nola 5

Excerpts from an email to a friend:
I’ve been here for about a month now and it's really wearing on me. I’m kind of losing my head, and maybe you'll be able to tell throughout my following email that I’m not quite all there. It’s extremely difficult to feel effective.

Today I 'gutted' an elementary school. What that all means is pretty complex. as far as organizational structure goes...: the Louisiana dept of education contracted out the 'recovery school district' who
further contracted 2 other groups: the Boston Consulting Group, and Alvarez and Marsal. Both of these latter groups work internationally to organize businesses so they can run as effectively and efficiently as possible. One part of that efficiency is efficiency of cost. So the Boston Consulting Group has been working largely with volunteer efforts to gut schools.

Let me stop and explain the word "gut." in most cases, gutting entails debris removal from a building as well as mold abatement. Debris removal entails removing rotting material that has been sitting in a building since (as the dates on the chalkboards go:) August 29, 2005. Hurricane Katrina hit that day, created a 20 foot storm surge which broke levees all across the city and flooded houses up to 15 feet for as long as 3 weeks. The school we gutted today was flooded only about 6 inches and is one of the more pleasant schools to gut. So debris removal...imagine walking into a fully stocked elementary school and dragging out everything from the first floor, irregardless of the condition. (Some things are in new condition, i.e. many unused textbooks, unopened office supplies, iBooks, etc. -- all of which are thrown away because of the mold spores that have had time to settle. Other things are not so new - cockroaches and a bigger version called Palmetto Bugs are abundant and yet they still creep me out.) Now, on to mold abatement. The water that flooded this place wasn't very clean - New Orleans is an industrialized port city and also has a fair share of oil refineries, garbage dumps and is generally a pretty dirty city. The mold that formed after the water sat in building is practically toxic to respiratory systems. After debris removal, we sledgehammer out the drywall and then mold abatement either means bleach or "E.M." (Efficient Microbes) to kill the mold.

This is a pretty typical day.

Today was not typical for me. I’ll be honest: I’ve been pretty shitty lately. This is very hard to be here. And my grandpa died on Monday and the funeral is today and my mom is being really weird about it (it's her dad). And my dad just had surgery and my sister is in Europe for a month. Yeah. This is all pretty crazy. So I had a bit of a crazy breakdown today, where I was just kind of delirious and unable to work. I would walk into a classroom and just not know where to begin. Although is not an unusual feeling, I just didn't know how to do it today, and work was really hard. We also had the smallest crew yet at this school: 5 and one guy left like halfway through...so there were 4 of us. On an entire school. In 95+ degree weather. With inadequate gear and insufficient clean drinking water. Today was hard.

A friend from U of I came down to work for a while a few days ago and she bought me Chinese food tonight. It was really good to eat a fairly normal meal. I recently moved out of the volunteer housing because I didn't want to get raped, shot, or have my stuff stolen (all real concerns), so I have no reliable source of food at this point, and no income until about an hour ago. Eating dinner was nice.

I'm sure by this point you have to think I’m insane. Rightly so. I see this as sort of an experiment and also a gigantic learning experience. if you're interested to hear more of my rationalization/justification I can let you in on that to help you understand why I’m still here...I’m sure you have a fairly large amount of unanswerable questions you might want to ask, too (such as why is the gutting done by volunteers when the gov't pledges 'no child left behind', or why do I fear getting raped or shot, or why haven't I left, or, well, I’m sure you have some of those), and I’m willing to entertain some of those as this dialogue progresses.

Rereading my email I realize I’ve said a lot. You must understand though that when I came down here it wasn't the same situation but since then has morphed into this monster that I’ve been entangled into. Granted, home is only a train ticket away, I’m not sure I want to come back yet. This place is like a rollercoaster and I’m trying to enjoy the ride even though I’m scared for my life.