Over my Spring Break, I decided to spend a week in New Orleans as part of the Alternative Spring Break put forth by the law students association at Santa Clara to do legal aid work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Saturday, March 3
I flew in at around 5 pm and after some minor hassles ended up riding into the city with a professor who rented a van. Since there are 25 people in our group, we had to stay in two different places. One is the Dominican Conference Center next to the Loyola Univ. School of Law. For myself, I stayed with 7 others in my group at the India House, a hostel that is slightly closer to the downtown area. Both locations have been flooded by Katrina, and the scars on the neighborhood remain. The India House sits in a largely deserted neighborhood that is in the midst of rebuilding and the advice is not to venture out alone at night.
Sunday, March 4
Our day started in the Vieux Carre (French Quarter) where we lined up to get coffee and powdered sugar Beignets at the Cafe du Monde. We were free to roam the area until about 1 pm, and I went off with some guys to check out some souvenirs and bought a copy of the New York Times for $5 (!). We then ended up having a beer for lunch while we sat inside at a bar; it was basically too cold to sit outside since the weather was windy and in the 50’s.
In the afternoon, we ventured out to parts of the city that were flooded. It was clear that while some neighborhoods (like the French Quarter) bounced back fairly quickly, some communities took far longer to recover. We passed by houses and apartments, visible from I-10, that have been vacated since the hurricane. Whole complexes and neighborhoods were boarded up. As we went farther out of town, signs of the destruction was apparent. Hwy 90, which roughly runs parallel to the Gulf Coast, were lined with not houses but stilts for much of the way out of town. These were where entire houses had been swept away, leaving only stilts where the houses once were. Some residents had parked an RV on the property. Others had begun the process of rebuilding and every single house was placed on even higher stilts in these parts not protected by any levees. One of us asked whether it was wise to rebuild in these parts where it was clear the new homes would not stand a similar hurricane. But Californians also build and rebuild in face of earthquakes, so the psychology is similar.
We drove into Mississippi and followed Hwy 90 into Waveland and Bay St. Louis, ground zero for Katrina. Here, against the open gulf, nothing remained. The beachfront community was completely wiped out and even the trees were bare. I compared the area with satellite photos on Google Maps and only then did it become clear how complete the damage had been. The power of nature was thorough and had left nothing in its wake.
We returned to the DCC around 6 pm and had a meal of jambalaya with the group and had a meeting about the work assignments for tomorrow. After dinner, the big group who is staying at the India House decided to hit a bar, but I stayed behind to blog and to catch up on happenings with the free internet. There are only two power outlets in the room and it isn’t enough for all my electronics, but it will have to do for now.
Monday, March 5
We got up bright and early at the hour of 9 am to drive over to downtown NOLA for our work assignment. For those of us who initially applied to the IDP program, we were assigned to New Orleans Legal Assistance (NOLAC). Everyone got to pick a specialty to work on, and I chose litigation. I immediately had three assignments to research, one of which was high priority.
The case involved a resident who had a FEMA-installed trailer in his front yard. Now the city he lives in has summarily declared the emergency over and wants him to remove the trailer. Since he didn’t know that keeping the trailer required a permit, the city denied him a chance to get a hearing. Basically, no permit, no consideration for his circumstances. I got started on the research but were immediately confronted with a bunch of questions. Since my supervising attorney is in court most of the week, I had to communicate with him via email which he can only reply to in the evening, making communication very difficult.
After work, a large group of us went in search of food in the French Quarter. We arrived at “Snug Harbor” and had a sumptuous feast of fried calamari, mushrooms, fish, and gulf shrimp. The local Arabi Amber is a good beer and it goes down well with seafood. It was good spending the time to get to know the people in our group better. Everyone has a story and it’s not one that you hear being told in the Bannan Lounge back at school.
Tuesday, March 6
I think my persistent cough finally got Leland sick, so he stayed at the India House to recover while the rest of us went to work. Dan compared me to the monkey in Outbreak, which was actually pretty funny and quite a fitting comparison. I’ve been sick for almost two weeks now so I consider myself recovering, but I don’t know whether I’m still contagious. The fact that two other people got sick with almost identical symptoms pretty much means that I’ve got something to do with it. I’ve really tried to cough into containers and away from crowds in general and I don’t know what else I might have done (except maybe if I didn’t come). So yeah, sorry guys for taking the hit.
Continued to do research at work today. I was distracted the first working day while sitting in the law library, so I took the liberty to move into my supervising attorney’s office while he’s in court. It’s got windows and a lot of room so I was able to get more done. The basic difficulty is still trying to find an analogous case that would help our client and I just haven’t had much to go on and it’s frustrating, but I did come up with about three pages of research centered on the procedural due process case law from the Louisiana and U.S. Supreme Courts. Unfortunately that didn’t seem to be good enough because I got response that told me to refocus my research. I hate having to do this in the dark without an opportunity to get some timely feedback, but that’s what tomorrow’s for.
-Ben Kuo
