The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [73]
Sean Penn talking to the Dirty Hands Caravan volunteers
Our last stop was New Orleans, where we volunteered with an organization called Common Ground that was made up of young people from all over the country who had put their lives on hold to rebuild New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. They were headquartered in the middle of the Ninth Ward, the area that was most affected by the hurricane. Nothing could have prepared us for the destruction we saw in the Ninth Ward. There were concrete stairs leading nowhere and empty lots where houses had once stretched for miles. Each lonely stoop was a gravestone for a home. Three years after Katrina, the place was still eerie and sad. It was hard to imagine what it had looked like before the storm.
The local people in the Ninth Ward wanted their lives to return to normal, but since we were there for only a few days, we just did whatever we could. We met a woman whose home had been completely destroyed and had just moved into a new, yellow house—the only one on the block that had been rebuilt. It was a beautiful house but it was surrounded by a sea of mud. She wondered if the volunteers would help her construct a driveway and garden, so we rallied a gang of volunteers to do the job. We set out to build a makeshift pathway from whatever materials we could find in the area. We got our hands and feet dirty and slaved in the hot sun. As the garden came together, the woman said that we were angels sent to her from God.
Other volunteers went off to paint people’s houses and log dead trees in different parts of the Ninth Ward. Forrest, one of my favorite volunteers, went to help a woman who had recently returned to her house and had also lost her husband. He had been confined to a wheelchair before the hurricane and survived it, but he had recently succumbed to health problems. She showed the group the water stains left on her house by Katrina. Two miles from the levee, the water had reached nine feet; the scope of the flood was more than any of us could comprehend. Forrest and some others created a stone pathway, landscaped the garden, cleared rotten wood, and painted. The woman brought the volunteers water while they worked and kept saying, “Bless you, bless you, and thank you so much, you don’t know how much this means to me!” She was the only one on her street who had returned, and the neighborhood was eerily quiet. Everyone had moist eyes as they worked in silence.
Sean took a busload of volunteers to a massive tent city that had formed under the highway. These were homeless people who had jobs but due to the lack of affordable housing had been forced to camp in the shelter of an overpass. They would wake up and put on nice clothes to go off to work, then return later to sleep in their tents. The volunteers dished out food and sat around speaking with the tent residents, offering words of comfort and just lending an ear. Another group of volunteers went to fix up an old church, and still others moved sheds that had traveled great distances with the floodwaters. A few others rode around on bicycles with a Common Ground worker, helping anyone who looked like he needed a hand.
After the trip with Sean officially ended, a group of seventeen volunteers decided to remain in New Orleans for four more months. In a relatively short time, all the volunteers had begun asking serious questions about the world and their role in it, and many of them felt that they couldn’t go back to their normal lives after seeing how much help was needed around the country. I saw that the trip had changed them