Where Paint and Hope Collide

            The teal-colored paint was all over my shorts, shirt, work gloves and skin. I stood atop the metal ladder and finished off the side of a house, brushing from side to side. It was such a small thing – such a tiny drop in the bucket – but at least it was something.

            I’ve been wanting to get to New Orleans ever since August of 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city and Gulf Coast region with the worst natural disaster in American history. At the time, though, I had an infant and a toddler at home, so it wasn’t easy to leave them for a service trip halfway across the country. This year, though, I was asked to chaperone six teens to New Orleans for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s triennial national youth gathering. One of our five days in New Orleans would be dedicated to service. With my kids now older, it was a better time to leave them and my wife and get myself to the Big Easy. Last week, we made our trip.

            I was impressed with the degree to which New Orleans’ main tourist districts are still thriving. Led by its delicious food, vibrant music and festive atmosphere, the city has shown an astounding determination to survive. But when we took a bus trip to the Seventh Ward last week for our day of service, the atmosphere was different. In the area we visited, it seemed as if 60 percent of the houses were renovated, while the remaining 40 percent were abandoned or boarded up, with vegetation growing unchecked. I know that other sections of the city are in even worse condition than this. Many individuals have chosen not to return to New Orleans, and have started their lives over again in new cities and states. This is the biggest heartbreak of New Orleans, post-Katrina – that it still, at times, resembles a third-world country. In the United States of America.

            Some of the New Orleans residents who are rebuilding their homes have received help from the government and from non-profit organizations. Our work last week involved collaboration with Habitat for Humanity. As we arrived at the homes we’d be painting on North Villere Street, teens and adults from states across the country hopped out of two buses and started covering the outsides of two homes with colored paint – one of them teal, the other army green. The teens from my church painted the porch of the teal-colored home, while my fellow chaperone and I took on the side of the house. As we dipped and brushed, the homeowner of the green house arrived along with her brother. In true Habitat spirit, they grabbed paintbrushes and got to work as well.

            When we had finished painting the teal house, I helped put away the ladders, then walked over to the homeowner’s brother. I asked him what the experience of Hurricane Katrina had meant to him. He answered with an optimism that surprised me: “Katrina was meant to come to New Orleans because it taught us how to get away,” he said. “So many people here only knew New Orleans, but Katrina forced us to leave and learn about other places.”

            New Orleans, he said, will always be home. But the evacuation had helped him to make an informed decision on whether or not he wanted to live here, he said. I asked him if New Orleans will survive this. “Oh yeah,” he said, adding that the city’s residents wouldn’t give this town up because “we love to party too much.” When I asked him if America had forgotten New Orleans, he pointed to people like us who were venturing out of the tourist zones for the first time, in order to help.

            The bus was packing up, as we had finished painting the teal house, with the green one nearly done as well. I shared with the man how much I’d been wanting to get to New Orleans for the past seven years. Now that I was here, though, it felt like such a small thing. A few hours of help on one house, out of the many thousands still in need of love and labor.

            The young man turned to me and said what I knew to be true: “Every little bit helps.” From what I can see, America has not forgotten New Orleans. But there is still so much to be done there. It is one of our truly unfinished jobs. I am home again now, but I don’t think it will take seven years for me to get back again. I’ve got paint-stained clothes to remind me.