The Water is Falling -Reid Cater

How can you not feel good when the water is falling?

There are a lot of reasons not to feel good in New Orleans, especially if you have lost your home and don't have the money or experience to even begin to rebuild. Yet, there I was at a meeting for homeowners who had lost everything and I was being asked how someone could not feel good. Looking outside the window of the trailer at a former church and school, now a warehouse and headquarters for Catholic Charities' Operation Helping Hands. I began to understand what that could mean. Progress may be painfully slow, but New Orleans is healing. People are slowly finding the money and help to turn their gutted houses back into homes. Working with Operation Helping Hands through DukeEngage this summer I hope that I will be able to watch the water continue to fall and maybe pump a little out myself.

Operation Helping Hands is a division of Catholic Charities that works with homeowners of all faiths to repair and rebuild their homes. We have programs that bring in volunteers from across the country to gut houses and do exterior work, i.e. painting, as well as a rebuilding program that guides homeowners through the process of completely renovating their gutted homes. (Since I am working with them as an intern this summer I guess that I can say "we" though I don't feel like I have earned that yet.)

An hour or so into my first day I found myself dialing the number of a Katrina survivor who had called our helpline, wondering what I would say. I had been given the job of calling people back and figuring out if they fit into one of our programs. After several calls and plenty of questions for my boss I began to get the hang of the calls. Some of the the people who called in needed help gutting their homes. Gutting is the process of tearing out all the drywall and destroyed personal items in a house and it is the first step towards rebuilding. However most of the callers had gutted their homes and were ready for the next and much more difficult step of putting the "guts" back into their houses so that they could finally move home.

Helping Hands provides gutting and painting free for those in need using volunteer labor and donations. Since most volunteers are not skilled enough to wire a home or put in the plumbing and dry wall the rebuilding program focuses on putting homeowners in contact with reputable contractors (working the phones I heard several stories about contractors who literally left holes in the walls) and acting as a mediator between the homeowner and contractor during the rebuilding process. Homeowners pay for the work themselves using funds from insurance or from "The Road Home" (a convoluted, federally-funded state-run, privately adminstrated-program that seems to be widely despised). Often there is a significant gap between the cost of rebuilding and a homeowner's avaliable funds. In these cases Helping Hands tries to fill the gap with donated materials and skilled volunteers. It is my job to explain all this to people who are desperate to move back into their homes as soon as possible. If they are interested I invite them to one of our meetings where they can hear more (from people who have been with helping hands much longer) and sign up if they like the program.

At the meeting I saw dozens of people packed into a small tralier on the grounds of St. Raymond's Church which was itself flooded in the storm. Many were elderly an/or disabled and all were fighting the frustration of being out of their homes for two years. And yet, after the meeting it was one of them who reminded me that no matter how bad things were or still are here on the Gulf, the waters are falling.