I am grateful for the opportunity I have had to coordinate and to attend personally; the opportunity to put our hearts, hands, and feet into the prayer for a better world. I am grateful for all of you who were there physically, all of you who supported the trip financially, all of you who have been with us in spirit, if not yet in body. May we all be strengthened in our resolve to do Tikkun (repair) wherever we can, however we can, and as much as we can. As we said when we began our work in New Orleans: Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Ha-Olam, Asher Kidshanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu lirdof tzedek. Blessed are You, Eternal God, Sovereign of the Universe: You make us holy with commandments and command us to pursue justice/righteousness. Amen.

Check future Bulletins and updates for the dates of our next trip…coming soon ...

Proud that each one in the group felt the calling to follow Rabbi Sachs-Kohen to NOLA; Proud that each one of us just “showed up” not knowing what God had in store for us that day; Proud we found our way around the area with just a few extra circles around a block; Proud we arrived at the assigned site for the day given a tiny map, a respirator, gloves, a tyvek suit and a bagged lunch; Proud that our group had a positive mental attitude; Proud that we entered a home and treated the home with respect, like it was our own. Just look at the pictures ... I pray you too feel the pride in which I speak of ...

“It is not our job to complete the work, but neither are we free to walk away from it”. (Pirkei Avot 2:16)

Although it came as a result of Bessie's advancing years and growing frailty, I nevertheless feel so privileged to have been able to have been part of this communal mission of learning and healing. We chose BHC membership largely by default; Erica attends the Day School and so BHC was her community, rather than our former synagogue. Because we never really made a conscious choice to join BHC, I never felt any particular personal connection to the synagogue. But as a result of spending a week with a truly inspiring group of people, I now feel a connection to the social activism long exemplified by this synagogue and its clergy.

Plus, I got to spend a whole week with my wonderful daughter, just the two of us, for the first time since she came into our family. Every day, she got up uncomplainingly, even eagerly, to go to work trying to heal the Big Easy's wounded soul. To see her weeding, seeding, pulling up old chain-link fence, volunteering to go off to paint and sand a house almost ready for occupancy, was to see my daughter becoming a responsible adult, dedicated to making the world a better place than she found it. To witness her growth in this, her Bat Mitzvah year, was especially moving.

A major theme of last night's Yom Hashoa memorial at BHC was the importance of bearing personal witness to human tragedy, of the need to act in the hope of building a better world. This was a most fitting finale to our week in New Orleans. For the principal lesson of the enormity of the loss brought about by the human failings that drowned New Orleans is that it is essential for us to respond to such tragedy not with pious words, not even just with money - although money is certainly needed - but with our hands and with our hearts. I want to thank Rabbi Sachs-Kohen and the BHC community for the rare and great treasure of having been able to contribute my hands and heart to this communal task.

Laissez les bon temps rouler. Please.

The Tour
Nineteen months later. It looks like Europe after the War. Large X’s painted on houses everywhere: “Here on 9-12. No one found alive. No one found dead. Ten feet of water.” In the middle class neighborhoods, some construction on each block amid the rotting shells. In the working class areas, trailers and the slow beginnings of a few fresh starts. The Lower Ninth Ward: gone. Nothing for blocks, then a smashed wooden shell atop a car. The brick homes of famous people still stand, empty windowed. We drive past the Army Corps of Engineers’ materials. Pre-Katrina 8-foot steel pilings held the levees together in soil that shifted with every wave. The new 15-foot ones lie nearby. Our guide says, “It’ll break opposite the repairs next time.”

The School Yard
We are clearing the front yard of Frederick Douglass High School in the Upper Ninth Ward. This is where the community dumped its refuse as they gutted their homes. Afterwards, a bulldozer scraped their moldy belongings into a dumpster, along with the school yard’s grass. We will replant the grass. But the people and their lives have been hollowed out like melon from the rind.

We pick up small objects. These have escaped the bulldozer: batteries, a child’s marbles, pieces of a game. The frosted glass stopper of a perfume bottle. Broken pieces of the school yard fence half-buried near CD’s. So many CD’s. Music is oxygen here. Mundane, intimate pieces of lives. I dig out a half-buried, smashed, measuring cup. I feel my hand close on its handle as it would on mine at home. I add my tears to the dirt.

The Students
We sit in a circle facing ninth graders from this “Recovery School.” They joke when we ask, “Why did you come back?” “Partay! The girls!” But the rind cracks.

“Anthony” is handsome with bright eyes and shoulder length dreds. His smile is quick. He uses humor to deflect the pain. But he is the first to tell his story. His father waded back and forth in the toxic waters, ferrying neighbors to safety while Anthony and his younger siblings were sent to Houston. Three months later, an older sister called from New Orleans. His father just died of infections contracted in the flood water. Anthony didn’t know he was ill, never got to say goodbye. Death rates tripled in the year following Katrina. How many were heroes like Anthony’s father? Where is his “Purple Heart?”

“Lynn” has big, watchful eyes that take in everything. In the large circle of teens, she says her name and then falls silent. When we break into small groups, she leans toward me and touches my arm, “Can I tell you my story?” Without raising her voice beyond what is needed to reach me, she tells of running with her Aunt, Uncle, Grandmother, cousins and siblings to an Up-Town school. “We stayed on the second and third floors. We had a pretty good time for two days. Then there was nothing to eat and no one was coming to us. Men from the neighborhood broke into a boathouse and got us boats. The kayaks held only one person. They took us all to the bayou. It was dry, but it got really cold at night and there were insects all over us. My grandmother couldn’t take the cold, so the men brought her back to the school. Then guards brought us by boat to an overpass. It was horrible. No food, no water. Real hot. No bathrooms. People fighting over nothing. They just left us there. We didn’t know where my Grandmother was, if she was alive.” Eventually Lynn and the remainder of her family were sent to Houston. “We stayed in the Astrodome there. The Red Cross helped us and I bless the Red Cross. They fed us. They fed us three meals a day.” At the Astrodome, they began to search for their Grandmother using the Red Cross computers. “There were so many people with her name, Bertha D. We looked through them all, and finally we found one with the same birthday. So we knew it was her. She was alive. In Baton Rouge.”

Sitting silently behind Lynn and watching me is “Ken.” His long face is immobile except for the sadness behind his eyes. When I lean over to him, he says, “I am so lucky my Momma didn’t go to work that day. Some other kids, their parents went to work. She stayed home. Otherwise it would have been just me, the oldest [he was 12 years old then], and my younger brothers. We would have died. My Momma got us on the roof.”

A tough girl from the Lower Ninth Ward no longer has a neighborhood. She stays with her Grandmother. Her bright yellow headband and tight orange clothes broadcast “I am alive and I am here to stay. Don’t mess with me.” Her anger at the government is loud and focused. Only later, when we ask directly, does she gaze downward, telling how her close friend died trapped in his attic from heat ranging well over 100 degrees.

I asked each student with whom I spoke what they would wish for if they could change one thing in their lives today. This is a question only an outsider could ask. Somebody who didn’t yet grasp their diaspora or the fabric of three-generation neighborhoods, or being able to “sit-in” with a band from the time you could walk, or a hedonist-European-Carribean culture which smells the roses before it smells the money. To a one, the answer was the same. “I want my life back before Katrina. I want my life back.”

Ken has been interviewed by Nickelodeon, and two of the teens went to Washington, D.C. to testify on the flood. But are they getting their lives back? Here they are, thrown together from different high schools in this “Recovery School,” bussed there and back each day. Their own schools are closed. Mass transit busses run at a quarter of their normal schedule. Scuffles break out in the halls between rival neighborhoods. Forty percent don’t live with their parents. Many work after school to help extended families with food and clothing. They have no physical place to call “home.” Yet here they arrive each day, fighting the odds to graduate, leaning on the fiercely committed and loving faculty. These teens talk to survive, to stop the nightmares. They go on ...

The Store
It seemed very cosmic, finding a Judaica store on our first day in New Orleans. We went in to scout out a gift for Rabbi Sachs-Kohen, our leader on this mission, and chatted briefly with the owner. We were clueless about the Rabbi’s interests. After quizzing Missy, her partner, we returned later and made a selection. The owner knew the reason for our gift and kindly claimed to have mis-tagged the item to reduce its price. She laughed, “Since Katrina, I can’t even blame the help because it’s just me here.” I asked if the store was damaged in the flood. No, she said, but told us her story. She and her husband moved ten times in the months following the storm, living with several friends and in rentals. Their home was destroyed. Of her beloved artwork, two-thirds could be salvaged and cleaned. She put aside the book she was writing, and she and her husband slowly built an apartment in the top two floors over their French Quarter store. Finally, she had a home, “...with a nail file, and a night stand.” Knowing where to find these simple items had taken on comforting significance during their disjointed months of rootlessness. As I looked around her store, at its sculpture and wall hangings, jewelry and light-filled mirrors, I said “You’ve made it so beautiful here.” She burst into tears. Where I saw only the present, she saw the past: two retail floors compressed and diminished into one, a home and all its furnishings lost, a lifetime of work needing to be rebuilt.

From the upper-middle class to the poorest class, people are both moving forward and fragile.

Thank You
I am at a cashier, paying for my son’s T-shirt (“There are places I remember...”), when the woman asks if we are on vacation. When I tell her why we are here, she tells us her story, with the familiar ending-still no home. Then she thanks us for coming down. The waitress thanks us. The man behind me in line thanks me. The owner of the art glass store says, “It’s so humbling, how many people are coming from all over to help. Thank you.” We are pulling weeds from the “regular flood” absorbing trees newly planted in Central City, an inner city neighborhood. A local man walks by saying “I love you all. I love you.” A woman walks by and thanks us. Another man. We enter the community center to use the toilets and see their artwork. The man at the desk thanks us. We are working on a Habit for Humanity House in East New Orleans. A car slows, the driver waves and thanks us. Why are they thanking us, I think. Don’t they know this makes us feel less helpless? More connected? That we are the real receivers here?

The Quarter
Go! Spend! The French Quarter is open! It funnels green blood to the shattered body of New Orleans. The shops and galleries, restaurants and music halls gleam. In New Orleans art, music and food channel the Life Force as nowhere else in our nation. Dance your way down the streets! Help bring them back to life.

Habitat’s Musician’s Village
Oh, the colors! Here is New Orlean’s joy. Mid-tone pinks, oranges, greens, blues and purples. Porches for jammin’ on. All raised a good four feet from the next flood. Some already have flowers planted. The family’s name proudly on the front railing. They are off working on their neighbor’s home. “Each one reach one” and pass it on. The signs from volunteers all over the country: LA, Portland, Harvard, Mississippi, Oswego, Connecticut, on they go. The masses of workers in the morning, waiting to be assigned. Everyone eager. Feeling ownership. Of what? The houses? Of being part of the solution? Of our own ability to take action and reach out? Of hope?

Down the road from the site, another of the endless X’s on the front of the house. Only this one, off to one side says “No cat found. SPCA.” More tears in the dirt.

Conclusion
Why go to New Orleans? Because when you say “Never again” you have to act on it. Whether you say it about slavery, holocausts, wars or any other form of human suffering isn’t important. You have to act. New Orleans needs everything. If you can’t lift a hammer, spend money on a vacation there. If you can lift a hammer, do so. Anyone over 16 can stay at Habitat’s Camp Hope. If you can fund raise, ask what they need and fund raise. If you can open a hospital, file a deed, pour cement, or teach arithmetic they need it all. And you need them. We are less of a nation without them.

Hello from Camp Hope...

7 of the 27 of the BH2C are staying in Camp Hope this week. The Camp can house up to 1000 people; however, the camp is approximately 40% to capacity this particular week. The living quarters, food, and accommodations are humbling. We feel we have all gained a true appreciation for our own homes and private spaces since we have lived in Camp Hope this week ... the food has been plentiful and nutritious, showers hot after a long day of mold, dust, dirt and sweat and the beds are adequately cushioned with a simple single mattress. Our bunks are dormitory style with an average 20-25 people (of the same sex) in handmade pine bunk beds. We are "living simply so others can simply live."

Our week started out with two days at ACORN, the demolition team. During the gutting process, we found Al and Helen Haley’s (the owners of the home) correspondences, postcards and cancelled checks dating to the late 60’s; letters and years of accumulated Christmas decorations ... we also know that this house was a home for a couple married at least 40 years ... It was unsettling, eerie and sad as we threw away this couples’ life because even if it survived the flood, it was all infested with deadly, noxious mold from the Katrina’s man-made flood. When we stripped the bathroom down to its support beams, we found the medicine cabinet full - clearly untouched by the Haleys as they evacuated. It appears Al and Helen had no time to plan and pack or no idea that the storm’s wrath would make them homeless.

Working with ACORN, the task is to demolish and remove walls, flooring, a hot water heater and other everyday rusted and muddied appliances. Each and every nail from this home’s beams and studs had to be pulled so the home can one day be rebuilt (if it ever will be - ACORN told us that some of these homes may simply stand vacant for years). Doing the work we wear respirators, a full body Tyvek suit, plastic gloves under our leather clothes , goggles and a head covering to protect us from exposure ... believe us when we say ... t is very hot in this suit!

It is clear that our BH2C team has passion for what we believe in ... to repair the world... The commandment of Tikkun Olam feels overwhelming down here in New Orleans but we continue with God’s grace and direction unselfishly ... attempting to repair one destroyed home and life at a time...

Shalom from Camp Hope, NOLA

Today, the families worked in a community garden outside a warehouse that was home to volunteers after Katrina. The volunteers left their mark, as you'll see in the pictures, by painting a beautiful mural highlighting the importance of volunteering and helping to rebuild. The garden is an effort to bring sustainable growing practices to the New Orleans community, to help them understand that environmental issues are more than just nice ideas, they're essential to the health and well being of the city. The garden employs sustainable practices like growing plants that provide each other benefits in proximity (like plants that attract aphids next to plants that can't survive aphids), watering in ways that don't waste the water, etc. Our time was spent weeding and mulching. That is, when we weren't finding lizards (cute), fire ants (not cute at all), and seashells. The seashells, interestingly, are present everywhere in New Orleans because, being below sea level, they've been deposited in the soil over hundreds and hundreds of years.

More from the adults who worked at Habitat for Humanity after I see them at dinner...

We have heard story after story that illustrate how devastating this man-made disaster was - to individual families AND to the society as a whole. I say man-made because it is absolutely clear down here, if not in the rest of our country yet, that the worst of this tragedy could have been avoided with better government foresight and more responsible environmental practices. Yesterday afternoon while it rained, the families went to see the Imax movie "Hurricane on the Bayou" which showed how the denigration of the wetlands surrounding New Orleans contributed to the intensity of the hurricane as it came ashore. And driving around town on our first day, we saw the old steel girders that were supposed to hold the levees in place but were only 1/2 the length actually necessary to anchor the massive slabs of concrete into the soggy, sandy soil. We also saw the new ones the Army Corps of Engineers is NOW using on the levees and the difference is striking - they are 3 times as long, long enough now to reach a depth that will hopefully withstand the next big storm.

Despite their frustration with the local/state government which still doesn't have a solid reconstruction plan for the city and federal government which has been on the whole unresponsive to the tremendous need here, New Orleanians are committed to rebuilding what has been lost and that spirit is as striking as the devastation itself. When they talk about generations of history and connection to the land, about surviving and overcoming tragedy in order to pass their rich culture and heritage on to generations the resonances are visceral for me. We Jews have been through such destruction and we know what it means to "Recover, Rebuild, and Organize" as it says on my t-shirt from the organization with which we are gutting houses. It is an honor and a blessing to be here helping them do what our people have done over and over again.

Check back later for an update from the families who spent the morning with teens from Frederick Douglass High.

We've just returned from an evening in the French Quarter, using our resources to support the local economy. No, really, Charmaine Neville whom we saw perform at Snug Harbor told us how much our money means to New Orleans. But as fun as the evening was, the day was much, much more meaningful.

I joined the family half of our group who spent the day working at Frederick Douglass High School in the Ninth Ward. Our first task was to plant sunflowers. Apparently, these beautiful flowers not only bring joy to whoever sees them, they also help to purify the soil by drawing the toxins into their reedy stalks. Next we prepared the soil of what was once the front lawn of the school. When we started it was hard-packed earth full of glass, metal and wood debris. Massive piles of trash had been dumped in the schoolyard when the houses in the neighborhood were gutted after the flooding. The piles had been cleared, but much of the smallest debris remained. Finally, when we finished clearing the trash and raking the ground, we scattered grass seed in the hopes of reseeding the lawn. Tomorrow our families will meet ninth grade students from the high school to hear about their experiences during the flooding and since.

The majority of the adults in our group (those who came without children) spent the day with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) gutting houses. They worked on a house which had stood empty for the last 18 months, waiting for someone to make rebuilding possible. Everything had to be removed - the appliances, medicine bottles left in the bathroom, the walls, ceiling and floors. There was no furniture when our volunteers arrived - maybe the owners had returned to remove it or maybe it had floated away while the 6-8 feet of water stood in the neighborhood for all 6 weeks. In the house, our volunteers found rotting wood, decaying walls, broken windows, and the sad remnants of an entire life abandoned in the moments after the levees broke. It is heartbreaking and back-breaking work and like gluttons for punishment, they're going back for more tomorrow. It's awfully meaningful work.

More tomorrow....from N'awlins...

In just a few days, the second Baltimore Hebrew Hope Corps mission will leave for our work in New Orleans. About half the group this time is comprised of families with children 11 years or older. The families will be working with students at Frederick Douglass High School in the upper 9th ward of New Orleans to rebuild a project that the high school had begun prior to Hurricane Katrina. The project, called Edible Classroom, will help these urban students understand the interconnectedness of nature and human civilization as well being a hands-on lesson in botany, earth science, nutrition, and so much more. To read more about a similar project go to www.edibleschoolyard.org/homepage.html. The project was completely destroyed during the flooding and we will help them begin anew. The added benefit, post-Katrina, comes from the effect it will have on the New Orleans soil, which was contaminated by raw sewage, chemical and petroleum products and more during the flooding.

The other half of our group, composed of adults, will be working with Habitat for Humanity building homes for families and with ACORN www.acorn.org/index.php?id=8219, gutting houses that, while still standing after the flooding, are currently still uninhabitable.

Check back here for updates from New Orleans after April 8th.