St. Bernard Parish : Camp Hope
Miles Ross
I put on a bandanna and went to the kitchen. there were more people in there this time. more kept showing up. i helped with the salad. an americorp girl and i chopped things and put them in the salad containers. we worked up against the ipod stereo system while the rest of the kitchen hectically operated under the direction of a short girl wearing a bandanna and neat clothing. when dinner was all prepared, we carried and rolled it up to the gymnasium-turned-cafeteria. during this time i met a lot of the people that worked there, or i made eye contact with people and they must have thought: ’new person’. after dinner was ready i served food on the food line for about an hour. then someone took over for me. i sat at a table with some food. i stayed quiet and sat near the people i knew were also new. the people who had been there longer acted differently. they talked more, or ate very fast and went back to work - they talked to locals who they had friendships with. they looked comfortable in dirty clothes, had long hair, and carried themselves with the ease and pressure of routine. after i ate two plates at a moderate speed i returned to the serving line. a second wave of volunteers came to eat. a few straggling locals came to eat. then we just sat around behind the serving line and eventually no one else came.
photo by Jennie Clutterbuck
We started hauling things back to the kitchen where the trays, bins, and pots had already started to pile up on tables near the dish pit. three people were working the dish pit. it could have been a younger guy who didn’t get around to helping in the kitchen or a restless older woman or a random americorp person or a person like me who just felt comfortable and useful - in the beginning anyway. i helped wash while talking to the other people at each sink. the music had continued playing from dinner prep after being changed several times. someone put on paul simon very loud. the rest of the kitchen had been cleaned a little while after the dinner was sent off to the service line. around ten or eleven the kitchen was finally quiet and sat there waiting, desolate but comfortable... and random people would gather in it, or a single random person would come walking through looking for a cup, a snack. i learned that the kitchen would never really rest. i learned how different e.c. was from habitat and americorp though i was never really confused. people called each other baby, love, and were flirtatious. or people were strangers.
In the days to come we’d be drinking in it. mixing random flood liquors, sharing foam cups of daiquiris after hours. it was a good feeling when this was going on. sometimes when everyone wasn’t joining, it felt bad, excessive. for a few days there was actually a keg in one of the reefer trucks. half drunk off daiquiris i made my first phone call to a friend from home. i talked while lying in my tent in my classroom. i told them there were so many things i want to tell them about. it wasn’t about destruction or anything because there wasn’t much of that around. we had toured the 9th ward and things but to me inside camp hope was the most interesting. it felt good to be excited about something. when i returned two weeks later to my friends drinking and smoking to their mixed cds, as i had left them, i didn’t have much to say. it wasn’t worth describing at that moment anyway.
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