Plenty Bulletin

Articles:

Introduction
The Gulf: Two Years Later
Plenty Belize
Guatemala
Pine Ridge Agriculture
Kids To The Country, Summer ‘07

September 20, 2007

Peter Schweitzer
Executive Director

Dear Friends of Plenty,

This year, 2007, we’re marking a lot of 40th anniversaries like the Beatles release of their seminal, groundbreaking album, "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band," and the Summer of Love (recently celebrated by more than 50,000 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park). Forty years ago many of us were hippies in San Francisco, living in apartments in the Haight-Ashbury or Mission District, working temp jobs at the Post Office, immersing ourselves in music and growing our hair.

Carl, Tony, and Ms. Emma in her new kitchen.

In honor of those anniversaries, let’s start with some good news. Since we last wrote, we’ve gotten another nice grant and some terrific volunteers to bolster our work in the Gulf. Our Gulf Recovery Program Director, Tony Sferlazza, with the assistance of volunteers Carl Evertson, Brian Quinn, Forrest Blass and Val Peterson, have all but completed the repairs on 83-year-old Emma Prebost’s house. Tony says they just need another week and she can move in. Brian has done the electrical wiring of Mr. Washington’s house in the Lower 9th Ward and Tony is teaching ten AmeriCorps volunteers how to hang sheetrock. They’ll do the sheetrocking for Mr. Washington. Vernon Washington, is a life-long builder and every day he sits at his house and tells our volunteers what to do, which is “just what the doctor ordered” for this 87-year-old New Orleans patriarch who lost everything to Katrina.

When we interviewed him last month for a documentary about the 2nd Anniversary of the storm he was visibly despondent as he told us, “Two years, and nothing has been done,” a refrain we heard time and again. As historian Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Great Deluge,” asks, in a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, “…why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes…?”

We were contacted by Robert Greenwald’s documentary production company, aptly named "Brave New Films," in August. They wanted to produce a short video piece about some of the Katrina survivors of New Orleans, two years after the storm. This gave us the opportunity to spend extended time with several folks in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward, some of whom are people we are either helping or hoping to be able to help. What we learned we already knew, but it was driven home to us more deeply and affectingly. People have been teetering on the brink of hopelessness. The title of Douglas Brinkley’s piece in the Washington Post was “Reckless Abandonment” and that is a good summation of the Federal Government’s record in the Gulf.

Plenty will continue its efforts as long as we have funding, but our impacts are small compared to what is needed. For instance, the entire sewer system of St. Bernard Parish where Plenty has a volunteer house needs to be completely rebuilt. So far, the Parish has paid $48 million for the trucks that pump and haul raw sewage to treatment plants when it is estimated that for $45 million the system could have been repaired. Hospitals and schools need to be constructed. And while the levees and pumping systems that need to be built properly to protect the city are a long way, 10 to 20 years away, from being completed, the floodgates holding up the infamous “Road Home” money need to be opened wide to jump-start the ability of people to get out of those cramped FEMA trailers and back into real homes.

It’s been interesting to explore some of the other 40th anniversaries of events that were also some of the context for the Beatles and the Summer of Love. It was 40 years ago that President Johnson called General Westmoreland and Ambassador Bunker back from Vietnam to spread the idea that we were making progress and we could not afford to fail or the Communists would win. In their testimony before Congress you can pretty much substitute the words Iraq for Vietnam and terrorist for Communist and you’re reading today’s news. But 1967 was also the year Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against the war, and one of the main reasons he did struck me as relevant to what's happening in the Gulf. Speaking of the “War on Poverty” launched in 1964, he said: “A few years ago…it seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” The “Road Home “ program is reported to be $3 billion short of what is needed. The war on Iraq is now costing $3 billion/week.

Plenty booth at the Summer of Love

One of the things we were celebrating during the original Summer of Love was the realization that, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Love is the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.” Now that’s worth celebrating again and again. In the Fall Bulletin we’re celebrating the good people of Pine Ridge, the Gulf Coast, Belize, Guatemala and all the kids of Kids To The Country (along with KTC staff and the people of the Farm community who host the program) and we’re celebrating and thanking you with all our hearts for helping make Plenty’s work possible.

To donate to Plenty please visit our donation page or click button: