My last few spring breaks have consisted of lounging around, drinking heavily and doing a lot of nothing. I was sick of it, so last week I chose to mix it up and head down to New Orleans with GU’s Habitat for Humanity group. The 24 of us were excited to get down to business and build some houses when we arrived.
Unfortunately, when we pulled into Trinity Church, where we stayed for the week, we learned that we wouldn’t be able to start right away because of inspections. This was frustrating, but we were given a laundry list of chores to do around the church instead. I was happy to help out until I sat down for our first dinner at the church.
There, I learned that Trinity Church is the kind of evangelical institution most of us encountered for the first time in Borat. At each meal, we were given sermons about the role of Jesus Christ in our “missionizing,” and it quickly became clear that the Church didn’t respect our multi-faith group, consisting of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and atheists. This wouldn’t have been so bad if we weren’t paying the church $150 each to stay there—they were profiting from our stay and trying to impose their beliefs on us.
Their pastor told us that the worst thing in life isn’t to die, but that it is to live without a personal connection with Jesus Christ. Another member of the church told us that “even if [we didn’t] know it, our good work is in the name of Christ.” Everyone that spoke to us seemed incapable of conceiving of service without a Christian foundation.
When we went into the city for the first time, our first destination was the Lower 9th Ward, a poverty-stricken, primarily African-American neighborhood. It had been hit particularly hard by Katrina, but I expected it to be well on its way to recovery. When we arrived and saw huge piles of debris, concrete steps that led to nowhere, and decaying homes with distress calls spraypainted on their rotting outer walls, I couldn’t believe it. I wondered how so little progress had been made in the three years since Katrina.
It didn’t take long to learn that there were a number of obstacles in the way of progress. A shocking amount of men walked the streets purposelessly, handles of liquor in their hands. At one point we stopped at a gas station in the city, and the African-American attendant asked why were in town. When we told him we were from Georgetown and were there to build houses, he told us that “we went to an all-white school” and could never understand the black community’s problems, let alone help alleviate them. Later, we encountered a white contractor planning a new community of houses near the Lower 9th ward, and it was clear he’d be profiting greatly from those displaced by the hurricane. These, and a host of other issues that popped up during the trip, all pointed to a breakdown of race relations within the city.
As we headed into center city, we noticed a massive tent village under the highway overpass, and we were told that the people living there had been kicked out of their FEMA trailers by the government. Once again, I was shocked by the seeming lack of interest in improving lives and effecting change.
To make matters worse, our first day on the work site with Habitat was inefficient and frustrating. Several of us spent the afternoon organizing a supplies trailer and sorting nails from one bucket to another, all while one of the organization’s supervisors lazily sat on a chair and bossed us around. After our first two days in New Orleans, we had done nothing more than sort a trailer and move some piles of lumber. Our group’s morale dropped rapidly.
Thankfully, things turned around during the last three days of the trip. The weather got much nicer, we built several exterior and interior walls of a house, put in insulation in another, and met the man who’d be moving in with his family and grandmother. Being able to attach a face to the project really helped, and it gave us the sense of purpose that we were missing for the first few days of the trip. When we left, I think we all felt that we’d helped create affordable housing for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to own a home.
One morning, before heading to our work site, the director told us she hoped we’d leave New Orleans with more questions than answers. I think that was her way of telling us that rebuilding was a complex process that wouldn’t have easy answers, which was evident after our time there.
