St. Bernard Parish : Arabi
Carrye Castleman-Ross
massive emergency response headquarters, with a food bank, portable showers and toilets, 3 medical tents and a FEMA trailer park. The area is just blocks from the levee break that doomed the Lower 9th Ward on one side and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet that created the storm surge that flattened St. Bernard Parish. It was completely inaccessible until 2 months ago and is still under an enforced dusk-to-dawn curfew.
photo by Katherine Pangaro
If the Uptown Highlands of the Garden District and the French Quarter are like an accident victim slowly learning to walk again, Arabi is still completely comatose. To a person, the first reaction upon seeing the destruction here is that it is SO incredibly much worse and more widespread than you could have ever imagined, almost unbearably overwhelming, simply stunning. The massive shipping barge that broke its mooring and breached the levee is sitting in the middle of the street now, with the tail-end of a school bus protruding from underneath it. Houses are piled atop each other like grotesque wooden accordions in the direction that the flood rushed in; cars, trucks and boats sit crushed, crumpled and covered with mud on both sides of the road and in the median. Huge sheds once used to store Carnival floats have had their walls sheared off, exposing statues of Proteus, Hermes and Osiris staring maniacally out upon the wasteland. Mardi Gras beads are everywhere; strands of them hang from trees, lie embedded in the mud, roll loosely down deserted streets. The whole effect is that of a horrific, fantastical circus in Hell. It is no less than apocalyptic, and truly beyond belief. Nothing I saw on my earlier visit remotely prepared me for this, simply because the scope of it is so thoroughly, devastatingly total. And here in the midst of the ruins are little miracles like Emergency Communities, bringing compassion and strength to the people through their daily offering of healthy, delicious meals made and served with pure love.
A similar kitchen in Waveland, Mississippi, which opened immediately after the hurricane and successfully served hundreds of displaced locals a day, inspired Emergency Communities to start a site in Arabi, after seeing the overwhelming ongoing needs of the residents trying to rebuild their lives and the massive influx of workers coming in to restore the infrastructure.They attained non-profit status and exist solely on donations from the public, a few generous corporate sponsors, and the endless energetic efforts of volunteers from around the country. Students from Oberlin, Bard, UGA, Simon's Rock...families wanting to get directly involved, groups of people in 2's and 3's driving down from Oregon, California, Iowa, Vermont, all at their own expense and willing to sleep in tents pitched on pallets to elevate them above the contaminated ground, use
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