The Big Easy - Tucker Page

New Orleans is the friendliest city that I have ever visited. Sure, people back home in Portland are friendly, but only if you act friendly around them; Europeans always surprised me with their friendliness toward total strangers when I was in London for study abroad, but New Orleanians take friendliness to an entirely new level. It seems like people here go out of their way to be nice. People actually say hi to each other in New Orleans, or at least acknowledge each other’s existence; the "I'll just walk past you like I don't know you're there" mentality that one sees so frequently at Duke or in big cities like Boston is conspicuously absent here.

I am not entirely sure why all of this friendliness has shocked me so much. I guess I would have thought that people who had so recently gone through such a life-changing event as Hurricane Katrina would have been in worse spirits. What I have seen here, though, has been far more complex. New Orleanians certainly still face innumerable hardships. I have met numerous people whose homes were destroyed; some have rebuilt, but some are still living in FEMA trailers or are still in the process of gutting their houses. One doctor that I work with at the Health Department told me that his wife and children are now living in Baton Rouge while he works in New Orleans; although he visits them on weekends, he told me that after thirty years of marriage, he had never been away from his wife for as long as he had been over the past two years. Nevertheless, people seem to reserve their anger for organizations like FEMA or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and not for other people.

I had never felt uncomfortable being thanked until I came to New Orleans. Everybody thanks us for coming here to volunteer, from my supervisor at the Health Department to my co-workers to completely random people whom I have met around the city. This wouldn’t make me feel so strange if I actually felt like I had already done something meaningful here; we have only been in New Orleans for a week. Even looking toward the future, I don’t feel like I could ever possibly make a dent in the enormous amount of work that everyone at the Health Department has on their plates. I am beginning to think, though, that people just appreciate the idea of us being here more than anything else. No doubt New Orleanians would like us volunteers to actually do something constructive, but the mere fact that we are here in New Orleans seems to be important to them. Just by being here, of course, we are supporting the local economy. On a deeper level, though, I think New Orleanians are happy to see that two years later, people still care about them. Especially as the government continues to renege on many of its promises to those affected by Katrina, it seems as though people here draw emotional support from the fact that the American public has not forgotten about New Orleans.

-Tucker Page