mishto

mi casita en neuva orleans

2008-11-23T00:34:00.000-05:00

Memphis

2008-03-23T18:36:00.001-05:00

Took a road trip to Memphis recently, for no reason whatsoever. New Orleanians are discovering the importance of getting the hell out of dodge every once in a while for the sake of sanity. It was also the first real road trip for my cute little Mazda, Miss Scarlet. Just me and her and the open road and a pack of CDs...

It's a pretty straight shot up through Mississippi and just across the border in Tennessee. As darkness fell, I drove through a snowstorm and (even though the ride was dangerous) I appreciated the change in seasons I was being treated to. Saw a deer crossing the road as I pulled off the highway at a remote gas station.

Didn't have much of a plan for my trip other than to roam around and eat and listen to music. Graceland seemed to be the must-see destination, even though I can't claim to be the biggest Elvis fan. Definitely appreciate his talent and appeal, but I never realized until I saw his mansion what an incredibly tacky dude he was! And his family is ruthless about squeezing every penny out of his legacy they can. Ah, well, that's Americana for you...

Also saw Sun Records and ate some great catfish and spent time at a cool coffee shop. Saw a band showcase with blues, rock and bluegrass, but honestly none of the music was better than what I've heard in New Orleans.

Had an extra day off of work so I could've stayed and wandered some more, but I was craving a day of playing hookie at home with my books and my DVDs and my kitty. Drove 6 hours to get home and luxuriated in doing nothing for the next 24 hours :)

Only in New Orleans, baby!

2008-02-07T22:25:00.000-05:00

The week before Mardi Gras is a mad rush of buying costumes, picking up ball tickets, making concert reservations, stocking the fridge with alcohol, planning out the parade schedule with your friends, putting all the other ducks in your so-called normal life in order so you can enjoy 5 straight days of fantasy fun world and revelry as only New Orleans can deliver. For those of you who still aren't aware: Mardi Gras is not about tits on Bourbon Street. Tourists in the French Quarter will only be looking at other tourists' flashing boobs and puking on other tourists' shoes, since no locals take part in that lame version of Spring Break on steroids. The real Mardi Gras - for the locals - with the traditions dating back hundreds of years, is rich in music, full of elaborate costumes, better than Christmas and Easter for kids, better than New Year's and Halloween for adults, and an exhausting marathon of picnics and parades and dancing and drinking and late nights and colorful days.

I kicked off Friday evening at the famed Zulu ball, the formal African American event for the Mardi Gras season, hosted by the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, one of the benevolent societies set up by and for African Americans in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. 17,000 people at the New Orleans Convention Center, men in tuxes and women in full length ball gowns.

What? Me in a ball gown? I had to explain to my friend Allison who invited me that I had never worn a full-length ball gown, not even to prom. (Hey, I went to high school in Cali! We're, like, totally laid back, dude.) Of course I spent the week in a crazed search for the perfect dress, which appeared in the guise of a form-fitting black chiffon number to the floor, with a gold beaded pattern in the shape of a fleur de lis. Then I had to go out and buy some actual makeup (as in eye shadow, powder, lipstick, which I never wear) so I could really look dressed up.

Expensive dress + $10 shoes + costume jewelry = priceless

I looked Oscar-ready by the time I got to the event, but I couldn't compare to the over-the-top gorgeous gowns these beautiful black ladies were wearing: ruffles, trains, diamonds, lace, silk, bustiers, long gloves, feathers, tiaras, fur stoles, the works. The hall was so wide I couldn't even see the other side in the haze on the other side of the stage, and it took me an hour to wander the whole building to check out the dresses and hairdos. Debutantes in tall red feathered headdresses were being introduced one by one in the center of the huge stage, accompanied by their escorts. Each girl daintily bent her knees under her taffeta dress and curtsied once to each side of the hall. On huge video screens overhead her smiling face beamed out as the announcer recited her ambitions ("medical school at Tulane") and recognized her sponsors ("Mr. and Mrs. Prominent Somebody").

Numbered tables around the hall hosted groups of families and friends, most of whom brought their own food, alcohol and centerpiece decorations. An odd combination of formal and picnic. We sat with Allison's friends eating Jambalaya and chicken wings, watching the presentation of the court of Zulu: former and current kings, queens, dukes and duchesses, selected by their communities, gliding across the floor in headdresses 12 feet high and 8 across, brightly decorated with feathers, beads, sequins, all hand-decorated, costing thousands of dollars, taking months to craft. Jaw-dropping pageantry and artistry.

After a few hours of the procession, however, my friend Laura and I decided to sneak out and wander over to the nearest parade, since this ball was only one of many festive occasions going on this Mardi Gras weekend. The evening air was cold, and we wrapped our long formal coats around us as we walked to my office a few blocks away to change into some comfortable shoes. Attired in a ball gown and cowboy boots, I led the way to Lee Circle to watch the Muses parade, the all-female krewe of marchers known for their prized throws.

“Throws” are what the people on the floats throw to the parade-goers, and parents position their kids on top of ladders so they can catch the best throws: not just beads but beads with medallions, beads with commemorative designs, beads with flashing lights, fat beads, long beads, Saints football-themed beads, handmade beads, stuffed animals, toy spears, decorated walking sticks, boas, Mardi Gras colored footballs, candy, bracelets, chokers, noisemakers, and every assortment of cheap Chinese trinket.

Muses, apart from having irreverent marching teams and floats making fun of everything from politicians to FEMA to pop stars, has hand-painted plastic high heels and fancy underwear and disco balls and bandanas to throw. Laura and I sucked on a bottle of champagne while a 10-year old local waved his arms and hollered at the girls on the float to get Laura – a first timer – the best throws. If it sounds dangerous, like it could hurt to get smacked in the head by a heavy throw, it is, it could. Gotta work hard to catch the things you want. The cop on the other side of the barricade would sometimes help the kid pick up really unique throws that had fallen into the street, like a Muses backpack. The smile he flashed us would disappear, however, if some drunken idiot tried to cross the barrier to get to the other side of the street and the cop had to tell him off.

Most of the floats were 2-story platforms painted with themed satirical drawings and slogans, with masked and costumed girls chucking throws to outstretched hands on either side of the street. Some of the floats consisted of just a band playing on the flatbed of a tow truck. Interspersed were crazy fake cheer squads, women dancers in beards and merkins (look it up!), roller derby girls, high school marching bands, the Marine Corps marching band, teenage girls in sequined leotards throwing batons, a team of Lady Godiva horseriders, and the Rolling Elvi (75 Elvis look-alikes on motorbikes).

As every Mardi Gras-related event has an opportunity cost (“If I go to event X, I’ll miss Y”), we ran back from the Muses parade to the Zulu ball to catch the dancing. The Gap Band and Doug E. Fresh, baby. Thousands of couples grooving on the dance floor in front of the stage, makeup and hair and cummerbunds starting to muss as we approached 1am. I felt certain I would run into people I know, since Tremé is one of the neighborhoods I work in (mostly African American, high poverty, high homeownership, strong neighborhood associations), but it was hard to find anyone amidst the dim lighting, costumed crowds and late-night drinking. The only fight that we witnessed broke out amongst a couple of white frat boys, of course. Wandered home with aching feet just before 4am.

Saturday was a mega-parade day, with the Endymion parade rolling for the first time post-Katrina along its original Mid-City route. Many of the parades had to alter their routes due to decreased police presence and concerns over security. Crowd control and safety is taken very seriously by parade organizers and the police. For the parade-goer, traffic and parking are major concerns and I have to carefully map out my cross-city treks during Mardi Gras. Tchoupitoulas Street is sometimes closed because that’s where the floats line up before the Napoleon Street routes, and St. Charles is closed a lot because that’s where people line up their BBQs, ladders, tents, couches, folding chairs for days before the parades. I have to take a freeway detour up to Claiborne Avenue just to get home, and I may or may not get to park near my house.

Did I mention the Saturday parades? Yeah, I missed them. That relates to a very important rule of Mardi Gras: pace yourself. Friday’s big night, followed by an anticipated big Saturday night meant I had to spend Saturday in bed recovering and refreshing. I think I awoke at some point and had a pita-feta-tomato sandwich and a gallon of Diet Coke, but then slumped back off to sleep until it was time to get pretty again.

Wore the ball gown again to my second ball in two days: the Armeinius ball, which is a gay ball where my boss Kristin bought tables for our staff. There was no dancing at this ball (and again, not any real food, ugh) – it was more like a drag show where the court of Armeinius was presented by foul-mouthed drag queen announcers.

The theme was “Let Them Eat Cake”, and the King and Queen of the ball (both men, of course) were dressed in elaborate Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette regalia, accompanied by young pages, i.e., old school boy toys. The King and Queen presided over the show, which consisted of musical numbers featuring drag queens dressed as different desserts. Cherries Jubilee had a wide white-feathered skirt with chocolate a sash and corset, with red sparkling cherry orbs for breasts and a 5-foot tall headdress of whipped cream and more cherries and chocolate. New York Cheesecake came out carrying an immense sugary display of the New York skyline supported by his/her outstretched arms, kicking a Rockette-style chorus line. Pineapple Upside Down Cake was two dancers in half-pineapple costumes they carried on their backs, until the emcee dramatically sliced them apart with a 10-foot cardboard knife. The shiny, colorful, inventive, beautiful, immense costumes were breathtaking in their creativity. We had fun watching the audience as well, as some of the most beautiful women at the tables turned out to be men.

Next, we all ran back to Kristin’s house to change for the next party: M.O.M.’s Ball, which started at 11pm and was my third ball in two days. This was a costume ball where the theme is anything goes, the more risqué the better. No long pants or jeans allowed, unless the doormen were sufficiently impressed with the creativity of your costume or the ampleness of your cleavage. One guy in our group was dressed as a cowboy, and the door was barred to him unless he removed his jeans. A good sport, he entered the party wearing underwear, and left his jeans waiting for him near the exit. As for me, my outfit was a pink wig (cause you gotta at some point start a wig collection if you’re going to live in this town!), a tight black minidress with a silver zipper down the front, tall black high-heeled boots with laces, a pink push-up bra, and lots of cleavage. I got into the party, no problem.

The venue was Mardi Gras World on the other side of the Mississippi river, the massive warehouse where the Mardi Gras floats are made and the walls are crammed with larger-than-life figurines from prior floats. The Meters, the venerable New Orleans funk band, played before a packed house of half-naked party-goers in costumes from cutesy to titillating to verging on pornographic to oh-my-god-no-she-didn’t. I got hit on by a cockroach and a giant condom, plus a priest and a Boy Scout. Vampiras and naughty nurses were passed out in their seats. The free and free-flowing beer was great, as long as you could handle waiting in the long line at the port-a-potty in your skimpy outfit in the cold and then maneuver your way out of your costume in the tiny stall.

A beloved local writer, Chris Rose, was there and wrote about the party and what Mardi Gras means to this city: http://blog.nola.com/chrisrose/2008/02/chris_rose_real_life_returns_b.html.

(I just realized I’m still trying to describe this whole Mardi Gras experience days later, and I haven’t even wrapped up writing about Saturday. Much craziness to follow on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday… Taking me a moment to remember what the hell I did for the next 3 days – ah, yes!)

Slept at my boss’s house Saturday, thank goodness, as did many other weary partiers, and we all awoke bleary-eyed to prepare for more parades. I had to drive home, or towards home, to catch the Thoth parade on Sunday morning, which goes down Magazine Street right by my house. Since there was no parking by the time I got home, however, I had to park a ways away and walk, leaving all my funky costumes and gowns in the car.

Thoth is a very neighborhood-y parade, as the beginning of the route goes down the narrow parts of Magazine, without the throngs of people that line St. Charles Avenue. I drank Heinekens with my neighbors on their front porch until we heard the marching bands signaling the parade’s approach. Then we walked down the street, turned right, and a block away we were on the parade route. I ran into some more people I knew in front of the neighborhood bar, Henry’s. Another friend I knew was riding in the parade, so he threw me tons of red beads as the parade passed. The weather was magnificent, and everyone enjoyed the sunshine and good vibes.

After the parade, my other neighbors invited me over for a crawfish boil in their backyard. They bought about 115 lbs. of crawfish to boil up in a big pot over a gas burner, along with Zatarain’s Cajun spices, garlic, mushrooms, and corn on the cob. I stood side by side with their family and friends peeling the “mud bugs” on a newspaper-laden picnic table and ate up some crawfish until my eyes watered from the spices.

Alison and her roommate Joe came over so we could walk to Napoleon Street from my house to see the next parade – Bacchus. On our way meandering through the neighborhood we came upon a brass band playing on someone’s front porch. The sound of live music in the fading daylight at Mardi Gras is just about as good as it gets!

Hulk Hogan was the King of Bacchus parade, riding in regal cape and crown, sitting on his throne surveying the multitudes from atop his wildly decorated float. I guess the rest of the country was watching the Super Bowl, but I forgot there was even such a thing. We found a spot to watch the parade where someone had set up a projector on the side of their house, so people could watch the Super Bowl and the parades. People riding the floats by would stop throwing beads to look up and see the score and point and cheer. A big finish by Eli Manning, New Orleans’ native son, brought a surprise win to the Giants, and the whole street went wild in front of the projector.

I think at some point around 10 or 11 pm I finally wandered home laden with beads and shoved some pizza in my face, since I had been starving most of the afternoon and evening. As much as New Orleans is known for its food, Mardi Gras is not. No one has time to sit down at a restaurant or go to the grocery store, so usually you end up eating greasy street food at a hot dog vendor or taco truck just to soak up the alcohol.

Nothing much happened Monday day, Lundi Gras, since I stayed in bed completely unable to move. Getting old, I tell ya! Exhausted, I drifted in and out of sleep while my kitty Bijou sat on my feet and purred. The apartment was becoming progressively more of a sty, but that was just about the last thing I cared about. Most of the other suckers in the country had to work that day, but New Orleans was still partying! I did at some point retrieve my car and my clothes from about 10 blocks away, but then I had to borrow toilet paper from another neighbor because I was incapable of making the trek to the drug store.

Monday night was gearing up to be a big one: Galactic, another New Orleans band, at Tipitina’s Uptown. Laura was going to come over so we could walk to the club from my house, but she was taking a long time, so in the meantime I hung out on my front porch with the girl who used to live in my apartment (I know, small town!) and convinced her and her friend to join us for the evening. Laura finally arrived and all of us wandered to a bar called Three Brothers, or Three Sisters, or Three Something, where a group of girls celebrating a 21st birthday party told me they thought I was 25 – I don’t care how much they’d been drinking, it still put a smile on my face :)

At Tipitina’s, I ran into some of my Americorps volunteers, and since I know what it’s like to be a poor volunteer in a third world country, I bought them quesadillas and drinks. We all danced until late, then Laura and I took a cab to the Maple Leaf on Oak Street and stayed until later. That seemed to be dying down, so we took a cab across town to Frenchman Street to check out the scene there. Barhopping in the French Quarter ensued, accompanied variously by Eastern Europeans and Americans living in Eastern Europe. A Bosnian told me he had been waiting his whole life for a girl with pink hair. Oh, did I mention I was decked out in my pink wig again? And why wouldn’t I be?

I think Laura and I got home at around 6:30am, awaking in a panic a mere few hours later, thinking we had missed the Zulu parade, the best and penultimate parade of Mardi Gras. Too hurried to wash my hair – guess the pink wig would have to do again! plus I wore bee wings just because – we rushed to Lee Circle, where fortunately the Zulu parade was still going by. This was the African American parade, originally started in response to being denied access to the white parades. The black float-riders paint their faces up in blackface and wear fake savage outfits to make fun of the white portrayal of blacks way back in Al Jolson days. They have the best throws of any parade, and if you’re lucky enough to get a hand-painted golden coconut, you cherish it for years to come.

And the Mardi Gras Indians ride in the Zulu parade. That’s a whole other tradition that’s too complicated to go into here – you’ll have to look it up! Extra points if you can figure out the link between that tradition and the song “Iko Iko”, a.k.a. “Jock-a-mo fee na-né” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D21nsqe0F-4&feature=related).

We snuck into a bar on the circle called the Circle Bar, acting like we belonged to the private party. We were dressed like loons, so of course we belonged, right? Laura had on a purple petticoat and tall boots and a bustier and a mask. It was Mardi Gras, baby!! Inside the bar we had drinks, seating, bathrooms (score!), a good jukebox, and, oh yeah, REM was there... Plus we somehow positioned ourselves on the balcony of the bar and had prime viewing for the Rex parade coming down St. Charles Avenue in all its colorful splendor. Watching a Mardi Gras parade from a balcony on a gorgeous day with your friends and a drink in your hand? How can you beat that?

Liana and her husband showed up and we all caught heaps and heaps of beads before the parade ended. It was around 3 or 4pm when we walked to the French Quarter to meet Paul and Nicole, two do-gooders who had met while working in relief shelters in Texas following Katrina, fell in love, moved here, got married, and had a baby. Now they were strolling down Bourbon Street, him dressed as a priest, her as Marie Antoinette, and baby Connor in the stroller absolutely loving the music and the array of strange people all around him. Yes, it’s absolutely nuts to bring a 6-month old to Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras, but the fact that his parents thought it was fine and the baby was so relaxed was highly entertaining. Little Connor elicited the most shocked and delighted looks on people’s faces as they tried to determine through their alcohol stupor whether they were hallucinating, or whether that baby really was just hanging out bopping his feet to the beat.

We all found a quiet courtyard to sit and eat some very greasy food as the rest of the Quarter got rowdier. Departing near sundown for home, I could feel my body slide into the finish line in anticipation of a good night’s sleep. The end of Mardi Gras, back to work the next day, recovery to take a few days, I knew… My feet were filthy and I spent all my money and my stomach ached from the food and my cat was feeling neglected and I needed 30 hours of sleep and I had no clean laundry, but I was very, very happy.

gurlz

2008-01-25T18:05:00.000-05:00

Here's a pic of me and my boss Kristin (left), with her 3 daughters (!), and one of my Americorps volunteers (like a domestic Peace Corps).

Here's a drawing my boss' youngest daughter (4 yrs old) drew of me and Kristin while she was hanging out at the office.

2008

2008-01-14T20:22:00.000-05:00

Hey everyone! Not much news in the New Year here. Just dealing with the Cold That Won't Die. I think everyone has it. No matter how much I curtail my going-out habits and give myself some TLC, the cough and phlegm won't go away. (Sorry if that's TMI...)

Me and Bijou are laying low these days, and she's turned into the cuddliest and sweetest kitty I could hope for. The other day she was in the backyard climbing a tree, and a red robin and a blue bird scared her out of the tree by screeching at her. Not much of a vicious hunter, that cat!

Doing lots and lots of overlapping projects at work, and the deadlines are really piling up. We've got new corporate sponsors and natiional sponsors and programs and staff, but it's all positive growth, as stressful as it is. We're rebuilding houses like crazy :)

Still enjoying New Orleans and looking forward to my second Mardi Gras coming up soon!!

Strange set of dreams I'll relay: One night last week I had a dream in Romanian. The next night I had a dream in Indonesian. Bizarre.

back to Cali

2007-12-20T13:24:00.000-05:00

Took a quick jaunt to Cali to visit friends and family... saw some mountains again, ate tons of Mexican food, took some long road trips in a rental car, and watched a few sunsets over the Pacific (sigh)

VACATION!!

2007-11-30T00:34:00.001-05:00

Just came back from a Thanksgiving cruise with my mom in the Carribean :)

Diving diving diving yay!!!

busy lately

2007-10-21T15:54:00.000-05:00

I've been taking part in a wide variety of activities in the past month or so, and really taking in the diverse experiences this city has to offer. Last night I went to Tipitina's music club to see Gogol Bordello, a gypsy punk band from Brooklyn, where the lead singer (a guy from the Ukraine) brought to mind a rock-star version of Borat. Immediately prior to that I was at a charity function on the grounds of a Greek revival style plantation home, catered by the finest restaurants in New Orleans. Did some roller blading in Audubon Park, under the arches of the grand oaks next to the lake and golf course, across from Tulane University. Had an amazing meal of shrimp and wine and spinach and goat cheese at a country-French style restaurant with an outdoor patio lit by sparkling white Christmas lights. Started taking a yoga class - the morning after an ill-advised bender, unfortunately, but my hangover almost immediately vanished after a few breathing and "centering" exercises. Attended the New Orleans Film Festival, where I saw a beautifully photographed and moving film by Anton Corbijn called "Control", about the band Joy Division. Attended a Catholic Mass at the 165th anniversary of St. Augustine Church (one of the oldest black churches founded by free blacks), followed by a Second Line parade of jazz musicians through the streets. Went to the Art Walk in the warehouse district, when all the galleries throw their doors open and musicians play in the streets, and vendors sell food and wine, and people get dressed up to walk around in the warm evening air. Trying to learn Spanish - FINALLY - with some classes at the Jewish Community Center and some CDs.

This on top of an incredibly demanding work schedule that will hopefully slow down somewhat next month. Worked for many of the past weekends, but managed to take a little time off here and there during the week to get my life sorted out and catch up on some sleep. Also had to go to St. Paul, Minnesota, for a conference for a few days. Plus I've been undergoing some major dental work, which is best left undescribed.

Da Saints

2007-09-28T09:07:00.000-05:00

My job sometimes has really cool perks! Got invited to sit on the 30 yard line at the home-opener for the Saints at the Superdome. Me and a couple dozen other people from my organization were honored on the field at halftime (along with people from a few other nonprofits) for our efforts in rebuilding the city. We even got to see the players warm up in the empty stadium. It was amazing being so close to these amazing athletes in action (Reggie! Reggie!) and looking up at the cheering crowd. Too bad the Saints got hammered by the Tennessee Titans...

I had my moment of nation-wide media exposure, too, when apparently the camera zoomed in on me for a few seconds during the NFL broadcast. People were calling me and texting me and emailing me from all over the place, saying "I SAW YOU ON T.V.!!!" Everyone at work was teasing me and even our janitor came up to me and said jokingly, "Can I get your autograph?" I even showed up on a few sports blogs, the topic being - ahem - the way I filled out my t-shirt (!)... (Hey, I'm not bad - I was just drawn that way!) It's very strange to think that for a few seconds while I was sitting there doing nothing, millions of people were watching me.

Happy New Year... 5768!

2007-09-13T21:34:00.000-05:00

Went to Rosh Hashanah services at Touro Synagogue on St. Charles Avenue, which is the second oldest synagogue in the US. The congregation dates back to 1763, but the "new" building was founded in 1828. It's a reform synagogue, but there was lots of Hebrew in the service, and a cantor who sang beautifully.

Judah Touro, the founder, founded the New Orleans' first hospital as well. In fact, most of the major cultural institutions in the city were founded by Jews: parks, museums, department stores, libraries, etc.

Here's a great story about how the Jewish community is trying to replenish the population post-K:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-jewish19jul19,0,7281788.story?coll=la-home-nation

quick jaunt to DC

2007-08-31T23:05:00.000-05:00

Caught up with some friends in DC last weekend. Just trying to make up for all the time I didn't get out of New Orleans last year by checking out the rest of the country before I forget there are places where things actually work (or at least sort of work, in the case of DC)... Good mental vacation :)

Kind of an unexpected reaction while walking in Dupont Circle at lunchtime, and again in the evening: I was thinking to myself, "There are so many people here!" Guess I got used to the low population density in New Orleans and it felt strange to have so many masses of humans swirling about. Maybe I'm becoming a country bumpkin. Suits me fine for now.

David + me

Jackie + roommates

Mary + me

Chris + Michelle

some good news for once

2007-08-19T12:26:00.000-05:00

N.O. a beacon for young people

Molly Reid
August 18, 2007
Times Picayune

http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/08/no_has_become_a_beacon_for_you.html

Five days after she graduated from college in Philadelphia, Miji Park was gutting houses in New Orleans.

Bright and articulate with a degree in urban planning, Park said she was "not the world's best gutter," so the 23-year-old volunteered for a month at The Idea Village, a local nonprofit group that supports entrepreneurs.

She interviewed more than 60 entrepreneurs that month, from New Orleans and everywhere else. Each was passionate about contributing new ideas and services to the post-Katrina economic landscape, as were her colleagues.

Park had been here only a short while, but she realized that if any city in the United States could take a Katrina-induced breath of progressivism and turn it into something truly groundbreaking, it was New Orleans.

"It was amazing," she said. "This to me was really the spirit of entrepreneurialism. It really drew me to the city."

Park had lined up a well-paid research position in her hometown of Berkeley, Calif., and was to start in July 2006. She saw her work in New Orleans as more urgent and relevant, and she resisted the pull of a nice salary and a ticket home.

"The job in Berkeley was just a number and nothing else," she said. "What I could get from New Orleans was so much greater."

Park took a full-time position with The Idea Village in August as an associate in community development and urban planning, and she has been here since.

It's a story told over and over with every out-of-state young professional who arrives in New Orleans, bright-eyed and typically not long out of college, or every young native who returns home with a renewed sense of civic pride and duty.

Although the influx is by no means massive, it is substantial enough that experts cite plenty of anecdotal evidence that New Orleans, cast nationally as a place where many residents have not returned and others are still mulling whether to leave, is quietly attracting young people drawn by a sense of purpose.

Philadelphia native Jennifer Glick, 28, graduated from Tulane University's School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine and stayed in New Orleans to organize a sexual health program for teenage girls. Dan Favre, 25, from Joshua Tree, Calif., completed a summer internship for the Gulf Restoration Network and lives in the Faubourg Marigny working as a full-time campaign organizer for the nonprofit organization. There's John Alford, 32, who started a new charter elementary school in Mid-City, and Stephanie Slates, 28, a project manager for New Leaders for New Schools.

Many, like Park, arrive to volunteer for a couple of weeks and decide to stay. Others hear about post-Katrina life from friends who have settled in New Orleans and become intrigued by the wealth of opportunity the rebuilding city seems to offer. Many feel compelled -- called, even -- to help right the host of New Orleans' social ills that Katrina showed to the world.

"All the problems the city is facing -- economic development, health care, education -- are not that unique," Park said. "I think post-Katrina, New Orleans is the greatest challenge our generation will ever face, and it'll also be our greatest legacy."

It's a bold statement, especially for someone who describes herself as "not much of an optimist to begin with," but therein lies the sentiment driving young people to a suffering city that before the storm was hemorrhaging young talent as graduates sought job opportunities elsewhere because of New Orleans' moribund economy.

Now, instead of the brain drain, the city is nurturing a brain gain. New Orleans has become the testing ground for a new career and lifestyle ideal among today's 20-somethings -- called "millennials" by some -- one that places less importance on the value of money, title and a swift climb up the corporate ladder.

Faced with an increasingly global economy, less job security and more awareness of global problems, many graduates are seeking a more fluid and socially responsible career. New Orleans, with its myriad systems in crisis and authentic laissez faire charm, has emerged as a new mecca for adventurous young people hoping to start their careers, have a good time and make the world a better place.

City on the radar

To Tim Williamson, 42, founder of The Idea Village, the influx of young people is more than a trend. He sees it as part of a shift in New Orleans' collective ethos, one moving away from an entrenched old guard toward what he calls the "vanguards" of post-Katrina New Orleans.

The blow Katrina dealt to the city's centuries-old economic, political and social patterns has created an unprecedented amount of room for new ideas to take hold, which is precisely the kind of gap Williamson hoped to fill in 2000 when he founded The Idea Village to focus on innovations in business.

"It's based on the belief that how you fundamentally change the city is innovation, and innovation is based on the execution of ideas," he said.

From 2002 to August 2005, The Idea Village received 215 applications for entrepreneurial assistance; since September 2005, the applications total 978. While the nonprofit group does not track age, Williamson does acknowledge a rise in the population of young professionals, citing it as an indication that post-Katrina New Orleans is a magnet for fresh talent.

"Post-Katrina, there's an opportunity for talent to be attracted to us because there's an environment of social change. The people who are coming here are passion-driven. If you graduate from Harvard or something, you can move to New York and be just another person, or you can come here and be a part of something that's going to put your mark on changing the city," he said.

Richard Campanella, a geographer and associate director of the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research, estimated in early 2007 that 2,000 to 3,000 new young professionals had arrived in the city since Katrina.

Robert Edgecombe of GCR & Associates, a New Orleans research group, said the number of young professionals coming to the city is difficult to quantify but that "anecdotal evidence suggests that the number is significant and that it represents a range of skills being applied to government, nonprofit and private employers."

'People want to be here'

In June, Forbes magazine ranked New Orleans 17th among major American cities for attracting young professionals, beating out larger metropolises like Houston, San Diego and Chicago. New Orleans also placed third for its concentration of unmarried people in their 20s and 30s.

According to data from Hire Tulane, the university's career services center, 25 percent of students who registered with the center during the 2006-07 school year said they planned to stay in New Orleans after graduation. Amjad Ayoubi, director of Hire Tulane, calls it a "very decent number," considering that 80 percent of the student body is from out of state.

Teach for America has placed 120 new teachers, almost all of them age 22-35, in New Orleans for the 2007-08 school year. In addition, more than 200 Teach for America alumni, who have completed their two-year stints, decided to stay in New Orleans to continue their careers, 100 of them working within the education system.

"The need is great, and people want to be here," said Mary Garten, executive director of Teach for America's New Orleans arm. "We're definitely approaching a critical mass of young professionals in the city."

In something of a reversal, the long-suffering Orleans public defenders office recently cherry-picked 10 new hires from some of the nation's top law schools. Washington lawyer Brian Privor, who clerked in New Orleans after law school and recently completed a six-month post with Tulane University's Criminal Law Clinic, said that before Katrina, public defender positions in New Orleans often were seen as an inferior alternative to private practice or other government jobs. With impossible caseloads and scant funding, the office tended to attract only the most devoted public servants and those hungry for trial experience, as well as law school graduates who couldn't land more attractive positions.

After garnering national media attention about the deplorable state of the criminal justice system after Katrina, the public defenders office began to see more interest. They hosted hundreds of law school volunteers to help clear a Katrina-induced backlog of indigent defense cases and received 110 applications for 10 public defender positions. Among the applicant pool were graduates from Harvard, New York University, Columbia and University of California-Berkeley, as well as Tulane and Loyola universities.

The public defenders office is "happy to be one avenue by which professional people are choosing the city of New Orleans post-Katrina," said Christine Laymann, director of the office. "I know from personal conversations that those around the country who have applied to the OPD or who have offered their time on a volunteer basis are doing so in large part because they have been touched by the crisis in our city and want to do their part to help rebuild."

'Generational marker'

Why does New Orleans resonate so strongly with today's graduates? According to a 2006 survey conducted by a Boston think tank, so-called millennials, the demographic group born after 1981, are more socially and environmentally conscious than any previous generation.

Sixty-one percent said they "feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world." A whopping 79 percent say they want to work for a company that benefits society, while 54 percent stated they would "refuse to work for an irresponsible corporation."

Researchers Neil Howe and William Strauss anticipated the do-gooder trend in their 2000 book "Millennials Rising." They see it as a result of several factors: the rise in college attendance, the child-oriented culture millennials have enjoyed since they were born, and the apathy and disillusionment that, in their opinion, characterized Generation X.

From the "Baby on Board" stickers in the 1980s to the endless media reports on child safety, millennials have been protected, cared for and encouraged -- often pressured -- to succeed. They grew up in a time of uninterrupted economic prosperity, only to come into adulthood with several global crises looming -- namely the fight against terrorism and global warming. Mix in a five-figure college education and the passing of Generation X slacker-chic, and the current generation of young adults are, Howe and Strauss hypothesize, poised to "embrace a world-saving role."

"Katrina is absolutely .¤.¤. a generational marker," Strauss said recently. "I've heard a lot of millennials say that the failure to prepare for Katrina, as well as the very problematic failed response to it, is an illustration of the older generations not getting their act together on this, and they are committed to making sure that this doesn't happen again."

Shifting work attitudes

Also at work is a vastly different professional landscape for today's graduates than what their parents enjoyed. Millennials are leaving college to find work in a deunionized, outsourced, pension-free economy, with more and more entry-level positions becoming contract or temporary spots without generous salaries or benefits.

Apparently unable to rely on a lifelong career and healthy retirement plan, graduates are turning toward what they expect will be a more varied, entrepreneurial career. Instead of signing on with a large corporation with clearly defined advancement, some graduates are opting for multiple employers through freelance and contract work. They rely more on external networks and see themselves as more open to changing career directions.

There's also a greater importance placed on the balance of life and work, and New Orleans' traditionally easygoing pace combined with a newfound sense of recovery-driven urgency make it appear to be a perfect place to work and play.

Labor and management researchers Michael Arthur and Denise Rousseau identify this new professional path in their 1996 book, "The Boundaryless Career."

"Firms today cannot promise a lifelong career, or anything close to it; people can no longer expect such a prospect," they write.

"The boundaryless career perspective suggests that people take responsibility for their own career futures. If they are to do so, cultivating networks and gaining access to other people's knowledge and resources are fundamental steps."

Building networks

Already, a number of young professionals are building the kind of networks and resources that could foster this new career ideal in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Nathan Rothstein, 23, a native of Massachusetts, works three jobs, one as a recruiter for New Orleans College Prep Charter School, another developing the Newcomer Incentive Program for the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, and an unpaid position developing the NOLA YURP Initiative, a Web site and nonprofit dedicated to helping foster a strong community of young professionals in New Orleans.

As a graduating senior, Rothstein had been offered a full-time position with the Democratic National Committee. He turned it down and headed south in June 2006, intent on absorbing as much of post-Katrina life and politics as possible.

"The minute I got here I decided to go to one meeting after another just to get a sense of what was going on. I didn't speak; I just listened," Rothstein said.

In April, Rothstein founded a Web site to help young professionals network, share resources and find jobs in New Orleans. While The Idea Village prefers the term "vanguards," Rothstein's project caters to "YURPs," or young urban rebuilding professionals.

The Facebook-style Web site, www.nolayurp.com, has attracted more than 500 members in the past two months. A list of 59 "member objectives" ranges from the vague and lofty -- "alleviate the causes of poverty in New Orleans" -- to the simple and specific -- "create a political action committee .¤.¤. that could create and prioritize political objectives for young New Orleans professionals."

Rothstein hopes to attract financing through grants and sponsorships in order to work full time as director of the organization.

"A lot of people who are contacting me are saying, 'I've heard a lot about everything that's going on down here, and it sounds really exciting.' There's this buzz," he said. "I think there's this energy that maybe young people can do things differently than the current generation. If we start unifying now, in the future, all of us will be more well-connected and .¤.¤. will be able to accomplish a lot more."

Also helping to connect young professionals are marketing associate Michael Karnjanaprakorn, 25, and Lauren Baum, 26, who works for The Idea Village. The pair founded a New Orleans chapter of Likemind, a national networking movement with groups across the country who host monthly meet-and-greets for young, socially conscious professionals.

The group has met five times since May, with attendance growing from an initial 15 to more than 40. Karnjanaprakorn also is developing a New Orleans version of the New York-based Web site All Day Buffet, www.alldaybuffet.org, which hosts and lists fun events with a social-minded bent that tries to make young people "full on good."

Heather Mack, 27, a repatriated New Orleanian who works as a freelance nonprofit consultant, founded the Job Seeker's Alliance, a networking group for people looking for work in the nonprofit sector. Mack is emphatic about the importance of networking to her generation.

"A lot of people only think of it when it's time to find a job. So many people think that a job search is only a temporary thing. I know a lot of people who want to come down and are eager to rebuild, but are unlikely to find paid work right away. It's an ongoing process," she said.

Still finding their voices

Such eagerness sometimes makes New Orleans' young professionals come off as naive to residents worn out by the daily grind of post-Katrina life.

It's an easy criticism: They're carpetbaggers, they're dilettantes, they're just here to get their do-gooder fix and after six months, they're gone.

But several young people interviewed for this story said they have no plans to leave. Rothstein and Favre say they can see themselves settling down in New Orleans. Park says she'll probably return to the West Coast ultimately but has resolved to stay through the summer of 2009, after which she plans to attend graduate school.

"I don't see myself staying here for the long haul .¤.¤. but I'm a very loyal person, and I think in order to make an impact, you need a few years," she said.

Williamson says the young professionals trend is going through a "sorting process," wherein the newcomers are still finding work, finding one another and finding their voices.

"Once they gain the traction and momentum and realize they have influence -- economic, social, political -- when that happens, that's when you're going to see this movement reach the tipping point, I believe," Williamson said.

Privor, the Washington lawyer whose six-month rebuilding stint has come and gone, acknowledges that the wide-eyed moxie of many young newcomers has a certain tinge of naivete and sanctimoniousness. However, he said, they still fill an important role in the rebuilding. What's more, their experiences in New Orleans, whether they last six months or six years, will form their sense of civic duty and social justice for the rest of their lives -- and he should know.

A self-described cynic, Privor calls his time with the Criminal Law Clinic a "transformative experience," helping him to better see the social obligation of his work.

"I think if you spend any significant amount of time here, I don't think you can avoid being changed by it," he said.

Bijou with her favorite toy

2007-08-13T20:04:00.000-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC7VJ5Xfy-U

Bijou

2007-08-12T01:27:00.000-05:00

Bijou with the vet

Bijou at my house

Since I've been in my apartment for almost a year, and it looks like I'm staying put, it looked like a good time to make the plunge and finally get a kitty like I've been wanting to do for a while.

Bijou is a sweet little pastel tortoiseshell female 4-month old I rescued from the pound. She's already been fixed and potty-trained, and has had all her shots with the vet. She loves cuddling and purring - She shoves her nose under the blankets and stretches out next to me, while her paws knead me. I think in her whole lifetime of living on the streets of New Orleans and in a cage at the pound she has never been more relaxed.

She also likes to play with the toys I bought her: a leopard-skin fabric box house with a hiding place and a furry ball with feathers. I'm introducing her to the apartment one room at a time so she gets used to the place and doesn't run off to hide somewhere if she gets scared.

Bijou sometimes talks to me, too, and meows while she's running around playing or looking for me. She's hilarious!

Oh, and "bijou" means "trinket" (as in small piece of jewelry) in French

this Fortune article explains a lot

2007-08-07T22:58:00.000-05:00

Fortune Magazine
New Orleans: Where's the money?

Billions have been spent to rebuild the city, but not enough is reaching the local economy. Residents wonder where the funds are being spent.

By Adam Lashinsky, Fortune senior writer
August 7 2007: 12:51 PM EDT

Ask New Orleanians how their city is faring these days, and their responses follow an eerily consistent arc. They begin with gratitude that you bothered asking and then move on to recitations of all the good that's going on.

Hurricane Katrina, and the flood that followed, struck two years ago this month, and since then the tourists have returned, basic services are operating, and the city has crafted a comprehensive recovery plan.

Linger a bit on the subject, however, and optimism quickly turns to exasperation. Lack of government leadership, the glacial pace of rebuilding, and outright rage at absent neighbors who've yet to demolish blighted homes top the list of gripes.

New Orleanians talk darkly of emotional stresses on residents and hidden health risks, like the recent revelation that the city hasn't been fluoridating its tap water since the storm.

"Those of us who have chosen to stay are very optimistic that we can make this work," says Bill Freiberg, New Orleans branch manager for regional brokerage Morgan Keegan and a sixth-generation native. "But after two years the frustrations become depressing."

The frustrations are many, and all too often they boil down to money. By some measures, New Orleans is flush with cash. About $25 billion of Katrina-related private insurance claims have been paid out in Louisiana, some of which went to rebuilding damaged homes.

What's more, the federal government has allocated nearly $27 billion for housing, rebuilding the levees, and what's known as hazard mitigation, the messy job of removing debris and repairing critical infrastructure, like broken sewer lines and potholed roads. Too few of those dollars, however, have found their way into the local economy.

Bank deposits have skyrocketed, indicating that the insured haven't decided whether to reinvest in their community. Just 22 percent of the funds Washington has set aside for rebuilding Louisiana have been spent. For example, the program that compensates uninsured homeowners for their losses took more than a year to establish and only recently has begun distributing checks in significant quantities.

The population of Greater New Orleans is roughly 200,000 below its pre-Katrina level, which has triggered a labor shortage. Private-sector investors, in turn, have scaled back or postponed development plans, furthering a vicious circle of inaction.

"We're in a terrible catch-22," says Scott Howard, a local banker with Regions Bank. "We can't build because we don't have enough people. We don't have enough people because there's nowhere to live." Unsticking the gridlock is no simple task. It's as complex as getting local and federal bureaucrats to work better with one another - and with Louisiana politics that's extra tough - and as prosaic as finding enough plumbers to build new homes.

Uneven development

There's no one-size-fits-all way to describe the state of New Orleans today. During a citywide tour on a rainy July day, ritzy Uptown neighborhoods and the famous French Quarter look the way they did before Aug. 29, 2005, while the shattered Lower Ninth Ward, etched on the nation's guilty conscience in the days after the storm, still looks as if a powerful bomb had struck.

Residential neighborhoods like Lakeview and Gentilly display what locals call the "jack-o'-lantern" effect: spots of light surrounded by darkness. In those sections of town, it's common to see a tastefully landscaped and recently refurbished home next to a badly damaged house with a white trailer in the driveway supplied by, yes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The lot across the street may well be barren but for a lonely concrete slab. In many parts of New Orleans, abandoned homes still sport the large "X" that National Guardsmen painted and annotated to signify, among other things, that the structure held a dead body.

Plenty of people wanted to help New Orleans. KB Home (Charts, Fortune 500) CEO Bruce Karatz thought his company, the big homebuilder, could pitch in not merely by giving money to charity but by doing what it does best, building homes. In December 2005 he appeared with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Jim Bernhard, CEO of Louisiana-based Shaw Group, an engineering firm, to announce that KB would open a regional office in New Orleans and that the two companies would build houses there.

By May, KB was in contract on three land deals - including a 3,000- acre parcel in nearby Jefferson Parish, where it planned to construct 8,000 to 12,000 homes - and said it was negotiating for 40 more sites.

"Nobody knows what demand will be," Karatz told FORTUNE last year, which featured KB's efforts. "I just know we're doing the right thing."

It turns out that supply and demand were problematic. KB scaled back its plans in Jefferson Parish, then backed out altogether when the owner of the land wasn't interested in selling a smaller parcel. KB has begun building in the region, but primarily in Baton Rouge, as well as on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

The company is developing 73 Greek Revival homes in a transitional neighborhood near downtown New Orleans called River Garden. So far it has sold eight homes there. Karatz retired from KB in late 2006 amid questions over the timing of options grants. His successor, Jeff Mezger, inherited the commitment.

"It's taking longer for the city to rebound than we expected," he says. One unusual problem: a severe shortage of plumbers. KB learned after it arrived that state law requires plumbers to complete more than four years of training before obtaining a license, and that Louisiana follows different plumbing codes than most other states. That means KB effectively can't bring plumbers from Houston, where it has an extensive contractor network.

The company promoted a bill in the Louisiana legislature to loosen the requirements. The state's Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association saw that the bill was killed.

A handful of hardy national players have jumped back into New Orleans. Starbucks (Charts, Fortune 500) opened a new store in the recovering Lakeview neighborhood on the spot where an independent coffee shop didn't return. Lowe's is constructing a giant store in East New Orleans. Even Donald Trump still plans to move ahead on a 69-story condo and hotel tower he announced days before the storm.

But more investors are as frustrated as KB. Strategic Hotels & Resorts (Charts), the Chicago owner of the badly damaged Hyatt Regency downtown hotel, unveiled a plan this spring to develop a 20-acre site that would include a new hotel, a new city hall, and a jazz museum. That plan is dormant.

Even companies that made significant investments in New Orleans have fled. Smith & Wollensky (Charts) ran a restaurant on a prime downtown spot for seven years but decided not to reopen after the storm.

"It wasn't viable to run an $80-per-person restaurant in the area," says Alan Stillman, the company's CEO. "We owned the best location, the best corner, in the best quarter of town. But the dynamics have changed."

Although the Port of New Orleans is operating at pre-storm cargo levels, several longtime tenants who were wiped out have relocated permanently to Mobile, Ala., or Houston.

"Every day we feel the impact of Katrina," says Patrick Gallwey, chief operating officer of the port, an entity administered by the state. Every city covets national chains and major businesses, but their absence is acute in New Orleans, never much of a headquarters town.

Of the 23 publicly traded companies that were based in the city before the storm, only half remain. (Ruth's Chris Steak House (Charts), for instance, moved to Florida.)

Domestic Marshall Plan

Nobody expected the private sector to rebuild New Orleans by itself. It was assumed the federal government would step up, especially given that the worst of the damage was caused not by the hurricane but by flooding attributed to shoddy levee construction and maintenance by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

What seemed to make the most sense was a kind of domestic Marshall Plan, or at least the appointment of a politician with disaster experience who would be as empowered as Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover was when river flooding destroyed Greenville, Miss., in 1927.

What New Orleans got instead is Donald Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Powell's title is federal coordinator of Gulf Coast rebuilding. His role is to be President Bush's ambassador to the disaster-stricken region, meaning his job is to deflect the considerable flak local residents send the feds' way.

Unlike Hoover in the 1920s, Powell has no real power, only a bully pulpit and an ability to play referee when local governments have a beef.

"The President was very clear that this should not be an exercise in centralized planning and that the locals need to control their destiny," Powell says over endless rounds of Diet Cokes at the sleek InterContinental Hotel, where he stays when he's in town. He lives in Washington, D.C., but hails from Amarillo, Texas, where he was a banker for decades. A lanky and courtly type, the white-haired Powell is determined that Washington not shoulder all the blame for the slowness in rebuilding.

"At the end of the day, the federal government's role in assisting the good people of the Gulf Coast will be satisfactory," he says. "Could it have been more efficient? Sure. But we're limited by laws. We give them the money, and say, 'Here's the deal.' "

It wasn't until last summer, however, that Louisiana worked out the deal of how to reimburse uninsured homeowners. Congress appropriated more than $6 billion through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to be paid to the state. Concerned that the state's endemic corruption would pervert the process, the Louisiana Recovery Authority hired a private contractor, ICF International of Alexandria, Va., to run its Road Home homeowners' assistance program.

Adding yet another bureaucracy slowed down the process further, as did the state's decision to include homeowners whose only damage was from wind to those eligible for Road Home checks. (Flood insurance wasn't required in areas supposedly protected by the levees.) Road Home got off to a slow start, and a year later - years after the storm - has distributed just 37,000 checks, or $2.8 biIlion, out of 162,000 applications.

Because the state changed who could be covered after Congress appropriated the money, the program currently is estimated to be underfunded by more than $4 billion, much of which it hopes to get from Congress. If Congress doesn't act, Road Home will run dry by the end of the year. The absence of Road Home payments speaks directly to the halting nature of the city's recovery.

Residents who can't afford to repair their homes won't move back from wherever they've resettled. The longer the checks take to arrive, the longer they'll stay away, and the less likely they are to return.

"We've been frustrated since day one," Powell says of the Road Home program. "But that's a contractual relationship between the state and the contractor."

Some $6 billion in FEMA disaster money is held up because of federal rules for distributing it. According to those rules, recipients of federal disaster aid need to apply for grants through their state, which in turn is required to make a 10 percent deposit for the grant. It's Washington's way of making sure states will watch over its money. Congress, working with the President, can waive the 10 percent requirement, as they did for New York City shortly after 9/11. After nearly two years of fighting over the 10% waiver, Congress finally granted it to Louisiana in June, freeing up $750 million in additional funding.

At the end of my conversation with Powell, I ask him what advice he plans to give to his successor in the next administration. He said he's working on a list of suggestions, because "there is no handbook" for disasters like this, a comment I hear repeatedly in New Orleans. I remind him that Hoover did provide a successful model 80 years ago - it involved near dictatorial powers - and ask if there isn't any possibility of creating a similar recovery czar for New Orleans.

Having already explained to me more than once the President's position on the matter, Powell simply shakes his head in a silent "No."

The man behind the rebuilding effort

On the eighth floor of the rundown, 1950s-era New Orleans City Hall, at the end of a long corridor, is an office with no number. Beside the doorpost, taped over whatever sign was there before, is a single sheet of 8½-by-11-inch photocopy paper that reads, "Office of Recovery Management."

This is the redoubt of Edward J. Blakely, Mayor Nagin's point man for rebuilding New Orleans. Blakely, 69, is a longtime professor of urban planning and an expert on disaster recovery. He coordinated the relief efforts in Oakland after the 1989 earthquake, and Nagin hired him to craft and implement one plan that would decide where the city would and wouldn't rebuild.

Blakely inherited more than 50 plans that had been drafted by numerous consultants and community groups, and in March he presented his blueprint for spending $1.1 billion over five years on 17 "targeted areas." He promised fast results, predicting "cranes in the sky by September."

Blakely fancies himself a man of action. He leads reporters on Saturday-morning bike rides through blighted and recovering neighborhoods, both to show citizens that the mayor's office is paying attention to their plight and to familiarize himself better with New Orleans. He arrived Jan. 8 of this year, "the day of the Battle of New Orleans, a providential omen," he tells me. In his spare time he is developing a residential real estate project near Riverside, Calif.

On his desk sits a plaque that reads, footprints in history aren't made sitting down. For all his biking and planning, however, Blakely has yet to spend any money.

For one thing, he's not certain he'll be able to find the billion dollars. He intends to get about a quarter of the money from a municipal general obligation bond passed before the storm, though it isn't legally clear whether that money can be spent on hurricane recovery.

He intends to use $117 million of federal housing money from the state, and he also hopes to float a so-called "blight bond," using condemned properties as collateral for borrowing an additional $300 million. The state may be able to supply the balance.

Blakely lately has begun to acknowledge that there'll be no cranes in the sky by September. (Locals cluck that only a newcomer would have promised construction projects during the heart of hurricane season.)

The delay and the uncertainty over funding highlight an unfortunate fact: Blakely, too, has only so much power. He explains that some traffic lights in the eastern section of town are administered by the city and others by the state. The board that runs the sewage and water system is a separate entity over which he has little control. So despite the existence of a workable plan that generally is supported by residents, Blakely is in a holding pattern.

"It takes time to build things," he says. "They don't appear overnight. It also takes a certain process to put things in order." New Orleanians I talk to admire Blakely's intellect and his ability to look at the situation dispassionately. It's impossible, however, to overlook the contradiction between his professed love of action and his calm, measured approach to what in many areas remains a crisis situation.

A positive note

By New Orlean standards, it's a mild summer evening on the leafy campus of Tulane University. The twilight sun dances off the stately homes along St. Charles Avenue, the toniest address in the city's Uptown neighborhood, as students jog along the dormant tracks of an electric streetcar line.

This part of town is the antidote to the destruction that weighs so heavily on the soul elsewhere, an oasis of Southern charm in a blemished city.

I've come to Tulane to meet its president, Scott Cowen, a professor of management and a big bear of a man whose decade in New Orleans has done nothing to soften the honk of his native New Jersey accent.

As leader of the city's most prestigious university, and its largest employer, Cowen has been active with numerous recovery groups, including the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, which is helping Ed Blakely implement the city's plan.

He displays the zeal of a convert, more unabashedly boosterish of his adopted hometown than many old-school New Orleanians. Cowen launches into the positives. The port is doing well, he notes. Tourism and higher education are coming back.

Of course there are problems. The Road Home assistance program "didn't work for a long time." The federal government "grossly underestimated what it was going to take to get us on solid footing."

Tulane alone suffered $600 million in damage and has borrowed some $200 million for daily operations. (It is using insurance claims and FEMA grants to pay down the debt.)

"The fact that the money is flowing bodes well," Cowen says. "A lot of surveys have been done, and 80 percent of the former residents of New Orleans would love to return."

Counseling patience, Cowen has become a proponent of the Rule of Ten, a disaster-recovery timeline tool postulated a generation ago by a Brown University geographer named Robert Kates. It posits that the amount of time it takes for a place merely to function again is 10 times the period it was uninhabitable, which was eight weeks in the case of New Orleans. (This past March marked the 80-week point.)

The time needed to completely rebuild is another factor of ten, or, for New Orleans, a total of 15 years.

"I've got to believe this is one of the great development stories in America," he says, "especially as people more clearly can see the progress we're making. Developers in particular have been taking a wait-and-see attitude. But I think private money will come down in droves."

With that, I thank Cowen for his time and head out into the pleasantly muggy New Orleans midsummer's night feeling ever so slightly upbeat. Finally, a conversation that began hopefully - and ended that way too.

bday in Austin with Ellen

2007-08-06T21:25:00.000-05:00

nightlife

2007-07-15T11:05:00.000-05:00

Uptown

2007-06-30T15:53:00.000-05:00

Here are some more pix of my awesome New Orleans neighborhood ("Uptown").

New Mexico

2007-06-25T20:54:00.000-05:00

Went on a work/pleasure trip to New Mexico. It was great to get out of town and see wide vistas plus nature writ large. And how beautiful the mountains were! John, my camping buddy (Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce), who lives in Santa Fe, picked me up from the airport with his car already packed with dog/tent/firewood/et. al. One stop by the supermarket and a shuffle of the CDs, and we were off into the wild!

Camping, corn on the cob and beer by the fire, a killer hike (severely testing my cardiovascular fitness at 12,000 feet), washing off the sweat and the grime in the freezing creek, wandering through winter ski towns mid-summer in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range...

A drive back to the "city", through deserts and past clapboard Indian settlements, with a view of the Rio Grande gorge on the horizon, then spicy New Mexican food for dinner and sunset over the Old Spanish square...

Then it was on to my conference in Albuquerque - days in over-air-conditioned rooms listening to lectures, nights drinking at hip-hop bars with surfer/soccer boys riffing in Spanish :)

Pensacola

2007-06-12T16:41:00.000-05:00

work, play, work, work, play

2007-06-10T02:35:00.000-05:00

Keeping myself pretty busy these days. Work is going well, but it can be stressful and pretty fast-paced. We have a lot of new projects going on, but thankfully there are also a lot of new staff members. I'm enjoying the challenge of helping guide the organization in its growth, and now we're getting some good media coverage, which will help with donations and volunteers. People from out of town always comment that it must feel great for me to do the kind of work I'm doing - helping families get back into their homes - and I guess if I stop to think about it I am making a contribution, although most of the time it feels like we're just inching along a marathon course. There are years and years to go before New Orleans really recovers, and it will never be as it was before. That doesn't mean we should stop and let the city die.

I've instituted a new rule in my life - "No talking or thinking about work on the weekend" - in an effort to focus more on having fun and relaxing. So far it's been great, and gives me the freedom to spend time doing my photography and writing and museum-going and catching up on my reading.

Memorial Day was a fun and much-needed getaway to Pensacola, Florida, which is total mullet-land. As much as I'm loving the city, being out of New Orleans was great for my mental health. Me and my friends did a pretty good job of implementing a "No talking or thinking about Katrina or the recovery or FEMA" rule for the weekend. Enjoyed some tasty crawfish and snapper and Waffle House and lazy time on white sand beaches. Saw a bluegrass band called "Bubba and Them"that made me almost want to learn the fiddle. Bubba, the lead singer, is a middle aged woman in a mumu and Birkenstocks. I hope to go back to Pensacola (on the panhandle, just 3 hours away by car) to do some diving sometime soon.

This weekend was the Creole Tomato Festival and the Seafood Festival in the French Quarter. Of course there were bands (zydeco, country, Mexican, and rock), and a cooking demonstration by Paul Prudhomme. While the 95 degree heat beat down on the crowd, and I walked through the streets as though wading through humid soup, shiny streams of sweat poured down my legs, arms and back. Smells of bar-be-qued oysters and crabcakes and etouffe and fried green tomatoes and daquiris and boiled crawfish and bread pudding tempted me from every direction.

The evening was spent at a local institution called Rock 'n' Bowl, which is exactly as it sounds: bowling with live music (and alcohol, of course). A brass funk band was up on stage groovin' it out as the bowlers hurled balls down the lanes. Dancers of all ages and colors boogied in front of the stage. Some 12 year-old kid got up with the band and brought the house down with his trumpet playing. By day he was just some pudgy 7th grader in the back of the class, but by night the throngs waved their hands in the air and cheered at each solo he wailed out. Crazy cat.

A final stop before heading home was the local bar "Le Bon Temps Roule", which always has a live band in its dingy, stuffy backroom, and tonight the variety was honky-tonk. Music spills onto the streets and college students mingle with retirees and alterna-freaks. The beer is always cheap and the doors are open until at least 4am.

Laissez Les Bons Temps Roule, baby...

Jazz Fest

2007-05-11T21:40:00.000-05:00

Finally finding a moment to poke my head back up and post to my blog. For the last few months my life has taken on some sort of normalcy (or as normal as it can be in New Orleans these days). I work, I go out, I walk in the park, I shop, I decorate my apartment, I spend time goofing around on the internet - in short, the adventuress has slowed down a bit. Things at work are going really well, and my organization is growing. Making friends and finding the cool nightspots. Dating.

The biggest event lately was Jazz Fest, which is 6 days of music and parties and food and sun and crowds. Mom came out for a visit and got to check out my neighborhood. We ate beignets, of course, at Cafe du Monde :)

We saw Dr. John, Van Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis (the Killer!), the Mardi Gras Indians, Calexico, Charmaine Neville, Bonnie Raitt, Jill Scott and lots of gospel, jazz, zydeco and folk the first weekend alone. The next weekend I saw John Legend, John Mayer, the Allman Brothers, Galactic, and Harry Connick, Jr.

On the menu at the festival was crawfish beignets, fried green tomatoes, crawfish monica (pasta!), fried chicken, sno-balls, spinach artichoke casserole, fried eggplant with crawfish sauce, mango freeze, crawfish pie, fried crab cake w/smoked tomato & jalapeño tartar, crawfish sack, and oyster patties - oh man, oh man, oh man!!!

Summer's upon us, and I'm planning trips for the next few months... time for a real vacation...

pix from Fat Tuesday

2007-02-27T17:27:00.000-05:00

Mardi Gras down in New Orleans

2007-02-22T21:08:00.000-05:00

I fall asleep humming songs about goin' down to the Mardi Gras, I wake up singing about the Mardi Gras Indians, thump my thigh as I walk to the tune of:

Talkin' 'bout
Hey now (hey now)
Hey now (hey now)
Iko iko an nay (whoah-oh)
Jockomo feena ah na nay
Jockomo feena nay

I am exhausted after two straight weeks of letting the good times roll in a way that only Fat Tuesday in the Big Easy inspires. The town of New Orleans turns into a bright, brash, loud, happy, dancing, parading, festive gumbo of tradition and religion and irreverence and debauchery and smiling children each year at Mardi Gras. It is like nowhere else on Earth. It is nothing like non-participants would imagine. It is more than one could dream.

Beads of every color and shape linger in every gutter and at every corner for miles. Marching bands from around the country, with gold epaulets bouncing proudly on crisp costumes, boom and wail down the street. Frat boys plant couches and do keg stands in the wide median - or, as they say here, neutral ground - on St. Charles Avenue. Stout tractor drivers pull the floats through the streets wearing overalls and work boots. Debutantes in lace and diamonds wave from the back of convertibles, and each parade's king reigns in velvet and tails from high above his float. Harry Connick Jr. beams from atop the Orpheus float, surveying the crowds. Families stake their spaces along the route days in advance, strategically placing ladders at the curb to give the little tykes a better view. Mardi Gras Indians prance and beat drums, their bright plumage shivering in the wind. Everyone shouts to the riders on the floats, "Throw me something, mister!" in hopes of catching unique beads or a prized coconut or stuffed animal. High school dance troops and cheerleaders gyrate and stomp on the cement. Revelers lie sleeping on lawns midday or in parking lots early in the morning. Marines march in lockstep, with their bayonets sparkling and the crowds cheering. Satirical groups lampoon FEMA and the governor and the mayor with signs and costumes and faux rituals. Food carts sell funnel cakes and meat on a stick. The Zulu krewe paint their black faces black and cartoonishly mimic African jungle savages. Drooping oaks and willows graze the tops of the floats as their lights flash in the warm evening.

Parade after parade, float after float, party after party, band after band, beads and beads and more beads.

I lose my voice. My camera dies. My feet are killing me. I lose my stamina Saturday, then gain it Sunday, then lose it again Monday, and somehow make it to Tuesday after non-stop walking and eating and drinking and standing on tiptoes and people watching and going to clubs and untangling beads and gaping at the beautiful craftsmanship of the floats and spending money and catching what little sleep I can.

It is awesome.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2007-01-04T13:38:00.000-05:00

Important facts about New Orleans - please spread the word!

2006-12-11T11:58:00.000-05:00

From the Times Picayune:
http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1165561800312270.xml?NOESR&coll=1

You tell 'em

Confronted with clueless folks who question New Orleans' right to get help, or even to exist? Here's what to say

Friday, December 08, 2006
Bob Marshall

The nice lady -- a friend of a friend -- was shocked and angered by my statement, which went something like this: "The way New Orleans has been treated since Katrina is one of the most shameful episodes in our nation's history."

A patriot, she wasn't about to let that stand.

"What about all the money we've spent down there?" she asked. "And what about accepting some responsibility for building in a flood zone, and not having insurance?"

I wish I could say I was surprised, but recent travels had already shown me that most Americans are woefully ignorant of the ugly facts on the ground here in The Big Uneasy. My concern now is that as my fellow New Orleanians hit the road during the busy holiday travel season they may be stunned into silence -- if not apoplexy -- by the questions and statements of the misinformed masses.

So here's a package of talking points.

Isn't flooding what you should expect when living in a hurricane zone?

The flooding inside the city limits was not a natural disaster, but a man-made disaster. The hurricane protection system built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was poorly designed, constructed and maintained by that agency, a part of our national government. The system was never built as high as we were told, and it failed due to faulty engineering. Katrina's storm tides didn't come close to reaching the tops of the walls, and never would have.

This is not my opinion. This was the judgment of the corps after its year-long, $10 million in-house investigation. The corps said "our fault" -- yet Congress has not responded to that confession.

Didn't Congress agree to pay for the damage?

Only a small portion of it. The corps' failures resulted in the destruction of 200,000 homes and businesses at values estimated to surpass $100 billion, yet Congress has appropriated only about $10 billion to rebuild homes.

Well, is it our fault they didn't have any insurance -- or enough insurance?

That's like saying a man killed by robbers was at fault for not wearing a bullet-proof vest. You're blaming the victims.

Insurance is for natural disasters, acts of God and self-inflicted damage such as fires. This is not a no-fault case. The corps -- part of the U.S. government -- has already accepted it was at fault. Fairness means the nation should pay for completely rebuilding those homes. Insurance shouldn't be a consideration.

That's what the nation has always done in the past.

When?

Remember the savings and loan disaster? Congress accepted responsibility for allowing that industry to run amok, and spent $178 billion to protect the savings of millions of people.

Remember 9/11? Just five days after that tragedy Congress had passed and President Bush signed a $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, then paid billions to the 9/11 victims.

What about federal flood insurance? We subsidize that to the tune of billions. Why should we do that in a hurricane zone?

You're right. The nation shouldn't subsidize environmentally stupid development. But if we're going to start that policy, we must inaugurate it simultaneously coast-to-coast.

So when we yank flood insurance from south Louisiana, we also will stop it for Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg,. Jacksonville, Washington, D.C, and New York City, not to mention Houston, Gulfport and the rest of the Gulf.

And while we're at it, we will stop paying for earthquakes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Alaska.

And what about those people living in tornado alley? Why should we encourage them to rebuild year after year?

What about this Road Home Program? I see people getting money to rebuild. I've seen your politicians thank Congress.

They have been groveling for crumbs -- and that has hurt us more than helped us.

Here's an example that is typical. I have a friend who owned a $200,000 home in Lakeview. He had $14,000 left on his mortgage, and only $40,000 of flood insurance because it had never flooded. He might end up with $100,000 from Road Home. So he pays off his old mortgage and spends another $15,000 having his home torn down.

But the builder says it will cost $325,000 to rebuild the same size house.

So, at 55, he will have a $250,000, 30-year mortgage. He may never be able to retire.

He's left in this situation after the richest nation in the world admitted it destroyed his home -- but refuses to pay for the damage.

And he's lucky. There are many retired people who can't get the $300,000 mortgage to rebuild their homes destroyed by an agency of the government.

They'll spend their remaining days in small FEMA trailers.

Why isn't anyone telling us this?

They have. But you haven't cared enough to pressure Congress to do the right thing.

That's why I call this one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

. . . . . . .
Bob Marshall is outdoors editor. He can be reached at rmarshall@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3539.

Miss Scarlett

2006-11-30T12:19:00.000-05:00

Miss Scarlett is the Southern Belle who has joined me in New Orleans as my partner in crime... OK, she's not a native Southerner, but a transplant (like me). She's a spunky fire engine red 2007 Mazda 3. She's spicy and sassy - Yowza!

Happy Turkey Day :)

2006-11-25T14:50:00.000-05:00

Had a nice "orphans" Thxgiving with all the other newbies in New Orleans. My friend Allison hosted 15 people at her house, and her roommate Kayte - a chef - cooked. There were a bunch of Tulane grad students, and folks from all around the world, plus Allison's mom. It was a really nice holiday :)

my hood

2006-11-18T16:51:00.000-05:00

Bush and his right-wing nutjobs are at it again

2006-11-17T16:06:00.000-05:00

Bush Choice for Family-Planning Post Criticized

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 17, 2006; A01

The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as "demeaning to women."

Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman's Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.

Keroack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, will advise Secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy. He will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are "designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons."

The appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, was the latest provocative personnel move by the White House since Democrats won control of Congress in this month's midterm elections. President Bush last week pushed the Senate to confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations and this week renominated six candidates for appellate court judgeships who have previously been blocked by lawmakers. Democrats said the moves belie Bush's post-election promises of bipartisanship.

The Keroack appointment angered many family-planning advocates, who noted that A Woman's Concern supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and does not distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts.
"A Woman's Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness," the group's Web site says.

Keroack was traveling and could not be reached for comment. John O. Agwunobi, assistant secretary for health, said Keroack "is highly qualified and a well-respected physician . . . working primarily with women and girls in crisis."

Mark Conrad, president of A Woman's Concern, said Keroack would be able to make the transition to leading a federal program in which provision of birth control is an integral part. "I don't think it's going to be an issue for him," he said.

The group helps women in unplanned pregnancies but discourages abortions, Conrad said. He said the decision is the woman's but "we do want to give her the opportunity to have all the information and the support necessary to choose life."

Marilyn Keefe, interim president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents 4,000 family-planning clinics, said Keroack's work "seems to really be geared toward furthering anti-choice, anti-contraception policies." She added that despite the congressional election results, the appointment "goes to show you the importance of controlling the White House and how important federal agencies are in the delivery of health services."

The federal family-planning program, created in 1970, supports a network of 4,600 family-planning clinics that provide information and counseling to 5 million people each year. Services include patient education and counseling, breast and pelvic exams, pregnancy diagnosis and counseling, and screenings for cervical cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV.
Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called Keroack's appointment "striking proof that the Bush administration remains dramatically out of step with the nation's priorities."

Taken together, Keroack's appointment, the Bolton push and the judicial renominations suggest that although Bush may work for consensus with Democrats on selected issues, he does not plan to avoid decisions simply because lawmakers will disagree, and he may in fact seek fights in some instances when he feels they may be useful politically.

Confirmation of Bolton and the judicial nominees are popular causes with Bush's conservative base, and a family-planning chief from an organization that opposes contraceptives may appeal to disaffected social conservatives.

White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino cautioned against reading a larger pattern into the recent moves, saying, "You have to look at these things in isolation."

She added: "The president has said we will look to reach common ground where we can find it. However, he's not going to compromise on his principles."

once a Duranie...

2006-11-01T17:07:00.000-05:00

It only took 20 years, but I finally got up close to the stage for a Duran Duran show. Simon!!!!!!!! The band headlined at the 2-day Voodoo Music Fest in New Orleans last weekend, along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Saturday, when the Chili Peppers played, City Park was filled with a lot of teenagers and 20somethings, and my friends and I felt old. Sunday, it appeared all the 30somethings came out (along with their strollers), and we didn't seem so out of place.

We all crammed in front of the stage (sans strollers) waiting for the reappearance of the Fab Five, whose made-up faces and blowdried hair had covered our bedroom walls as teenagers. Although the guys of Duran Duran have aged (I guess we all have, but I'm in denial - I digress...) they put on a high energy show packed with loads of hits from the 80s and some great ballads. Full grown women were squealing and shrieking every time Simon walked down the catwalk, and men who wouldn't admit to listening to Duran Duran back in the 80s were singing the lyrics at the top of their lungs. One guy behind me kept shouting, "I love being 34!"

We had an anachronistic moment when someone started crowdsurfing. Hello, that hadn't been invented when Duran Duran was on the charts... Plus there was pot smoke wafting through the crowd, which is another thing that doesn't really go with Duran Duran. I would think of them more as a coke band, don't you think?

Anyway, the point is we all had an amazing time bopping down memory lane, going back to the time when "Save a Prayer" could make you cry, and the last time before 2006 leggings were in. We relished in our 30somethingness.

dorcus maiorcus

2006-10-18T15:17:00.000-05:00

Just got back from a conference in DC for work, and spent a day lobbying on Capitol Hill for affordable housing in the disaster zone.

Here's a picture of your favorite dork...

:)

Finally, Bush gets serious about fixing FEMA...

2006-10-07T13:12:00.000-05:00

...by insisting on waiving minimum requirements for the Director of the Agency!

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1160206764253020.xml&coll=1&thispage=1

(From the New Orleans Times Picayune)

Bush rejects minimum experience to lead FEMA

Democrats, Republicans alike blast president's stance on law

Saturday, October 07, 2006
By Bruce AlpertWashington bureau

WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers from both parties criticized President Bush on Friday for saying he won't comply with a homeland security law that sets minimum qualifications for future directors of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The law requires the president to nominate a FEMA director with "a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and "not less than five years of executive leadership." The qualifications are included in a spending bill the president signed into law Wednesday and aimed at the federal government's ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina.

That response was initially overseen by FEMA director Michael Brown, who had only limited experience in emergency management before coming to the agency in 2001, initially as the agency's attorney before being named by Bush as its top official in 2003.

In his signing statement, Bush said he also won't comply with a provision in the homeland security spending bill that authorizes the FEMA director to inform Congress about the nation's emergency management needs without first getting permission from the White House. The president has used signing statements much more than any of his predecessors to signal his intention to ignore provisions of laws he considers unconstitutional, or an infringement on executive authority.

Bush said establishing minimum standards for the director of FEMA could rule out a "large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge" to run the agency. The president, he added, has the constitutional authority to supervise the executive branch and recommendations to Congress should be subject to "appropriate executive branch review and approval before submission."

"The president's signing statement addressed a number of technical aspects of the FEMA provisions, making sure the government implements the provisions in a manner consistent with applicable constitutional provisions," White House spokesman Blair Jones said Friday.

State's delegation unhappy

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., was working Friday on getting Senate colleagues to send a letter to the White House protesting the signing statement.

"Under the fig leaf of 'constitutional precedent,' the statement rejects Congress' call that future FEMA directors come to the job with a bare minimum of basic experience to qualify them for the position," Landrieu said. "And despite having seen several investigations into FEMA's failed response be hampered by constraints on the agency's cooperation, the statement also now rejects Congress' right to receive unfettered counsel from the FEMA director on the emergency response needs of the nation."

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said he doesn't see how the White House can argue that it is improper for Congress to set minimal standards for a position as important as director of FEMA.
"I really think the president should rein in his lawyers and their very frequent issuance of these signing statements," Vitter said. "The statements have absolutely no legal authority. If Congress passes something that's unconstitutional, it's invalid whether the president has issued such a statement or not."

"Given the horrendous shortcomings of FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina," Rep. Bobby Jindal, R-Kenner said, the administration should have chosen "another battle."
"We saw what happened when we didn't have good leadership at FEMA, and this is common-sense legislation to ensure that problem doesn't occur again in any administration, whether Republican or Democrat," Jindal said.

Matter of experience

Brown served as FEMA's general counsel and later its deputy director. His only emergency management experience, according to his White House biography, was when he worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., between 1975-1978 with duties that included oversight of emergency services. Before joining FEMA, Brown was commissioner of the Arabian Horse Association.

By comparison, his successor, David Paulison, was U.S. fire administrator in the Department of Homeland Security when he was appointed to replace Brown in September 2005, and before that he had 30 years of experience in emergency services, including chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department with 1,900 employees.

Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said that for the administration to object to minimal qualifications for the director of FEMA shows that the administration is unrelenting when it comes to protecting executive prerogatives -- even if it has a point about the nominating process.

"He can appoint a chimpanzee if he wants, and the Senate can reject that chimpanzee if it chooses," Ornstein said. "But to argue that Congress can't ask officials in his administration for information or recommendations without his permission on an issue like homeland security, in which it has clear jurisdiction, is just plain wrong."

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Congress acted only after investigations found serious shortcomings at the top management levels of FEMA.

"This is not unprecedented," Collins said. "Congress has established qualifications for numerous executive positions, such as the solicitor general and the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service."

. . . . . . .
Bruce Alpert can be reached at bruce.alpert@newhouse.com or (202) 383-7861.

my pad

2006-10-05T13:40:00.000-05:00

my apartment is the left half of this double-shotgun

tears of joy, tears of sorrow

2006-10-03T17:37:00.000-05:00

Seven days can take you on a wild ride through a myriad of emotions, spinning through elation and grief, zig-zagging past all manner of feelings with enough speed to make ya plum tuckered out.

Last week I was sitting in box seats at the newly reopened Superdome, watching U2 and Green Day take the stage in front of a jubilant crowd, in anticipation of the New Orleans Saints' homecoming NFL game. I sang along with Bono, I craned my neck to stargaze at the famous fans in the stands, I jumped up and cheered when the team scored spectacularly within the first few minutes of the game. A palpable sense of release and celebration buzzed through the arena. New Orleans had arisen!

A few days later I got what I had been expecting for a long time: "The Call" - my grandmother was in the final hours of her life, her three children gathered by her bedside, watching her slip peacefully off to Elsewhere. I rushed home to join my mother and the rest of my family, and stood at my grandmother's gravesite, watching her simple and beautiful coffin being lowered into the earth's warm embrace. I think of her celebrating, too, and dancing in a great ballroom to Benny Goodman or Duke Ellington, her husband's arm once again wrapped around her waist and leading her across a white marble floor.

Rebuilding Together

2006-09-19T15:08:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm deep into the thick of it as the Program Manager for Rebuilding Together, which is a nationwide organization that normally works on repairing and upgrading properties owned by the elderly and disabled. Since Katrina, the local affiliate in New Orleans has transformed its mission into rebuilding the homes of elderly and disabled victims of Katrina. I am the point of contact for the homeowners, construction managers, volunteer groups, and local partners. We have staff in Washington, D.C. that manage the fundraising, publicity and planning.

Here's the website for the national organization (which employs me, even though I work at the local office) - http://www.rebuildingwithcountrywide.org

We're housed under the umbrella organization of the Preservation Resource Center, which does historical preservation, in partnerhip with the National Trust and other organizations. I'm learning about the unique and diverse New Orleans architecture - http://prcno.org/arch.html

First Night

2006-09-12T17:30:00.000-05:00

OK, so the apartment’s not totally ready yet, as I’m doing some work on the place in exchange for a good deal (plus it made the landlord’s job easy, since he lives in Baton Rouge, almost 2 hours away, AND it bumped me up to the top of the list of applicants, since there were quite a few people beating down his door). I’m still painting some of the walls and replacing some light fixtures. The landlord had someone redo the wood floors, and now they’re shiny. He’s going to have someone come in and strip and wax the kitchen floor. I’m going to be replacing some blinds/curtains and doing some other sprucing up (on his dime). So it’ll be spiffy by the time I get visitors!!

Anyway, even though I am still waiting for my furniture and there’s painting gear in some of the rooms, and it’s not totally clean yet, I spent a great first night in my new apartment. Yes, my apartment – yay! Laid on my air mattress and watched “History of the World Part I” on DVD. Ate a Subway tuna sub and drank some beer.

Such a great feeling. I can finally stretch out again between my own four walls! I almost forgot how nice it is to have your own address, since I’ve been floating around the planet for the past year and a half… I’m back on the road to being a normal person again. (Can you believe it?)

Codrescu

2006-09-01T19:11:00.000-05:00

It's my last official day off, the final hours of my "vacation" in New Orleans before I start work next week. Quite fitting, then, that I'd be suffering from a day-long hangover from last night's partying with the writers.

Went to a literary event/poetry reading/gathering of the local book celebrities in the French Quarter. Dingy bar, boiled sausages, home-made birthday cake, massage chair, and of course lots of beer. Here's details on the event:

http://www.17poets.com/wst_page8.html

Walked right up to Andrei Codrescu, started speaking Romanian to him, watched him blink twice before answering back, then we chatted in Romanian for a few minutes before he said "De unde esti?" (Where are you from?). "California!" I said. He had no idea I was American - he either thought my accent was that good, or he had already had a few too many drinks. We laughed and went on in Romanian, eventually of course ending up talking about the special foods we missed from there (tomatoes to die for!, fantastic eggplant salad, plus the best salty goat cheese ever...).

Apropos to the event, we reminisced about the sweet taste of coliva, a Romanian honey and nut dessert that is only served at funerals. It was one of my favorite foods while I was in the Peace Corps, a delicious, crunchey, gooey dish. However, it's not something you can request someone make for you, because it's bad luck to eat it unless someone has died. This puts you in the perverse position of looking forward to a funeral, when you can taste your favorite dish. I suppose the idea is that you'll appreciate the sweetness of life even while mourning your loved ones' crossing over into death.

After Codrescu did his beautiful and evocative reading in front of the group (again, on the subject of life and death, a la post-Katrina New Orleans), I asked him how he is able to use the English language so well when he was born speaking Romanian. In Romanian he replied, "I was bestowed with polyglotism." "Me too!" was my answer. Much drinking ensued, whereupon the languages became more fluid, while my date and Codrescu's wife looked on suspiciously.

Here's his official website:
http://codrescu.com/

Here's the literary journal he edits:
http://www.corpse.org/

Here's one of his many NPR commentaries on New Orleans after Katrina:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4826792

P.S. In case you had any doubts (and shame on you if you did!), I have no intention of trying to steal Codrescu (or any man) from his wife. Big no-no in karma-land. I was just digging speaking Romanian, and of course I had to get him to sign his book for me :)

chutzpah, AKA cojones

2006-08-29T16:46:00.000-05:00

I was juggling job offers and potential apartment leases, waiting for the written offer from Cool Job Inc. while I held off Mr. Landlord at Dream Apartment. This lasted for a few days while I "kept my options open" and hoped that I could actually secure some kind of income before signing a lease on a new place...

Lo and behold, on the last day I needed to give the landlord my final answer, the job I wanted came through! Woo hoo!

Now I'm on my way to starting with a new secular disaster recovery organization in New Orleans (more on that later), AND I'll be moving into a sweet pad Uptown.

Uptown, between Magazine Street and St. Charles Avenue, parallel to the Mississippi River, is also known as the "Isle of Denial", because life appears almost normal in this narrow strip of the city that didn't flood. I'll be closer to the universities than the French Quarter. My neighborhood is quiet and family-friendly, and near lots of cool bars, restaurants, shops, drug stores, yoga studios, book stores, parks, cafes, grocery stores, etc.

My apartment is what's known as a "shotgun", meaning if you stood on the street and opened all the doors, they would line up and you could shoot a gun straight through toward the backyard. Front to back, it's got a front porch with shutters and a rocking chair, a front room, a living room, a huge kitchen, a cute bathroom, a bedroom and a small backyard. It has high ceilings, hardwood floors throughout most of the place, and black and white checked tiles in the kitchen.

Even after I get my stuff out of storage in DC and unpack everything, I won't be anywhere near filling the place with furniture! Ah, well, one hurdle at a time... I am excited about decorating it, though, and pulling all my photography and art out of boxes.

August 29th is, in case you've been hiding on a rock and haven't heard in the media, the 1-year anniversary of Katrina. How fitting for me that instead of being overcome with sadness and despair on a day like today, I'm filled with hope about all the great new things that are afoot in my life, in this reborn city.

rambling and roaming in NOLA

2006-08-24T16:23:00.000-05:00

Despite the lack of structure and seeming lack of direction in my life at the moment, it's not all doom and gloom. I'm enjoying New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA), by doing what the city is most famous for: loafing.

Watching bad TV, searching for the best burrito in town, riding a friend's bike down quiet leafy streets past the glorious mansions Uptown, luring my friends into 3PM margaritas, sneaking into the Marriott pool as if I belong, renting movies, reading novels, searching for Andrei Codrescu (the NPR correspondent and novelist, who was born in Romania and who supposedly hangs out at Molly's bar in the French Quarter), sampling the greatest Cajun and Creole cuisine at local eateries, checking out Kermit Ruffins on trumpet at the Boom Boom Room on Frenchman Street, long hot baths in my (free!) hotel room, wine and cheese at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art...

I'm also, of course, deep into my job search, and also looking for my dream apartment. I have a few good leads and some irons in the fire, and thankfully some friends down here who help me get by and refer me to good opportunities. Will update y'all when there's news.

(How do you like that "y'all"? I'm learning, see?)

b-day

2006-07-26T19:56:00.000-05:00

My birthday was last week... Took the day off so I could re-coup some of the weekend days I've been working, and treat myself to some nice birthday self-indulgence. Started off with a massage and pedicure, then moved on to a swim at my friend's place in the French Quarter, followed by cocktails and appetizers, more drinks and craziness on Bourbon Street, I think another swim, and on and on until the wee hours of the morning.

...Took me quite a few days to recover, which I guess is fitting, considering my advanced age nowadays (35!).

Bastille Day

2006-07-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

July 14th began at the counter of a diner in Alexandria, Louisiana, a country town with corn fields and baseball diamonds and minimalls some three hours northwest of the Big Easy. The summer humidity rose steadily in the early morning hours as I perused the greased menu. The waitresses scuffled past while calling out to the regular customers and the cook.

The man on my right, eating bacon and grits and wearing a worn baseball cap, brought me up to speed on the topic of the day. "We were just conversing about daw-ags."

"I'm sorry?" I looked at him with a puzzled expression.

"Daw-ags," he repeated. I gave him a blank look.

"Daw-ags."

Finally it dawned on me that the topic of conversation, rendered in two syllables according to Louisiana-speak, was dogs.

Much later that evening, I was sampling New Zealand sauvignon blanc, cumquat-grilled chicken skewers and avocado soup at a benefit function in New Orleans. The room was electric with socialites' anticipation of the arrival of the main event: The Sexiest Man Alive.

Moments later I was shaking the hand of Brad Pitt himself, sharing a few nervous words with him about the rehabiliation of the city. Gulp.

Then it was on to a Bastille Day celebration in the French Quarter, sponsored by the French Consulate. A rowdy Cajun band fiddled and toe-tapped in front of throbbing and sweating couples. The wooden dancefloor and the gallery above, ringed with twinkling lights, were seeped in the revelry and music of 150 years of socialites and celebrities and debutantes and country boys and fiddlers.

boppin' around

2006-07-11T22:17:00.000-05:00

Been out of touch for a while... Lots going on.

Got in a minor car accident a few weeks ago. I was rear-ended while I was sitting in traffic in Gulfport. The damage to the vehicle was minor, but I got some whiplash. When I went to the doctor to have it checked out, he said I was OK, just sore. I'll go for some follow-up next week.

This happened right before my vacation (bummer!), and my prescription pain pills / muscle relaxers turned my first few Cali days into a zone-out fest. When I finally stopped taking the pills, I was able to enjoy a relaxed time full of pool, jacuzzi, beach, massages, mudbaths, DVDs, sleeping, Mexican food, craziness, cocktails, friends and gossip.

Now I'm back in the Gulf and ramping back up to my worklife, but trying to take care of my back.

the "village"

2006-06-22T16:01:00.000-05:00

Here's what the "pods" look like where the volunteers stay. We have six of these sites ("villages") across the Gulf. We pipe in AC in the summer, and heating in the winter. There's port-a-potties, portable showers, and an outdoor kitchen structure.

Of course I stay in my chic trailer, with toilet, shower, AC, heat, cable TV, internet and full kitchen :)

Birmingham

2006-06-18T00:42:00.000-05:00

This weekend I'm at a big church convention in Birmingham, AL. Ha ha, can you picture it? I'm playing Vanna White at a booth where we have a tent set up like the ones our volunteers sleep in down in Mississippi and Louisiana. Answer questions, recruit volunteers, meet and greet, catch up with my boss...

Last week in New Orleans I had another brush with fame: met Harry Anderson (from "Night Court") at the club/bar where he does his standup routine in the French Quarter. Didn't actually make it to the performance, just the bar. Harrry's remark to me: "That is a lovely dress. And you wear it well!" What can I say? After a week of running around grungy in shorts and flip-flops, the old girl cleans up well ;)

Da Mayor

2006-06-12T10:47:00.000-05:00

Spent the weekend in N'awlins with my buddy Tom, another escapee from Disasterland... We hung out in the French Quarter, listened to reggae and jazz, went to fancy restaurants, ate snow cones, paid a visit to the voodoo queen Marie Leveaux at the cemetery, drank lemon drops, shopped on Magazine Street, read the New York Times, swam in a pool, and generally chilled.

Ran into Da Mayor at a Medditerranean restaurant on Sunday :)

Also sampled some Cajun cooking Satruday night: alligator cheesecake and fried rabbit.

Now I can dive back into my stressful workweek, but at least I'm refreshed!

beachtime in Gulfport

2006-06-05T22:43:00.000-05:00

Sitting on the white sand on a stretch of beach that's been cleared of storm debris by the city. Looking out at the Gulf of Mexico, bits of debris and tree trunks and metal shards poking out of the water. The signs say "Danger: Do Not Enter Water", but families are wading in the warm gulf anyway, enjoying the hot Sunday sun, hazardous waste and sharp objects be damned.

I'm listening to my 80's mix on the i-Pod, mostly to drown out the ranchero music that the Mexicans in the parking lot are blasting out of their El Dorado. My work phone rings but I move not a muscle. Today is my day - or at least a few hours of it - to do nothing.

Next thing I know, over strolls Jimmy Redneck with two cans of Bud. "Would you like a cold beer, ma'am?" "Sure," I say. What else do I have to do for the next few hours? He wouldn't be bad-looking, if he weren't so obviously Republican.

Jimmy Redneck has a shredded Confederate flag tattooed on his right arm, and another tattoo of a Chinese symbol on his chest. I ask him what the Chinese one means. "Aw, that ain't nothin' nice," he laughs. I press him on the matter, and he offers, "I just don't really care for people who think different than I do." Which is a candid but euphemistic way of admitting one's racism, I suppose.

Jimmy's work buddies are out splashing in the water, a couple of skinny pimply things who are supposedly 18. Jimmy says he's the big boss man at a construction site and these boys are his apprentices. When they gangle over with their awkward pale limbs and start talking to us, I can hardly understand what they are saying. Sounds like maybe an Alabama accent, but possibly a speech impediment thrown in there, or slight mental retardation? Maybe just social shyness? I want so desperately not to stereotype them as country yokels, but they are making it difficult: When they scurry over to the truck to grab Jimmy more beer, Jimmy tells me the blond boy was beaten by his father every day of his childhood after the man found out he wasn't the boy's father. The brown-haired one can't utter half a sentence without a torrent of profanity. Another colleague that appears, an older one with a beer belly, shakes my hand and offers a smile with half his teeth missing. (You think I am making this up??)

Jimmy Redneck isn't just red around the neck. He's starting to burn over most of his back and shoulders, but, as one of the boys puts it, "thunthcreen ith for puthieth". I have another beer and offer some of my sunscreen anyway. I am entertained, to say the least.

Jimmy eyes the Mexicans who are standing by the water and says he'll kick their asses if they don't stop staring at me, and why don't they all just fucking go home anyway? "Your family came from somewhere else once, too, you know?" I remind him. "And we invited them here to work on the recovery." Jimmy knows where this conversation is headed - If he wants to keep talking to bikini girl on the beach, he knows enough to stop his racist rant for the time being, so he does his best to play nice.

Now he's starting with how much money he's making doing construction down here, and it's so much money he doesn't know what to do with it. When he finds out that I'm working for a charity organization, he laughs, realizing how far off the mark he is, trying to impress me with his fat bank account.

Finally, after my Bud gets warm, I say goodbye to my beach buddies, thinking to myself, "This stuff is better than TV."

children's drawings at a local community center

2006-06-05T22:23:00.000-05:00

" Lightning and Rain

the only house that

survived."

"Hurricane Katrina"

"There was water all around the houses in Pearlington, Mississippi"

my roommate Harvey

2006-06-05T21:57:00.000-05:00

Folks

2006-05-31T21:37:00.000-05:00

Folks down here have a funny way of just coming up to you and talking to you, like they were introduced to you a long time ago, but you just forgot. They start in on their life stories, or pick up where they think they left off the last time they saw you, even though you've never seen them before in your life.

A woman in a cafe in New Orleans came up to me while I was working on my laptop, enjoying the atmosphere and the music of the quiet afternoon. She was all frizzy hair and flappy biceps as she began, "Oh, good, someone who uses a computer. Do you mind if I ask you a question?" She then sat down across from me at the table, lit a hand-rolled cigarette and peppered me with questions about printing graphics files, about memory and hard-drive space, about her favorite online game involving virtual worlds and power medallions and warriors. "You really must play this game if you've never done it. It challenges parts of your brain that you never knew you could flex." She was an artist, over 60, with red-tinged hair blue-tinted contact lenses. I nodded and let her continue, not really sure whether I would rather be working or entertained by this extravagant stranger. She lived around the corner in the French Quarter, had come from New York many years ago, and was full of insights about life, about men, about this simulated playspace that took up so much of her computing time every day. Finally she scampered off, seeing that I did in fact have real files and serious adult stuff to take care of, and after she realized I wasn't going to join her in a computer game. Of course, I couldn't go back to working at that point, and ordered a Heineken.

A few days later, at Dot's Diner, which is a humble south Louisiana chain that serves the most amazing corn and crab chowder, I'm sitting at the counter watching the fry-cook prepare the next cholesterol-laden steak and listening to the gambling machines chime in the corner. Along comes a skinny pink-skinned farmer in overalls, must have been at least 70, yellow teeth, baseball cap grimy and comfortable looking, and he sits down next to me at the counter. "Where ya been, sweetheart? I ain't seen you 'round here for some time." I shrug and say, "How ya doin'?" He continues, "You know they ain't gettin' that much corn this yur, an' I been sayin' how it's gonna be a tough one, that farm there. Things ain't mfrfm mnya gtchn. I don't know where ya been, doll? Sometimes those thar folks is mumble mumble mmm mumble, like I said." "Yup," is all I can say, with a smile on my face, as I look to the waitstaff for any cues. They sorta look away, then at each other. He takes my hand. "You should try the plant. They got jobs down there, and good 'uns, I hear. You won't have no trouble finding a job there." I answer, "Oh, yeah?"

their story

2006-05-30T17:32:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do, the things I'm managing, the moving parts I'm coordinating, and I think "Oh, man, how am I going to wade through all this?"

Then I have days like today, that remind me IT'S NOT ABOUT ME. I am doing this for the families who are struggling with the aftermath of Katrina and trying to put their lives together, piece by piece, day by day. No, I'm not trying to lay on the martyr complex or any stupid crap like that - I guess what I'm trying to express is that sometimes I get so thick into the administrative BS and remove myself too far from the stories of the people, but I only feel good again about what I'm doing when I meet them, talk to them, hear what they have to say.

Case in point: Family X, a husband and wife (both white), retired from their successful careers in California to buy a plot of land in Mississippi. They wanted to be closer to their grandkids, and spend the afternoons fishing in the bayou and lake that ran alongside their property. The house was a 100-year old hunting lodge, which they lovingly restored using their retirement fund. New appliances, climate control system, new siding, fresh paint, new finish on the wood floors, a pool with a swing for the grandkids to launch themselves into the water, ferns growing on the enclosed wrap-around porch upstairs, leather couches, fine rugs, bookshelves overflowing with a lifetime's collection of books, garage with 3 vintage cars the husband enjoyed working on. In August, 2005, the last of the new touches - claw-foot bathtub, low-flush toilet, state of the art dishwasher - were sitting in the workshop ready to be installed.

When the storm came, the family took their dog into the "safe room", a windowless section of the house the first floor. They heard trees crashing into the roof, windows breaking, gas tanks exploding. Outside, the neighborhood was flooded five feet high, and they were now separated from their neighbor's house across the street by a rushing river. When they determined that rainwater was coming into the house through the hole in the kitchen annex roof, they gathered up some things and made for the stairs. Just as quickly, the water began to rise inside the house. It rushed in and virtually chased them upstairs, rising with their feet as they ran to the second floor.

Now in their bedroom upstairs, they watched the water rise and saw their furniture float down the hallway and outside. The water lapped at the boxspring of the bed as they huddled together, man, wife and dog, on the mattress. It rose no further. Finally, about five hours later, the water that had rushed into their community drained out. They emerged from their home to find trees snapped and lying akimbo across their property, all their furniture destroyed, every piece of glass in the house shattered, their new appliances ruined, the cars wrecked, the books floated away, and carcasses of wild animals strewn everywhere. Their living room floor was covered with petroleum-slick mud, writhing with fish and snakes.

For several days, they had no information from the outside world about the extent of Katrina's damage, about when help might arrive to their town, which was cut off from the main highway by downed trees. A friend parked on the highway, walked in past the destroyed town, found the family in their ruined house, and led them away. The wife was unable to speak - she only mumbled as her husband threw a few of their belongings into a sack and they walked north. They spent the next two months with this friend, in a town a few hours away, unable to re-enter their town or their home and assess the damage.

After the roads cleared and they were able to drive home for a look, they knew what they were looking at: everything except the foundation and the frame were totally destroyed. Their belongings were totally lost. The insurance claim came back: denied. After insuring their home in California for over 30 years with one insurance company, they had to switch to a new company when they moved to Mississippi because the old company wouldn't cover them. The new company and the old company both gave them nothing. Zero. FEMA gave them nothing. Red Cross gave them nothing.

Now this retired, educated couple, who had put their whole life savings into their dream house on the bayou, were reduced to accepting free groceries at the local recovery center while they put the remainder of their savings into repairing the house - once again. They are both in their sixties, and they work all day every day on this restoration project. Soon, they will both have to look for jobs and go back to work again.

How do they find the strength to go on? My organization sends them 10-20 volunteers every day to help work on the house.

(That, and the Zoloft.)

Long Beach, Mississippi

2006-05-28T21:12:00.000-05:00

Beachfront mansions

Houma, Louisiana

2006-05-28T20:33:00.000-05:00

Grand Opening of our bayou site!

Beulah with Jambalaya

Cajun band

Chapel by the Sea

2006-05-24T22:11:00.000-05:00

Last month I went to a conference in Fort Myers, Florida, where we did a "case study" about Hurricane Charley that hit the Gulf Coast of Florida in 2004. It was hosted by a Presbyterian church called "Chapel by the Sea" on Sanibel Island, a sliver of beach that took the brunt of the storm's force.

People were ordered to evacuate the island a few days before Charley touched down. The hurricane knocked out most of the structures on the island - hotels, condos, stores - and nearly destroyed the church. The stained glass window was shattered and the chapel was knee-deep in sand. Leaders of the church coordinated with FEMA and the Red Cross, checked up on members of the community that were elderly or without family, and hosted the newly homeless in their auditorium when people were allowed back on the island.

They collected the pieces from the stained glass window, hired a local artist to make dolphin pendants from the colored glass, and sold the pieces online to raise money to rebuild the church. The island is coming back, being rebuilt, and the church is still feeding people who don't have homes or jobs.

Of course, after the conference, I got in a few days' tanning on the white sand beaches :)

Going to Pensacola, FL, next month for another "case study". Hopefully I'll get to go diving, too.

funny stuff about my job

2006-05-23T21:29:00.000-05:00

My job consists of managing 6 "volunteer villages" spread across a 250-mile-wide area in the Gulf (plus hiring and supervising the managers of those sites, maintaining the relationships with the local communities and churches across the country, developing future plans, writing and implementing policies and procedures, going to recovery conferences, making sure the building is going according to specification, blah blah blah, etc.). Volunteers who work on rebuilding homes stay at our sites, which are basically upscale campsites.

...Apparently, when I'm not at work, I'm still thinking about work: when I was at Coachella, I looked at the campsite and said "Oh, they don't have enough showers for 50,000 people," and "How many times a day does the truck come by to suck out the port-a-potties?", and "Why don't they have hand sanitizer available?" When I was at Jazzfest, I had port-a-pottie envy when I saw a trailer that was equipped with toilets and sinks and mirrors. ("Wonder how much those cost?")

Trailer life is going well for me so far. Since I've got 2 identical trailers (one in Mississippi and one in Louisiana), with identical cheesy curtains and bedspread, sometimes I wake up and it takes me a few seconds to figure out what state I'm in. At first I could tell by whether my stuffed hippo Harvey was in the room with me, but since he didn't like being left behind while I was gone, I had to bring him back and forth, so now I really can't tell.

Accidentally left the hatch above my bed open one day when it rained, and my sheets and mattress got soggy :(

Me and some of my Mississippi co-workers had a late night romp in the supply warehouse, where we had forklift races and wrestled on 30-foot high piles of carpet samples.

Lots of people in the South pronounce hurricane "hair-i-cane"... What gives?

more pix

2006-05-18T21:59:00.000-05:00

shrimp sashimi - fresh off the boat
Hurricane Camille

Coachella

Roc

2006-05-15T20:35:00.000-05:00

Disaster planning and recovery meeting, bayou country, southwest Louisiana:

Miss Ellie, the obese woman in a motorized wheelchair, wraps herself in a plaid blanket and opens the meeting with a prayer, and later wheels over to the corner to talk "in private" every time her cell phone rings.

Paula, the chair of the meeting, a chainsmoking overworked control freak, has a lot to say, but doesn't seem to have an agenda for the afternoon, as the topics veer from FEMA to elevation levels for homes to evacuation centers to resources available for disabled residents to food distribution.

Reverend Bob bats down the idea of a phone tree during a disaster, saying, "I sure as hell will be outta here, so it's going to be pretty damn useless to have my name on that list if I'm evacuated to Tennessee."

I sit there typing out email on my Blackberry to my colleague sitting next to me ("It appears there's no agenda... Ugh!") as the meeting gets boring, but keep an eye on who's there so I can pass out my business card at the appropriate time.

Julie, the smartly-dressed and made-up young assistant for the committee, sits patiently with crossed legs dangling her high-heeled shoe at the end of her toe, saying nothing.

Janelle, the only African American in the room, keeps getting up for more soda in the back of the room, and I can't figure out what organization she works with.

Marcel, with a ruddy face and crisp grey business suit, stresses the need to encourage the public to evacuate in the case of emergency - "Y'all weren't there with me in the boat in New Orleans, paddling past bodies floating in the water. It's irresponsible not to tell people to leave. We will have blood on our hands." Marcel is breaking up, his composure nearly crumbling under the weight of his memories of Katrina.

Roc, an 80-something son of the land, still living in his shack on the bayou, shoots back angrily, "That ain't nothin'! I seen thousands of bodies piled up during the war. Ain't nobody can't tell me I gotta leave my home. I sat out lots o' hurricanes, and I got an ax so I can bust outta my attic if I need to."

At this, the meeting grumbles and moans as Paula and Miss Ellie shake their heads and try to regain order.

some recent pix

2006-05-14T23:45:00.000-05:00

Jazzfest

2006-05-10T18:46:00.000-05:00

Another weekend of music and sweating amidst masses of human beings in the sun. My mom came out to New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival last weekend, which was actually the second weekend of the festival. The first weekend, for some reason, had most of the major acts (Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Dave Matthews, Elvis Costello, Herbie Hancock, Dr. John), but I was in California, so oh well. Our weekend had some big acts (Keith Urban, Lionel Ritchie, Jimmy Buffet, The Radiators, Irma Thomas), but Fats Domino was too sick to perform.

Overall, though, it was a great time. Three days of festival-going is a little much, even for this die-hard music fan. I started to get claustrophobic towards the end, and didn't want to wait in the long lines for food.

Anyway, my mom and her friend Patti stayed at a hotel in the French Quarter where they could walk to the galleries and cafes and soak in the architecture. We took a bus to the festival every afternoon, where we wandered around from stage to stage and food booth to food booth. I saw jazz, gospel, rock, folk, zydeco, pop, country, soul, and even a Native American pow-wow. The food was utterly amazing, with flavors so unique and rich that you can't get them anywhere else in the country. Crawfish this, gumbo that, shrimp something, etouffe, roumelade, catfish, artichoke, cream, yum yum yum. Making me hungry all over again...

I ran into some of my Peace Corps friends that I worked with in the fall, and I hung out with them for a little while, and saw some of my PDA friends who had come over from Mississippi. The only time it rained, I saw the black clouds on their way to the fairground before they arrived, and I pulled my mom and Patti into the Gospel tent. I've been really getting into Gospel on the long drives from Mississippi to Louisiana - it's impossible not to move at least one part of your body while you're listening to it. So we were in the Gospel tent and I was clapping, rocking, shaking my head, dancing, smiling, totally into it, and it just dumped down rain outside on the rest of the festival-goers for a full half hour. We stayed dry (although it was mighty humid inside the tent!), so we were joking that Jesus sheltered us from the storm!

Me and my 6 PDA friends took out my mom and Patti in the French Quarter, and my mom was sipping on those tasty tropical drinks getting hammered. So so so funny! I babysat her as we walked amidst the crowds on Bourbon Street, then I bought more drinks for everyone: "hand grenades", which come in long green plastic tubes with a hand grenade shape at the bottom. I have no idea what kind of alcohol was in them, but we were all pretty happy by the end of the evening. I think I even got pulled on stage with a fiddle player to play the washboard.

Next year I'm only doing 2 days of the festival, and I'm going VIP, so I can get a seat in the bleachers and not have to sit in the mud :(

Coachella

2006-05-03T20:15:00.000-05:00

Still recovering from a very full and very exhausting and very very fun weekend at the Coachella Music Festival in the desert in California. Went with Jason, the sweetie with a camper van in San Diego, and it was just the escape I needed from Katrina-zone! The weather was hot-hot-hot, and over 60,000 people crammed onto the polo fields in Indo (near Palm Springs) to listen to over 80 bands on 6 stages for 2 days. Can we say MADONNA, ladies and gentlemen?? She rocks pretty hard for a 50-year old!! Also saw Depeche Mode, Massive Attack, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Amidou & Marian , Franz Ferdinand, Scissor Sisters, My Morning Jacket and tons of others - and there were other bands I missed because there were just too many damn shows going on at once. The sounds swirled around the festival as we wandered and watched the interesting and half-naked people who were also enjoying the weekend.

The campsite was pretty crowded with tents, and we decided to stay in the camper van in the parking lot instead - which was definitely a good call, considering the noise and heat at the campsite. The line for the showers was way too long, so - like a trooper - I took a spongebath inside the van. Jason's gold-star-moment was washing my hair with bottled water as I hung my head out the side of the van, the soapy water pooling by the tires. What a man.

Guess I'm the only person who's insane enough to take a vacation from a trailer to camp in a van. Ha ha.

pix!

2006-04-21T16:50:00.000-05:00

"Stella!" Screaming contest

Burning Man party

The Indonesians with a Katrina survivor

The synagogue in New Orleans - notice the waterline on the window
the main dining hall

me with the Indonesians

honky tonk

2006-04-11T11:20:00.000-05:00

Rocky is a tall drink of water from Texas, a 21-year-old construction worker who says “Ma’am” and “please”, who shyly moves his barstool closer to yours at the Mexican cantina while sipping on his Dos Equis and making small talk. He wants to come out to the honky-tonk bar you’ll be meeting your friends at later, but he’s embarrassed to come because he’s wearing his tennis shoes instead of his cowboy boots.

The parking lot for the Stagecoach Lounge looks like a mega-truck sales lot. Inside, a band plays country while couples glide around the dance floor, cowboy hats boppin’ and cigarettes burnin’. You join the line dancing, learning the steps to scoot and shuffle in unison with a couple dozen other pairs of tight jeans and lipstick smiles. Kathryn from Connecticut is turning 23 today, so everyone is buying her drinks, making her dance and snapping photos of her attempting to whistle a cat-call.

Billy is a grizzled old self-described redneck, and he makes sure you know you’re invited anytime for barbecued ribs out behind his trailer, way out in the Mississippi countryside. Evan sits with downcast eyes in silence at the next table for an hour or so before he gets up the nerve to bring you a rose in a plastic wrapper and say hi. David, with a handlebar mustache and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, is the one the busboys at the Mexican place warned you about, and you politely decline his offer of a beer.

In the bathroom, the women are discussing who has cancer (three of them) and what kind (lung, breast, brain) and who has lost some hair and how they’re handling chemo. There’s no paper towels.

Rocky doesn’t show. Which is probably for the best, really.

Lache pas

2006-04-05T20:13:00.000-05:00

There's some great Cajun music on the radio out in Acadian country (Acadienne, i.e., Cajun), which is southwest Louisiana. Lots of the music is in French, accompanied by rollicking accordion and banjo. There's a French saying here: "Lache pas", which translates roughly into "Don't give up", or "Don't let go", or "Don't lose touch". It's a phrase heard often in these days of diaspora and renewal.

Met a family in Mississippi the other night who live across the street from one of our camps. A mother and daughter, about 80 and 50 years old, both with smooth charcoal-colored skin and gray hair. They laughed when I told them my name - "Like the hurricane?" everyone always says down here. Camille's not easily forgotten. These women told me their home took in 30 feet of water during the flooding after Katrina, and the house next door simply floated to the other side of the street. The mother said to me, "I can see in the mirror that I've aged since the storm. I don't look so good no more."

They also told me that they used to live in a small town across Highway 10, until NASA came 30 years ago to build Stennis Space Center and bought out the mortgages of everyone in that town, and four nearby towns. "Hi, we're your friendly government. Here's some money, now leave." I asked the 80-year old how long her family had lived in that little town, and she said, "Five generations."

Went to the Tennesse Williams Festival in New Orleans last weekend. They had a "Stellaaaa!!!" Screaming Contest in Jackson Square, which was won by a man who improvised the line by screaming "FEMAAAA!!!" The crowd was won over, however, by a 6-year old boy in Marlon Brando jeans and wife-beater and greased hair who delivered the convincingly line on one knee, calling out to the Stella stand-in on the balcony above.

Meeting a lot of FEMA people (some of my former colleagues from last fall among them). They're getting very sweet deals: fat salaries, hotel suites, per diems, etc. Only problem is, everyone down here hates the people who wear FEMA shirts. On the other hand, they come up to me when I'm walking around and say, "Thank you for being here. Volunteers from your organization came to my house and fixed my roof. I don't know what we would have done without you." Yes, I did think about working for FEMA, but this is much more rewarding and impactful, and I can be proud of what I'm doing.

Had the chance to spend some time with the Indonesians who came to visit. They were totally shocked to hear me introduce myself to them in Indonesian, and their eyes lit up when I told them I had been in Indonesia for most of last year working on tsunami relief. Some of them work on tsunami relief projects themselves, and some are actually survivors of the tsunami. One woman lost her house, her mother, and her foot, but she now has a prosthetic foot and was working alongside the American volunteers rebuilding a blind man's house in Mississippi. The Indonesians were very interested in the business of running a rehabilitation organization like ours, and wanted me to give them a mini-lecture on "The Essentials of Project Management". Somehow I came up with something to say (People + Resources + Time = Meeting Goals, or something like that), and they seemed to be impressed with that.

Finally finally finally got to chill out in my favorite coffee shop on Magazine Street in New Orleans again - writing, people-watching, drinking tea, reading the New York Times.

Burning Man

2006-03-30T00:34:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are familiar with Burning Man, you might not be entirely surprised by the fact that some Burning Man regulars showed up in the Katrina aftermath to set up shop. For those of you who aren't familiar with Burning Man: it's basically a weeklong festival in the desert where art, music, sunburns, drugs, camping, and tens of thousands of people converge. They're survivalists, explorers of psychic realms, ex-hippies and hippie-wanna-bes.

Their camp in Mississippi happens to be right next door to a PDA camp in Mississippi.

Imagine our neatly-aligned blue and white plastic tents, rows of port-a-potties, worker bees running about in blue Presbyterian Disaster Assistance shirts, cell phones, white trucks, a well-organized kitchen, work orders lined up on clipboards.

Next door you have a mishmash of army tents, parachute-enclosed dwellings, temporary wooden huts, mud-covered VW vans, trance music flowing out of 5-foot high speakers, tattooed and pierced people decorating signs with colorful designs, lush sofas draped with boas resting in the sand.

Now imagine me approaching the Burning Man camp in a neighborly way, wearing my dorky uniform of blue shirt and khakis, and the disdain with which I am treated as I introduce myself and try to gather information about what type of projects the Burning Man team has been working on in this tiny town that the media forgot. Never have I felt more uncool. To them, I was "the Man". Only when I threw down the California references, mentioned that I used to live in San Francisco, said I had been to some Burning Man parties, did they even pretend to want to talk to me.

They ended up inviting me to their goodbye party, where they danced around a firepit and burned works of improvised art that were created with items salvaged from destroyed homes. Unfortunately, someone shot off a flare and started a minor forest fire. Total buzzkill.

from the South Mississippi Sun Herald

2006-03-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

Posted on Fri, Mar. 24, 2006
Tsunami survivors coming
Nine Indonesians to share expertise

By KAT BERGERON
SUN HERALD

D'IBERVILLE - Nine Indonesian survivors and recovery experts from the December 2004 Asian tsunami are coming to South Mississippi, particularly D'Iberville and Pearlington.

Considered one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history, the tsunami claimed an estimated 230,000 lives and wrecked many waterfront communities.

The Indonesians are coming to help with Hurricane Katrina recovery, to share their knowledge and to learn more for when they return to a region still piecing together tsunami-struck communities.

Dr. Sari Mutia Timu, a general practitioner who was one of the first doctors in Banda Aceh after the tsunami, will be among them. So will survivor Muhammad Nazif, an Acehnese man who now oversees the credit union and small farming in his village.

"These nine from Indonesia will have a better level of what's happened here than volunteers who come from New England or elsewhere in the U.S. who haven't experienced the same level of magnitude, even though they may not speak the same language or have the same cultural background," said Kathryn Renton, manager of the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Volunteer Village in D'Iberville.

The nine Indonesians will stay at the Volunteer Village, helping out at worksites and talking with hurricane survivors as well as recovery agencies and volunteers. They will also visit Pearlington, a hard-hit community in Pearl River County, as part of their 2½-week working tour of U.S. sites served by PDA.

Volunteer Village, open since September, houses and organizes more than 90 volunteers each week as a part of PDA, headquartered in Louisville, Ky. It is one of six PDA villages in Mississippi to help with Katrina recovery and works closely with a D'Iberville citizens' group formed to help coordinate that city's recovery.

"The nine Indonesians are active in their regional disaster-response organizations and have incredible survivor stories," Renton said. "It is everyone's first trip to the U.S., and will be a rich cultural exchange in every way, based on mutual experiences of loss and devastation by natural catastrophe."

On Thursday they left Indonesia on the mission trip organized by Presbyterian Church-USA, and will arrive in D'Iberville on Sunday from Mobile. Their schedule includes an outdoor dinner Thursday with Katrina survivors at a Biloxi park in a demolished neighborhood.

The Indonesians will remain at the volunteer village on Lamey Bridge Road through March 30.

About the village
What and Where: Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Volunteer Village, called Camp New Hope, is located at 11322 Lamey Bridge Road, D'Iberville.

Indonesian visit: Nine survivors/recovery experts will visit to learn and share their own expertise from the Asian tsunami. They will be assigned to recovery worksites and are scheduled to meet with Katrina survivors and recovery experts.

Details: 228-224-0609

the Jews

2006-03-24T23:53:00.000-05:00

The Jewish students that are here are very different from the Christian groups that have been coming. For one thing, their religious services (held in our "circus" tent) are a lot more raucous with a lot more clapping and loud singing in a foreign language. The Presbyterian staff aren't used to that, and they watched the first Hillel group's services in wide-eyed shock.

Shower time is different for the Jewish students, too: The showers for the volunteers are in an improvised wooden enclosure, but basically outside. We post hours for women, and hours for men, to use the showers. Hillel groups ignore these rules and gather together - men and women - in their towels in front of the showers, which happen to be in front of the church. I can't imagine what the Mississippi folk must be thinking as they drive down the road and see a bunch of half-naked Jews gathered outside a church throwing a football and brushing their teeth. (What's the Southern equivalent of "oy gevalt"?)

I went with the students this week on a tour of some Jewish points of interest in New Orleans. We visited a synagogue in Lakeview that had eight feet of water inside after the storm. You could see the waterline on all the interior walls that were left standing, but above were beautiful stained glass windows fully intact. The Torah and all the religious texts were reduced to sludge by the water, and the few remaining members of the congregation had to bury them in a Jewish cemetery, according to custom.

In the history lecture we got along with the tour, we found out that the French, the Spanish and the Americans had all tried to pass laws keeping the Jews out of New Orleans, but they all found it unenforceable because the trade and skills the Jews brought were essential to the economic livelihood of the city. (A similar thing happened in La Jolla fifty years ago when they tried to ban Jews from owning property - then along came UCSD and the need for professors.)

interesting times

2006-03-19T22:33:00.000-05:00

Gulfport, MS

the church wall is gone but the balcony is still there

all that's left of someone's beachfront home

Had some interesting times lately. Examples:

Watched a rehearsal performance of the reunited Gulf Coast Symphony with a 70-year old man who lost his home in the storm
Learned that the proportion of men named Bubba is much greater here than in other parts of the country
Collected several dozen green beads around my neck at the St. Patrick's Day Parade in downtown Biloxi
Hosted 150 Hillel students (a nation-wide Jewish college group) at our camp in Gulfport, complete with kosher food and celebrations in Hebrew for Purim (...look it up!)
Went to Baton Rouge to meet with a one-legged good ol' boy minister and a butch dyke who offered to teach me to play golf
Gave a speech to a church group about "God giveth, God taketh away", spirit of renewal, let the good times roll, etc.
Hosted a BBQ at my trailer for the staff, featuring chicken sausages boiled in beer
Put 1300 miles on my new truck in two weeks
Became adept at taking 4-minute showers, as my hot water heater only holds 6 gallons of water
Threw a 300-lb. white Islamic woman off our property after she insulted me (her exact words: "I don't have to speak to anyone not equal to my status, and you are not equal to my status" - my response: "Honey, as long as you're on MY property, you WILL show me respect.")
Endured the false friendliness of a Louisiana pastor who was complaining to people behind my back about why the Presbyterians had to hire a Jew for the job (my boss's response: "She outclassed all the competition")
Bought $40 worth of fresh and pickled straight-off-the-farm produce at a roadside stand from a leather-faced gentleman in a checked shirt named Dean (anyone know what to do with pickled eggs?)
Introduced myself to Mr. Sam Walton and his bizarre breed of shoppers
Saw a very bad movie with Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker, where all I could think about was why they don't chop off that mole on her chin
Had to explain to a contractor why it was not OK to use our volunteers on his projects for personal profit

Work is keeping me pretty busy, most days and nights, but everything's moving along well. Managing 6 different sites in 2 states is challenging, plus I'm coordinating everything with our headquarters in Kentucky. We'll be expanding to at least 2 new camps soon, and my second trailer will be installed in Louisiana for when I work over there (ooh, posh! 2 homes!)... My main objective at the moment is making sure we have enough people in place to do adequate site assessments and proper construction supervision.

I'll be going to some conferences in April, May and June, and hopefully taking some extended weekend vacations away.

support New Orleans music

2006-03-13T20:58:00.000-05:00

This radio station is the real deal:

http://www.wwoz.org

...jazz, bluegrass, folk, blues, Cajun, zydeco, be-bop, gospel, Latin, Brazilian, Caribbean music and more!

Listen online and donate some money to keep the good times rollin' on :)

Waffle House

2006-03-11T16:24:00.000-05:00

One thing I discovered on my cross-country drive in '02 was the highly addictive Waffle House chain of restaurants across the South. They have simple, greasy food: eggs, hash browns, waffles, burgers, fries, and sweet tea. The first time I had sweet tea I didn't know I didn't need to add sugar. Talk about a sugar rush!

Here in Gulfport, Mississippi, I live near two Waffle Houses. Wandered over to one this morning to have a scrambled egg and cheese sandwich with some hash browns "scattered" (i.e., with onions). Yum! Sitting at the counter, I was joined by a guy from Nashville who proceeded to talk my ear off about these $35,000 pre-fab homes he was selling down here, and what did I think of the design and pricing?

Halfway through my breakfast, a black baby at a nearby table started crying, and her family was fussing over her. The man from Nashville said to me, "I just don't know sometimes. Why do you need to get a license to drive a car, and any old fool can have a baby?"

meetin' important folks

2006-03-10T21:12:00.000-05:00

Went to a meeting yesterday with Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi. He had a forum on the Mississippi Reconstruction Fund, which is a private fund set up to supplement government aid to victims of the storms (Katrina and Rita). There was an auditorium full of aid workers, city reps, FEMA people, and others - you mention money and people show up! Everyone was complaining that there isn't any good coordination happening amongst all these various groups, and that there were too many different "task force" groups spread out over the Gulf Coast that weren't communicating with one another. They thought maybe they should create a central body that would help collect information about what groups were doing what kind of work in what cities, and everyone could go to that central location to find contact details, assessments, meeting times, etc.

I thought to myself, "The UN was doing that by Week Two after the tsunami, and no one is doing that here yet, six months after Katrina." Crazy.

Colonel Kurtz

2006-03-10T20:44:00.000-05:00

One of my first assignments was a tough one: Like Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now", go upriver and retrieve a Colonel-Kurtz-like ex-warrior gone native. One of my camp managers lives on the very edge of civilization, in a forgotten neighborhood in Katrina's wake, infested with gnats and still thick with storm debris. He sees himself as the savior of the community, flying solo and living with a survivalist mentality. The problem is that as long as he's representing our team, he's gotta play by our rules. Since he can't play well with others, I'm afraid I had to look him in his war-glazed eyes and pull the trigger.

culture

2006-03-09T00:24:00.000-05:00

Things down in Southern Mississippi and Southern Louisiana sure can be interesting. The people are very friendly, and they'll talk your ear off it you let 'em. Vowels play a much greater role in sentences than they do in other parts of the country. The word H-E-R-E is pronounced "hea-ya" and the word B-A-R-N is pronounced "bo-ahn". The white people don't look as healthy as they do in California (mostly due to smoking), or as corn-fed and ruddy as they do in the Mid-west. I notice that black people avoid my eyes, perhaps as a sign that they "know their place". It's odd for me, to be sure, to be witnessing such racial stratification, but not at all surprising. Talk radio is full of overtly racist statements like "if they could just learn to talk right..." Lots and lots of pickup trucks and fast food restaurants.

But the people we are helping rebuild their homes are grateful beyond words. Sometimes they stop one of the volunteers wielding a hammer just so they have someone to talk to, to tell their stories to. Usually the homeowner and the volunteer end up crying and hugging. There's a lot of religiosity about, a lot of Old Timey "God will lift us up when we are weary" spirit in the community, amongst Baptists, Pentacostals, Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians alike.

I try to view the culture here with same the compassionate and respectful attitude that I would the Indonesian culture. I can just open my eyes and ears and heart and absorb the different worldview and appreciate it for what it is. It helps me to remember that they were poor before the hurricane, and mostly forgotten or mercilessly stereotyped by the rest of the country. We have an obligation to help, just like we feel obliged to help the homeless or people living with AIDS.

The landscape is utterly fascinating, I have to say. I can't imagine what would have made the French delve into swampland, marshes, rivers, bogs, through alligator country, battling mosquitoes and water mocassins, then build a high look-out point, see only more swamp and muck for 360', and say, "Oui, ca c'est bien!" That must be why they thought they were ripping off the Americans in the Louisiana Purchase. One thing I saw today, however, was pretty frickin' cool. There is a tree that grows on somewhat drier ground here, similar to the weeping willow, that has long, delicate, drooping, feathery moss growing off the end of its branches, that sweeps the ground lazily in the breeze in a way that's quite mesmerizing to watch.

And the amazing jazz, blues, bluegrass, country and folk music you find on the radio makes the long drives from Gulfport to New Orleans A-OK. Mix in a heavy dose of classic rock, a la Styx, Stones, Eagles, Zeppelin and ELO - plus some Flashdance soundtrack and old school Madonna - and what you have, my friends, is driving music.

Southern livin'

2006-03-06T17:22:00.000-05:00

M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I

2006-02-27T02:13:00.000-05:00

I'm off to my new assignment: disaster reconstruction project manager in Mississippi and Louisiana for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. I'll be managing 8 "volunteer villages", where people (Christian and non-Christian) come from all over the country as volunteer laborers on homebuilding sites. The volunteers live in semi-permanent tents while they're down there, but I'll be living in a trailer!

Before you start with the "trailer trash" jokes, let me just say that I prefer the term "retro bourgeois" :)

The volunteer village has a communal kitchen, washer and dryer, and wireless internet, and in my trailer I've got all the A/C, heat and indoor plumbing I need (with hot water, unlike Indonesia...). I'll be driving a truck around to the different construction sites and visiting local city officials, churches, FEMA reps, displaced families, etc., to set up our partnerships and figure out where we'll build houses.

I'll have one trailer as a home-base in Mississippi, near Biloxi, and another one in Louisiana just south of New Orleans where I can stay when I'm working over there. I'm pretty excited about my new job, especially because I can hang out in New Orleans and listen to some great music and eat fantastic food on the weekends. Y'all better start checking flights so you can come visit me down there!! It's an open-ended contract, so I'll be there for as long as I'm there - we'll see...

My new boss is great, and the Presbyterian Church is very laid-back and down with the Mexi-Jews. I'll put my new postal address on my blog when I know where I can receive mail.

Ciao for now,
C

hi everyone

2006-02-09T22:20:00.000-05:00

It's been a strange few months, hanging out in San Diego, looking for work while every company I've been trying to contact has been sleeping off their Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey-comas. Word of advice: never try to look for work at holiday-time if you can help it at all. I've been spending my time doing crazy internet job searches, and calling folks down in New Orleans, flying down to the Gulf for interviews, etc. In the meantime, I'm catching up on my sleep and my episodes of "Little House on the Prairie". Those of you who know my addiction to the Ingalls family and Walnut Grove know I'm only half-joking. I've discovered that DVR is a great invention. I also never have to miss a John Stewart episode.

OK, but my search has been fruitful. I'll be posting details about my new position on my blog soon.

Thanks to my friends, life hasn't been dull, though. Spent some time at Casa de Smith in Oceanside, where the jacuzzi's always hot and the Pacifico's always cold. Chilled at Miss Julia's writing pad with kitties in Golden Hill. Saw my buddy Chris when he came out to Cali for a bit. Watched some tsunami anniversary specials on National Geographic. Ate a bunch of Mexican food and drank a bunch of lemon drops. Went to Disneyland. Met some crazy people on New Year's Eve (you know who you are!). Did lots of writing.

what's next?

2005-12-13T11:59:00.000-05:00

No luck finding work in New Orleans - if you can believe that from all the work that obviously needs to be done!! The problem as I see it is that no one is attacking the problem like the serious international aid organizations attack disaster and development problems overseas. They aren't using the same strategies and trained professionals that are being used in Pakistan and Indonesia and Sudan, etc., and there is no overarching coordinating body overseeing the reconstruction like the UN does overseas. (FEMA isn't coordinating anything, they're just doling out aid piecemeal.) Such a tragically missed opportunity!

For now, I'm sitting tight in San Diego, working on the question of "what's next?" for Camille...

New York Times

2005-12-13T11:57:00.000-05:00

Editorial
Death of an American City

Published: December 11, 2005

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a major American city.

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

sorry for the site cleaning on the site

2005-12-03T06:30:00.000-05:00

I may be out of techie-land for a while. Ciao for now,

:)

C

2005-06-06T23:00:00.000-05:00

swimming at a waterfall

more snippets of my life in Banda Aceh

2005-04-29T05:05:00.000-05:00

A couple times waking up not remembering where I am for the smallest instant of drowsy half-reality, forgetting about Indonesia, about floating over oceans and ‘Stans, about geckos and white rice, expecting to open my eyelids to find my sunlit DC apartment, my stomach grumbling for my morning bagel
Attending a soirée at the German Embassy, where I (feeling cleaner than I have in a very long time in my white traditional Acehnese blouse and – wonder of wonders! – high heels) flattered and was flattered by the best of Aceh’s European diplomats, young and old
Getting a traditional Acehnese massage from a blind woman who slapped and tugged and rubbed and oiled my body for less than $3 per hour – the sweet torture was like watching “Saving Private Ryan”: if you can get through the first 10 minutes, you’re fine
Having to bite my tongue in front of the churchies every time I get the urge to swear
Working to get the next Batavia crew out the door to meet the ship at a port further south down the coast of Sumatra, the volunteers chomping at the bit to get aboard, me excited to see what’ll happen on its next run and what miracles Rick will pull off this time
Calling our counselors out to an IDP camp after one of our doctors reported that a woman who had lost five children in the tsunami was talking about slitting her wrists with a piece of glass
Jackie Chan and Miss China visiting Banda Aceh, speaking to the local people at the tsunami site through 2 interpreters (one for Acehnese to Indonesian, one for Indonesian to Chinese)
Unimaginable relief as the organization rids itself of the old-thinking and the inefficient, making room for change and growth (i.e., my least favorite staffmembers have returned to the US)
Needing a wool blanket at night so that the AC doesn’t freeze me – it’s too hot if I turn it off, and I can’t seem to control the temperature
Me and one of my co-workers stopping at the “supermarket” on the way home from a boring meeting to stock up on chocolate, Pringles, ice cream and cookies
Sleeping well knowing that my first paycheck has been deposited, most of my bills paid, and I’ve hardly spent $200 since I got here
My fantasy of meeting lots of hot doctors being dashed by the arrival of each team of retired and/or married docs
The black stubby-tailed kitten with white booties who’s taken up residence at our house, despite numerous evictions and dousings with water (the only way to get rid of him would be to keep the door closed, which none of us want to do) – he’s burrowed his way into our lives and can be found several times a day waiting, dog-like, at our feet while we dine
A trio of cheerful local girls (aged 10) sitting on our porch before dinnertime singing Acehnese songs
Hearing about the black scalding waves that gave some tsunami survivors third degree burns – they say that in certain areas the magma from the underground volcano which caused the earthquake which caused the tsunami heated the water above 100ºC
Using Muhammad’s birthday and our day off as an excuse to plow through 300 pages of an escapist novel
Finally having someone come out here from HQ who actually knows what she’s doing, despite her seeming youth and easygoing nature
Getting a little sick of Raskolnikov’s paranoid ramblings in “Crime and Punishment”… OK, so you killed the old pawnbroker – why do you keep trying to get caught?
Conspiratorially setting up a “business” meeting with my friend Natascha just so we can get away from our offices and relax a bit at a coffee shop (I met Natascha here in January when neither of us had jobs – we both went home in February with a burning desire to find a job back in Aceh, and we finally ran into each other at the UN last week, not at all surprised to find each other here again and gainfully employed)
Thinking about where I’d like to go on my week off in June (Phuket? Bali? Cambodia?), and where I’d like to venture to when I’m done with my contract in September (New Zealand? Nepal? Madagascar? South America?)

2005-04-27T21:09:00.000-05:00

Iwan, midwife Nurbahri, me and my boss Sal

One Family

2005-04-25T21:09:00.000-05:00

Nurbahri, a trained midwife, and her husband Iwan run a midwife clinic in the Lamdingin neighborhood of Banda Aceh. Women used to come to their clinic to get contraception, seek help becoming pregnant, obtain prenatal care during pregnancy, and have their babies in private birthing rooms. The clinic was open 24 hours a day, and Nurbahri was known to make house calls occasionally as well. If complications arose during delivery, a specialist would be summoned or an ambulance would be called. Nurbahri and Iwan lived with two of their children on the second story of the clinic, while two of their other children studied medicine in Medan.

On the morning of December 26th, Nurbahri was in the middle of a delivery. The mother-to-be lay sweating on the table, with two assistant midwives attending. Suddenly they heard a boy running down the street yelling, “The water is coming!” Chaos ensued, and in the panic of people rushing through the neighborhood, Nurbahri lost sight of her husband. She and her patient ran out of the clinic away from the sea. Somehow she and the pregnant woman climbed onto the roof of a three-story house to wait. They watched in horror as the wave rushed inland, brown and fast-moving, littered with bits of broken furniture, shattered homes, shredded clothes, crushed cars, dismembered bodies. The water engulfed the first story of every home, and they sat on the roof for the next five hours witnessing their neighborhood disappear. The baby decided to wait, too.

When the waterlevel began to drop again, the survivors ventured down from their perches to find their loved ones and what was left of their homes. Nurbahri and Iwan tearfully reunited at the midwife clinic, which still stood. The interior was three-feet deep in mud, and all the equipment and drugs had been washed away. Several walls had been knocked down, and all the windows were smashed to bits. Corpses lay strewn in the yard and twisted in the garage. Amid this scene of destruction, they helped the woman finally give birth to her baby.

It took an agonizing day for Nurbahri and Iwan to find their own children – alive and safe, although shell-shocked and trembling. For the next few days, the reunited family dragged the mud and debris out of their home with their bare hands, with nothing to eat or drink and no shoes on their feet. Eventually they found buried in the mud several bottles of mineral water and packets of children’s biscuits, which sustained them for a few more days until relief arrived. People wandered around dazed and crying. Many of the homes surrounding the clinic were completely destroyed, and 47 people were killed on Nurbahri’s block alone.

Once the house became habitable again and the family began to try to live normally, the first thing they did was hang the shingle out in front of the clinic reading “MIDWIFE NURBAHRI”. Iwan and Nurbahri dream of restoring the clinic to its former state so that they can help the women of Banda Aceh for many years in the future.

Today Northwest Medical Teams signed a deal with the clinic to provide them with equipment and support for their newly reopened clinic.

I asked Nurbahri: After seeing her neighbors’ houses destroyed and families torn apart, did she think herself lucky to have her family and her house intact? She said yes. I asked her if she had ever asked herself why Allah had given her such luck, and she said she was sure He wanted her to deliver many more babies.

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fisherboy

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the donut lady

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dining with the deutchers

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our restaurant for dinner

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bungalo #3

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Gapang Beach, Sabang Island

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ah! relaxation!

Sabang Island

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FRIDAY

AM:

Wake up with my sinus condition no better than it has been for the past two days - can't breathe and nose running like crazy
Try to convince my boss that I need to go away for the weekend for the sake of my mental and physical health - he says no
Make plans to go away anyway

PM:

Meet up with a friend of a friend to hitch a ride to the port
Take speed boat over to Sabang Island
Arrive at beach resort and meet more friends of friends - all German, Austrian and Swiss
Crack open a cold one
Zeppelin
Check into bungalo #3
Go swimming in the clean warm water of the lagoon
Eat dinner prepared by the European and Japanese staff of the dive shop
Fall asleep under mosquito net back in bungalo #3

Saturday

Eat breakfast at the cafe overlooking the water
Read a magazine in a hammock on the beach
Rain begins - retreat to write in my journal indoors
Nap in bungalo #3

Back to the cafe for lunch
Hang out with the Euros at the dive shop
Bust out with my rusty German language skills, much to everyone's amazement (including mine)
Depart on small motor boat to go snorkeling with the Euros at offshore island - see jellyfish, starfish, crabs, manta rays, angel fish, and other colorful fish
Back to bungalo #3 to change and have a beer
Ride motorcycles with the Euros to have dinner at a restaurant up the coast
Sleep

SUNDAY

Breakfast at the beach
Swimming
Sunbathing
George Carlin and Lewis Black on the i-Pod Shuffle

Coca Cola
Lunch
Reading in the hammock - Aldous Huxley
Nap
German wine and candles with the Euros on the porch of bungalo #3
Dinner
Sleep

MONDAY

Ferry back to Banda Aceh
Back to work

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passing out balloons

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local girls

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meeting the mayor

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coming ashore at Campung Aie, NW Simeulue

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another fantastic sunset

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fishermen

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coral

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the shore

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a new friend

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palms