The Wheels on the Bus

            Today we took a bus tour to different parts of tragic yet beautiful Nawlins. We hopped out on several occasions in the scathing heat to listen to our tour guide, Mary, talk about the levy that broke because the barge was left in the water during Hurricane Katrina. We actually stood on top of the levy, and as she spoke, I imagined the now vacant lots filled with houses being swept away by the water.

            Out here, so many houses are raised off of the ground several feet by concrete blocks. Mary pointed to this one house that looked like a giant double-decker carousel, and proceeded to tell us it could float! To me, these things seem like an explicit sign of the people’s preparedness and fears, a sign that disaster struck once too close to home to not take precautions in the future.

            Mary also showed us Dillard University, a beautiful campus with a predominately black population and all-white colonial buildings. Several of the dorm buildings were still being worked on: that many years later after Hurricane Katrina, there was still work that needed to be done and things that needed to be repaired. This idea of limbo between the past and the present reveals itself in many different ways here: the unfinished school buildings, the vacant lots, raised houses, and countless triage X’s on the front doors of houses, stating the date, time, and number of people found dead after the search and the extraction of the flood water.

            We finally took a ride through Cancer Alley, a desolate and eerie neighborhood that was never renovated after the storm. It reminded me of those plastic doll-like families and the houses they built out in the middle of the desert to do nuclear tests. The buildings were abandoned during the day, but at night, Mary said it was a crime infested and drug ridden place: in fact, just two weeks earlier, a fifteen year old boy was shot and killed there.

            The story behind cancer alley really shocked all of us. The whole neighborhood was built on landfill and waste from the previous storm. The government decided to build houses geared toward new homeowners and didn’t tell the buyers that their homes were basically built on this toxic waste. When people started getting sick, and when cancer rates increased, the families started to ask questions. They went to court and the homeowners won the case. The government tested the soil, decreed it was toxic, removed two feet of dirt (of the fifteen feet the houses sat atop on), and dumped the dirt less than several hundred feet away from the houses! People today are still trying to get fair compensation for their losses and illnesses but barely any progress has been made. It frustrated me so much, and my thoughts were mimicked with cries of, “Are you kidding me?” and “Wait, what?”  Uncovering this history and injustice while seeing it is very moving, but knowing that there is so much to overcome, even dealing with things that happened so long ago, can sometimes be disheartening. We can only hope that we take the stories we hear, share them, and hopefully use what we know to create change in what ways we can, if that’s only in our own communities. We have to start somewhere, right?

-Aurora