Bill Shore’s Letters

Letter from New Orleans About the Voices You Can't Forget

March 2006

I've just returned from my fourth trip to New Orleans since the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina seven months ago. I usually take meticulous notes to write you a letter like this, but this time I didn't need to because what I saw and heard was unforgettable. Since you've read my words from here before, I'll instead share the voices of a pair of restaurateurs, a doorman, a school superintendent and a fisherman, just a few of the voices of the many courageous leaders in the community we encountered that still echo in my ears.

Since 1946, Dooky Chase and his wife, Leah, have been at the helm of a restaurant that is considered New Orleans premier Creole dining experience. Now 83 and living in a trailer, Leah showed us the devastation wrought by Katrina on the restaurant they hope to rebuild.

"This is the stove I've cooked on for 50 years. I cooked meals on this stove for Duke Ellington, Daddy King, Thurgood Marshall, John Kennedy, Lena Horne. Now it's gone. But now the company that made it is going to send me a new one. All my life I've tried to do things for this community. Katrina only told me I didn't do enough. If this community had been better off people wouldn't have suffered as they did from the storm."

Over dinner at the Upperline Restaurant, owner, JoAnn Clevenger, explained:

"The word restaurant has its derivation from the Latin word restaurer, which means, 'to restore.' That's what restaurants do. They are a chance for people to restore themselves and their family. And now we have to do that for our community."

Our delegation stayed in the French Quarter at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, where doorman Wayne Anderson, in blue uniform with gold brocade, has worked for 18 years. The French Quarter was mostly spared by the storm, but not the people who work there. As we boarded our van, Wayne told us:

"Only 220 of our 500 staff are back. It's tough because employees don't have housing or schools for their kids. And everyone you see working here was hit professionally and personally. Debbie, who set your breakfast table this morning had just bought a new house in Lakeview and was selling her old one. She lost both and then found out that her mother had been lost as well. I keep thinking of all of these people I've known my whole life but haven't seen or heard from for seven months. It's a void you can't fill."

St. Bernard Parish sits on the border of New Orleans and 100 percent of the homes there were flooded when the levees broke. It is predominately white, blue collar, hard working, with a reputation for being scrappy, even tough. Doris Votier, its superintendent of schools, is all of those things. She prefers plain speech to political spin, action over apathy.

"We're used to evacuating. Every one here has done that and every time you pack a little less figuring you'll be back in a day or so. Our school had been used as a shelter many times in the past. So we thought we were prepared. We copied all of the students records and shipped them off-site. We rounded up all of the food from the cafeteria. Then people started showing up. We had several people in wheelchairs. We had two boys on ventilators. We had elderly with Alzheimers. We had a man with an oxygen tank and an amputee to the torso.

The fire department dropped off about 12 firefighters and I heard on one of their radios that a wall of water was headed toward us. We had to carry everyone upstairs by hand and then people arrived by boat and we had to drag them through second story windows. We didn't have time to get the food. We had no electricity in here so it was dark and 90 degrees and 100% humidity so I asked the fire department to break one window over there and another over here so we could get some air in here. I sat and held the hand of the man who only had two hours left on his oxygen tank.

And nobody came. Nobody bothered to come check on us as they say. The first people we saw, four days later was a Canadian search and rescue team. They were the only ones. I was able to get in a boat and go up the Mississippi, 10 hours, to Baton Rouge where my family picked me up."

Doris called modular classroom and trailer companies from around the country until 18 had been donated. She called teachers and asked them to come back. Students, mostly the children of first responders, started to arrive. There used to be 14 public schools in St. Bernard parish and 8,800 students. Today there is the one school that Doris Votier willed into existence. It opened 11 weeks after the storm, on November 14, with 334 students. By January, it had 1,056 and today, there are 2,200 from 3 years old to 12th grade--all of them living in trailers or motel rooms.

Doris added,

"They used to wear uniforms but no more, not only because they no longer have them, but because even if we gave them new uniforms they have no where to wash them. Every activity of daily living is a challenge now. The closest place to get your mail is a 50 mile round-trip. We have nothing. We have no money. We don't even have books in the library. 25,000 books were destroyed. But the kids are happy to be here. They love coming here. When they are not here they are cooped up in a trailer."

Hopedale, Louisiana is a fishing village about 30 miles from New Orleans. If you've ever enjoyed shrimp or oysters you likely have the fisherman we met with to thank. We sat under a bright sun on a dock by calm water, talking to about a dozen third and fourth generation fishing families whose way of life has been almost totally destroyed. It's been seven months since they've been on the water. The marshes and bayous they ply are still clogged with capsized boats, trees, and other debris that makes fishing impossible. The ice house so critical to their trade no longer stands. Each of them told us their story and how badly they wanted to get back to work. The last to speak was one of the younger men, Nicky Alfonso:

"I can't really talk much about this because frankly I'll just start to cry. Katrina turned me into a crybaby. I never cried once in my life except for a close family member, and now I can just be driving down this road and I'll start crying. So I can't really talk about it with you."

Obviously the need in Louisiana is far greater than Share Our Strength or any one organization can address. Yet this is among the best work we've ever done. We have a continuous staff presence on the ground. We're closer to the people we're serving and the frontline organizations we're supporting, have a deeper understanding of their needs, and we're allocating resources faster than many others and committing ourselves for longer. That's why Share Our Strength has already granted more than $640,000 to food banks, schools, and community foundations among others, with more to come in the weeks, months and years ahead." We may not have been first responders, but we've got a lock on second, third and fourth because we are there to stay.

It's this long-term commitment that is most critical but also most challenging and that most requires your interest and support to sustain.

In his 1970 Nobel acceptance speech, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said:

"What seems to us more important, more painful, and more unendurable is not really what is more important, more painful, and more unendurable but merely that which is closer to home. Everything distant which for all its important moans and muffled cries, its ruined lives and millions of victims, that does not threaten to come rolling up to our threshold today we consider endurable and of tolerable dimensions."

Share Our Strength keeps returning to Louisiana again and again, not only to make grants, or perform service, not only to bear witness, but to remind ourselves that the suffering being shared there today, by black and white, by old and young, should be neither endured nor tolerated.

As always, thanks so much for your friendship which sustains us and your commitment to Share Our Strength.

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