Fanua J. Borodzicz, who serves as assistant to the dean at Poynter, helped organize the recent Covering Hurricanes conference in New Orleans. When it concluded, she took some vacation time and stuck around New Orleans. Here’s her account of what she did and saw:
The bright sun streamed through my hotel room facing the Mississippi River this morning on Royal Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter. It could have been any other crisp December day in this city known for its Saints. Yet today was another of many days of recovery in an area devastated in so many ways by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.I heard on local Fox 8 News the night before that a group was planning to spend December 20th cleaning up the streets of the French Quarter. Here was a chance for me to volunteer to do something to help this healing community. It’s a place I visited once before at this same time of year a few years ago under merrier times, a community I returned to last week for a journalism conference about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and their effects on the local journalists who covered the story and experienced many of the things they wrote about.
As a visiting volunteer, I joined the management team from the Hilton Garden Inn New Orleans hotels, the Convention Center and the French Quarter/Central Business District properties. Our assigned task: cleaning the famous Bourbon Street from Canal Street to the end of the 900 block. With brooms, trash bags, cleaning solution and rags in hand, we spent about five hours today sweeping away debris. We hoped it would serve as a sign that New Orleans is getting back to normal — and that the French Quarter would lead the way. I had heard about a month or so ago that as the French Quarter goes so does New Orleans, and today it appeared to be true.
My new “colleagues” of determined souls, some whom had returned from evacuations to Texas, Alabama and Tennessee, represented to me the soul of New Orleans. They included people who had stacked up furniture to climb to the safety of rooftops to await rescue by helicopter, and others who returned three times to an abandoned family home to discover, each time, that more and more household items had been looted. They included people those whose families are contemplating whether to remain in New Orleans, as well as people whose families have already decided to stay put in places like Houston, never to return home.
These are among the many stories of this tragedy, as are the damaged houses on side streets along Canal Street, homes with spray painted markings on the doors and flooded cars scattered out front. I haven’t made it down to the 9th Ward yet, a major area of flooding once the levees breached. I’ll rely on the dedicated journalists here to carry these stories forward and keep us abreast of how goes New Orleans.
