Do you like tools?
- Are you eager to help victims of Hurricane Katrina?
- Would you like to have a memorable and life-affirming experience?
- Are you longing to do something really important?
If any of these questions apply to you, look no further because we have just what you are looking for! Nechama: Jewish Response to Disaster is looking for volunteers to join us for deployment to the Gulf Coast for one week….

This was the email that led my 16-year-old daughter, Emma, and me to New Orleans over her spring break. She’d never been there, so before meeting up with the Nechama group, I hailed a cab to take us to the French Quarter.

From the highway, everything looked calm and normal. Well-ordered neighborhoods extended as far as we could see on both sides, rows of houses punctuated by an occasional house with a striking blue roof that shimmered in the sunlight.

Our driver exited the highway. "The French Quarter doesn’t look all that bad, but I want to show you these neighborhoods close up." The cab began to bounce along buckled local streets, and the true picture came into stark focus. For miles, all these houses and stores were deserted, with no life, no lights—only black holes where doors and windows should be. The blue roofs we had seen were actually tarps, nailed down to cover the missing roofs. Some houses lay in ruins; others had piles of debris in their front yards. Rusted cars sat at odd angles in yards or smashed into houses; shattered boats were rotting in open fields or partway up trees.

The front of every house was marked with a large black X. Our driver said, “All these houses were searched.” Written on top of the X was the search date (eerily, it seemed that many searches had been done on 9/11). To the left of the X he told us that the letters indicated “the group that did the search.” To the right was a number represent-ing a hazardous rating (mostly 0, but sometimes marked 1, 2, 3, or 4). The number on the bottom – “the number of dead people found in the house” -- many 0’s, but periodically a jarring 1 or 2.

Every few blocks we saw a small white trailer sitting on a front lawn or at the curb. “Those are FEMA trailers,” said the driver, gesturing slowly around the neighborhood. “No one lives in any of the houses. The only people living here for miles live in those trailers.”


Nechama

The Nechama volunteers were based in Slidell, Louisiana--on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, beyond the deserted roller coasters of a Six Flags amusement park-- in a camp set up in an abandoned supermarket by Pat Robertson’s disaster relief organization, Operation Blessing. Emma was shown to the women’s dorm area, which consisted of two rows of bunk beds in a section walled off by sheetrock and tarps. Seth, the Nechama organizer who had picked us up at the airport, led me on a circuitous route past another tarped-off dorm area, marked “AmeriCorps,” and finally through a huge metal door propped up by a large barrel. Gleaming metal walls were lined with cots. “We sleep in the meat locker,” he said with a grin.

Seth and Gene, one of the original members of Nechama: Jewish Response to Disaster, told us that the Minneapolis-based group had been formed 13 years ago to help homeowners clean up after flooding in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Hurricane Katrina had prompted them to extend their territory to the Gulf in December, and they had reached out to volunteers throughout the country for their return trip in the spring.

Nechama means “comfort” in Hebrew, and the group derives its mission from the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world through acts of goodness. Gene has his own explanation, though: “We just tell everyone that Nechama means Jews with chainsaws.”


A wedding picture and a lost brother

We were working on a house in St. Bernard’s Parish, half a block down from the skeleton of a Sonic drive-in restaurant, across the street from a post office whose parking lot was filled with FEMA trailers. Donning respirator masks, heavy gloves and hard hats, we grabbed shovels, pry bars, some slop buckets and a wheel barrel, and followed Gene inside. The walls were muddy and water-marked to 4 or 5 feet, the floor covered with inches of dry mud and debris. Mud-caked mattresses and bedding and piles of clothes and belongings lay strewn across the bedrooms.

Over the next two days, we took down ceilings and walls, as blown fiberglass insulation rained down on us; we dismantled bathrooms and pulled down sagging kitchen cabinets and their contents. Carefully duct-taping the refrigerator shut to prevent the seven-month-old contents from spilling out, we lugged all the appliances to the curb, adding them to an ever-increasing pile of filthy beds and carpeting and possessions.

From the oldest of us, Gene, nearly 70, to the youngest, Emma, at 16, our crew of eleven Nechama volunteers worked hour after hour. Periodically, when someone uncovered porcelain or photos, Emma would take a break from the gutting and carefully clean these off, placing them in a separate little pile in the hopes that we were finding something of personal significance to the homeowners.

At the end of that long first day, the husband and wife who owned the house, and looked to be well into their 60’s, drove up. They carried coolers filled with cold drinks, and boxes of bakery shop pastries from their car. As we all sat next to the massive pile of rubble and belongings, she began to tell us the story. This had been her mother’s house for many years. Her mother had grown old and died several years before, and her brother, a disabled St. Bernard Parish firefighter, had lived here in pain and progressive depression, and had killed himself in the house only the year before. The couple’s own house, in a different section of New Orleans, had been completely destroyed with all of their belongings and treasures; the only thing they’d been able to recover was the husband’s Air Force ring.

When we went over to Emma’s small pile of salvaged items, they spotted a photograph and their faces lit up. It was a partially damaged picture of a bride—and now the only remaining picture from their own wedding. The wife’s eyes teared as she spotted her brother’s fireman’s hat and fire axe, which someone had found in the garage. The axe had a small plaque mounted on its handle – “In honor of 22 years of service…St. Bernard’s Parish.”


The Hippie Tent

Our first day we brought Army rations to the house for lunch—MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) in large, olive-drab plastic bags. Each bag was filled with a number of smaller bags. It took us a while to figure out that the largest inner bag had a chemical packet at the bottom that heated up on contact with water, and would cook the food in the other packets. I had a lukewarm meat patty with thin brown gravy on bread that could have been made of cardboard; Emma had stew that wasn’t too terrible.

Periodically, people wandered over from the FEMA trailers across the street. They were curious to hear about us, to tell us a bit about themselves, and to thank us for being there. One older woman told us about “the hippie tent.” A couple of months before, local residents had watched with suspicion as a group of “long-haired hippies” put up a big dome on an abandoned lot on the main street. After a few weeks, the woman had finally gone to see for herself. “They were the nicest kids, just serving meals to anyone who came, collecting and giving out clothes. So I came back and gave my neighbors a talking-to… Since then we have all been eating at the hippie tent.”

On the second day, we drove to the hippie tent—a silver geodesic dome called The Made with Love Café—where we shared a wonderful homemade lunch (the Asian cole slaw and ice tea with sprigs of mint were particularly delicious) with hundreds of residents and volunteers. Local musicians played jazz, as we ate and talked at long picnic tables. A woman sitting at our table told me that she and her husband and three kids were living in a FEMA trailer on her in-laws’ front lawn. Excitedly, she reported that the in-laws had gotten some of their house plumbing repaired and they were all looking forward to “our first real hot showers” since the hurricane. The volunteers had special trailers for showering, with hot water and private cubicles. I felt a little guilty about the showers we had taken the night before, and then the magnitude of things began to sink in: It had been seven months since the hurricane, and this woman felt lucky to be getting access to hot showers….


A Plague of Frogs

On day three we moved on to our second house. This one had been completely inundated. The roof was gone, replaced with the telltale bright blue tarp. More devastated, this house was actually easier to gut since we didn’t have to pull down the ceilings – they were just lying on the floors. As I opened the rotted kitchen cabinets and took the bowls and glasses from the topmost shelves, they were all filled with muddy water from Katrina.

These homeowners had been collectors of stuffed frogs. Throughout the house, there were soaked, muddy, rotting cloth frogs of all sizes—we hauled out load after load, but there were still more frogs. Some stank like rotten eggs. Several of us had to leave to get some fresh air.

As we took a break, we thought about the frogs. It would be Passover in two weeks--and just as told in the Passover story, first had come the waters and then the frogs….


New Orleans Without Pearls

Emma and I left New Orleans a few days later, touched by the local people we had met, happy that we had been able to salvage something personal from their homes, and hoping that our little band of Jews with chainsaws had buoyed their spirits in some way. But we wondered about the gutting of the houses: They were just two among thousands, in neighborhoods that no longer existed. Wouldn’t it make more sense to help people salvage what personal belongings they could and then bulldoze entire neighborhoods, building new homes here or in nearby areas less vulnerable to hurricanes? Where was a larger vision for rebuilding New Orleans?

As we approached New York City from the air that night, the cars and streetlights of the highways and residential blocks below like strings of shimmering pearls, I thought about New Orleans—no lights, robbed of its pearls, with an uncertain future….

--Charles E. Schwartz