of thousands of people have not returned--have nothing to return to but empty promises, bulldozers, corrupt insurance companies and do-nothing government sub-committees who can't seem to decide what to do. The Federal Government is AWOL. Empty FEMA trailers sit in parking lots behind guarded gates. Residents of New Orleans have been given until August 29 to have their homes mucked out and gutted or they will be bulldozed.

Peter, Eleanor, Phil, Tony, and Nancy
Eleanor is holding her proposal for a new distribution center/hurricane shelter in Pass Christian

Eleanor from “A Walk in he Park” food distribution center was wearing her Plenty t-shirt when we arrived. The food we brought, about a cargo van full, will all be gone by Saturday when Eleanor plans to close the center and concentrate on raising funds to build a permanent distribution center and hurricane shelter next to her current tent facility.

We also visited the woman who runs the day care center in Pass Christian. Her building was destroyed in Katrina and her insurance company offered her $26,000 minus her $10,000 deductible. Save the Children gave her a grant of $300,000 and she has a brand new building that will open on Monday!

150 young volunteers still labor daily mucking and gutting houses in and around the 9th Ward for Common Ground. CG also has a new clinic opening in the 9th Ward thanks to a team of volunteer carpenters from Wisconsin who came and built it in 10 days! A United Peace Relief clinic is still operating out of a tent in Pass Christian and the young medical volunteer, Craig Alphugh, says he sometimes gets as many as 40 patients in a day, but he has almost no meds.

The Bayou Liberty Relief camp is located on 27 acres (17 wetland and bayou and 10 dry land) in Slidell, LA just outside New Orleans. The land is owned by Kevin, a hip dentist who donated the land after meeting Niki Wilson back in January. Niki is an LPN from Norman, OK who felt compelled to come and help back in Sept. when we first got involved. Niki worked with the Red Cross and then with the Veterans for Peace out of the original shelter and then volunteer camp in Covington, LA. We had a meeting with the Kevin who described himself as a "dreamer." He will make the land available for relief work until April of next year when he has to decide if he's going to keep it and if so how is he going to pay for it. He has dreams of "intentional community" and "ecovillage training center." We discussed other ideas like "eco-tourism," weekend bird watching and canoeing, environmental easements for wetlands protection etc. You can launch a canoe from the camp and paddle through bayous all the way to Lake Pontchartrain. We have a good rapport with him. He's excited to have us there.

A couple of ideas we started talking about that had been suggested by residents:

1.) Set up a building supplies warehouse in the 9th Ward and fill it with donated plywood, drywall, nails, windows and doors and lumber for homeowners who want to rebuild. In the 9th Ward, homeowners are poor folks whose families have usually lived in their modest homes for several generations. In most cases that house was all they had other than their few possessions and a job which have now disappeared. With the help of volunteer electricians, plumbers, dry wall hangers and builders as advisors, houses could start to get re-roofed and rebuilt much faster. If some money (as promised) materializes from the government for homeowners, that will help, but no one is holding their breath. Activity like this is needed to encourage residents who are scattered by the tens of thousands all over the US to return and rebuild.

2.) Set up a process whereby skilled local builders can be paid a fair (not exorbitant) wage for taking part in the rebuilding of the poorer neighborhoods. Right now, people are getting gouged by unscrupulous contractors. Plenty and Bayou Liberty camp could participate in coordinating some of this work. The mucking and gutting could be followed by a roofing crew, followed by an electrical crew who would do the wiring, followed by the plumbing crew, followed by the dry wall crew and painters, and you could rebuild a block, house by house.

Other continuing and urgent needs: medical volunteers, more free clinics, medicines and medical supplies, non-perishable food, new clothes and kid toys, computers, tools, musical instruments, mold-proof respirators, gloves, boots, and suits for mucking and gutting crews, electrical supplies and all manner of building materials. There's a strong interest in appropriate, alternative building techniques and materials. We'd like to see some alternative builders come up with some designs for low-cost but sturdy housing for the people whose houses are beyond repair. We talked with the owner about the possibility of having alternative building design workshops at the Bayou Liberty Relief camp and he would love that. Also, photovoltaic electrical techniques and permaculture design.

Also, we want to develop a closer working relationship with the other grassroots relief and local area non-profits so we can better coordinate planning and projects. There are some very impressive local non-profits that we met with and who want to work with us. The challenges are daunting, almost overwhelming, and the only way to even begin to think about meeting these challenges is in concert with many other groups. The bureaucracy is frozen and can't seem to tie its own shoes, so the non-governmental organizations are going to have to take the lead and gradually untangle the bureaucratic log jam. The federal agencies are producing more harm than good (now they want to open 8 million acres of the Gulf for oil and gas exploration which is 4 times what Bush asked for), but I think local governments can be enlisted. But here again, we need to be working with the local non-profits and people who live there and act as a supporting agency for their good efforts.

For now, we have skilled carpenter, Tony Sferlazza and Josh Fillmore at the Bayou Liberty Camp with five other volunteers. We're paying Tony and Josh stipends which they need in order to do this work. Other Farm-based carpenters have expressed an interest in short-term work over the next couple of months, but Plenty's Katrina funds are mostly spent. Our first priority at this point is to help the rebuilding of some of the poorest neighborhoods. I believe that, as a country, we owe these people this support, and for a tiny percentage of what we're spending weekly in Iraq, these demolished communities could come back. (Several broken houses I saw have "Baghdad" spray painted on the sides.)

It's discouraging to see so little happening a year after Katrina struck, but it's encouraging to meet the residents who have lost everything, like the Mayans we met in Guatemala after the earthquake of 1976, and feel their spirit and commitment. One 50-year-old 9th Ward resident who was rescued by helicopter with her son and who ended up in a FEMA camp in Texas told me that although she lost everything, she believed she needed to lose everything because she was too much into clothes and jewelry and looking nice when she went out. Now she says she has a better understanding of what life is about. After visiting the Gulf and meeting some of the survivors, I have a better understanding of both how and why Plenty should keep trying to help.

Peter and Phil interview Nikki at the camp.

Tony and Gordon by the "Blue House" in 9th Ward.

Phil Schweitzer and Jeffrey Keating were there with me and we'll be posting new reports and visuals on the website ASAP. Phil was able to get some excellent interviews with various local folks as well as Tony, along with Niki Wilson who has been managing the Bayou Liberty Relief camp these past several months. Gordon is also there and served as our driver and introduced us to several potential partners for our continuing work. Niki and Bayou Liberty Relief have the funds to be able to continue supporting the basic camp costs over the next 6 months. Plenty's minimal budget for continuing to operate in the Gulf is about $4,000/month. Over the past 11 months more than $100,000 came into Plenty for Katrina/Rita projects which was largely spent on transporting volunteers to the Gulf and food and medical supplies distribution, as well as some emergency roof repairs, helping the Biloxi Chitimacha over in Duloc and helping Common Ground get started. For the next phase we're looking at more focused efforts, working with other agencies, enlisting the help of short-term volunteer teams and skilled labor. We'll need at least another $100,000 over the next 11-12 months to keep up our effort. At the end of August we can expect the media to be all over the Gulf Coast reporting on the continuing disaster one year later. We would like to have some positive stories illustrating the incredible work of the survivors who have returned and the grassroots volunteers who are the true heroes of the Gulf.

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