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I just
returned from New Orleans working for the organization Common Ground.
www.commongroundrelief.org.
The Common Ground Collective is based in
Algiers. They are comprised of local and outside volunteers whose lives are
dedicated to working toward social justice for all peoples. They see that there
was great inequality before the storm, Katrina, in the ninth ward. They believe
this inequality continued during the storm, and they see that this inequality is
continuing NOW, after the storm.
Since Katrina
hit, this collective has built a community center in Algiers that offers water,
food, cleaning supplies, internet access, house repairs and a free medical
clinic. They are a community-run organization offering solidarity and mutual
aid to the citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. Common Ground’s
team includes doctors, lawyers, aid workers, community organizers and volunteers
of all stripes and creeds.
This is a
determining time for residents of the Ninth Ward. It is critical that the
residents return home. Common Ground aids local efforts in the creation of
similar services and share a common vision of cleaning up and rebuilding the
Ninth Ward. It was not and is not comfortable, but needs are and will be met.
THEY and WE WILL SURVIVE this by WORKING TOGETHER.
Common Ground
began by placing flyers on every door in the ninth ward offering assistance with
anything anyone needed done. Work at Common Ground involves cleaning the
streets of the ninth ward, providing transportation to medical clinics, helping
with FEMA and Red Cross forms, helping provide the following aid: cleaning
supplies, water, food, gutting of homes, on-site protests when bulldozers arrive
to demolish homes, helping people move out and find shelter who have been
evicted (which by the way: it is illegal to help people move out after an
eviction date) computers, and legal aid.
During my time
there I spent several days gutting homes, which simply means: to destroy the
interior of; to remove the vital or essential parts from, in this case, the
inside of homes. The homes I gutted were still completely adorned with people’s
possessions such as fully furnished rooms, closets full of clothes, unopened
mail, computers, telephones, refrigerators, stuffed animals, beds, couches,
tables, dressers, etc. It takes several days of working from 8am to 5pm with a
crew of 8 to 10 people to gut an entire home. I wore a full body suit, thick
rubber galoshes up to my knees, gloves, and a full face mask covering my nose
and mouth to protect my lungs from black mold. Because these homes sat in water
for 6-8 months there is black mold all over the walls and on everything in the
home, black mold is very dangerous for human being to come in direct contact
with and can lead to death.
I also spent
some time at the Women’s Center, where two families currently live and a total
of 14 children. There are several single women and three very elderly, ill
women. One family speaks Spanish and the other family speaks English. The
children are home all day because there are currently no schools open in the
ninth ward and there probably will not be for a long while, if (and I hope not)
ever again. Several of the women found jobs in the French Quarter working at
coffee shops or restaurants and we celebrated this. I enjoyed trying to learn
bits of Spanish from the children and I cooked dinner for everyone several
times. There is not hot water at the Women’s Center, (try convincing a 3 year
old kid to take a freezing cold bath), there is no shower, the toilet flushes
sometimes, there are no beds, but mats on the floor, no doors between the rooms,
and electricity only on the first floor. The Women’s Center is applying for
funding rapidly right now and I hope their efforts are successful.
The ninth ward
is dangerous and very corrupt. A simple overview of politics in the ninth
ward: cops get paid $15,000 a year. Therefore the cops befriend the drug
dealers who then supplement the cops’ income by $10,000 in return for
protection. This working relationship between drug dealers and cops also gives
the cops an inside view on local crime so that the cops can arrest certain
individuals that the drug dealers deem inconvenient. The cops also have an
affiliation with certain contractors and have arrested several individuals and
placed them in jail for no legitimate reason so that their homes could be
slapped with eviction notices and the individuals in jail could do nothing to
save their homes. This also helps certain people in the city raise property
taxes. Also, if people receive money from wind or flood insurance, they must
send that money to their mortgage company who will then send them a small
stipend each month that is to be put only into restoring their homes. Then an
inspector from the mortgage company will visit the house to decide if the money
is being used properly. I met a family of six who used there $726.00 of
insurance money to buy food and water. They are now being evicted from their
home for not using “their insurance money” correctly.
Nonetheless,
this is a vicious cycle that has to be dealt with. While I was at the Common
Ground Center six local people were killed, just in the ninth ward. Situations
within Common Ground alone involved the following: The individual who started
Common Ground was physically beaten by the police, taken to jail for no legal
reason, and placed in a cell for violet criminals. At this time the police made
it clear that they wanted Common Ground to leave and they would be sure to
arrest this individual, who started Common Ground, by planting drugs in his
vehicle. Then, one of the local drug dealers entered the Common Ground housing
complex on several occasions with guns. He punched someone in the kitchen staff
in the face, he threatened a medical worker at gun point, he took a volunteer
hostage for three hours and held her at gun point, he held the director of
Common Ground at gun point, and with each incident Common Ground phoned 911 and
only once did they show up, the day after an incident. I personally had a run
in with a police officer in the lower ninth ward; I was one block away from the
Common Ground center at 3pm in broad daylight taking photographs. A police
officer circled the block several times and then pulled up right next to me and
opened his door. He proceeded to sexually harass me and run me into the mud. A
Common Ground volunteer saw this happening and ran over and grabbed me by the
elbow and we walked away together. Common Ground has volunteer legal staff and
they are working very hard to “get all of these incidents on the record,” so
that somehow, someday, someway social justice will evolve.
As you can see
Common Ground is at a crucial point where the issues are much deeper than
rebuilding homes and removing trash. The issues are race and class and gender
and ageism and power. Someone has to stand up to the police and the drug
dealers to protect those people that are trying very diligently to rebuild their
lives in the lower ninth ward. The ninth ward community will have more of a
chance of surviving if the residents know that aid, relief, and protection are
available for the long-term. Common Ground is not presently in a situation to
provide protection to residents such as Grandma Gains who is 83 years old and
has lived in the ninth ward her whole life. She taught the cooks at Common
Ground how to make true New Orleans food. She lives with a padlock on her front
door, her windows are boarded up, and she has no electricity, no running water,
and no bed to even sleep in. Consider the people of the ninth ward, consider
letting others know what is going on, consider the efforts being made, and
consider staying the course for the people of the ninth ward.
Regardless of
whom you are, where you live, what you believe, what your occupation is, there
is nothing hiding this violence, you only have to walk around a single block in
the ninth ward once to know this.
Eliza Bishop
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