New Orleans Is Us

Marcus Mundy (on ladder) and his fellow Flight of Friendship fliers spend a day sprucing up the New Orleans house that Mundy's mom grew up in. Photo: courtesy of Patrick Eckford

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. -- William Shakespeare

I am certain that 19 months ago my cousin did not envision my sleeping in the extra bed in her trailer home. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

Still, I will spend another night in Peggy and Ellsworth Frank's FEMA trailer, another brief night of slumber, another early morning (this time to catch my flight), in the selfsame bunk bed I mentioned in an earlier note. Most of our Flight of Friendship "team" from Oregon is traveling back west today, having worked, observed and cared feverishly, while empathizing furiously, for a few important days in Louisiana.

Today's tale, however, is about a few generous Oregonian hearts and my last full day in New Orleans.

Today is the day I had reserved to honor my Grandma Mary, and my Grandma Lillian and Grandpa Vernel, and my Mom, and my cousins. To honor my family by working a bit to get the home in which my Mom grew up, a quiet little house ensconced near the corner of St. Anthony and Humanity Streets in the Seventh Ward, in a better state than when I arrived. I had hoped to spend some time and try to take their minds off of their misery by doing what I could in the time I had.

I got up early to pick up tools at a lifesaving place called Hands On Network, where tools can be borrowed and returned for the myriad day jobs confronting nonprofit agencies and individual New Orleanians as they seek to rebuild. I dropped them off at the house, went to the hotel, and rustled up the "crew".

Rather than undertaking this personal journey alone, as I had once planned, I was joined by a new "family" to complement the efforts for my own family. Sho and Loen Dozono, Kristen Dozono, Tad Dozono and friend Aaron, Sunshine Dixon, Patrick Eckford and the quintessentially useful Rick Denhart of the omnipresently helpful Mercy Corps all spent the better part of Wednesday working like dogs for people they had never met.

How they came to be there was a story in itself. Even back in Portland, at the planning meetings preparing for this trip, Sho and Loen (in particular) were doggedly obsessed with identifying a project with a personal, Portland connection. They kept asking, and eventually we determined that this project was do-able. (I was grateful for their offer, and glad to be able to do something tangible for my Mom's favorite little cousin).

After many eleventh-hour calls and through Mercy Corps's connections, I finally got through to the Hands On Network, which provided us the tools to work. The rest was Beaver State sweat equity, and it was delivered unflinchingly by the highly unpaid crew of volunteers.

Without hesitation or pause, they scraped paint (and scraped paint and scraped paint) in the heat, in the sunshine, on precarious ladders, at risk of lead-laden flakes inveigling their way into their pores, and did not stop until we had attacked most of the house (now home to my younger cousin Ayana and her family). They hammered loosened boards, ripped down no longer useful parts of the porch and house and the intrepid Patrick even went so far as to perform minor carpentry work (borrowing time and tools from the workers across the street) to shore up a bedraggled portion of the formerly-screened-in-now-open-air porch, and its support stanchions.

They would let Peggy and Ayana do precious little to assist, allowing them only to captain the trips to Lowe's for the occasional need such as paint or equipment.

They paused but briefly for lunch (tasty fried chicken, and greasy but delicious French fries; there wasn't a Zupan's around the corner) and then got right back to it. If they were on the clock, I would have had to pay them overtime, because I know it was more than an eight-hour day.

They refused to leave until we had made a noticeable difference, which to the crew meant painting (with primer at least) the front façade of the house so that that one thing was done for the family. It also meant honoring a request by Ayana that the symbol appearing on her house, and most houses in New Orleans, the big "X" with cryptic code denoting whether or not any dead bodies were found in a home after inspection by government authorities, be sanded off and painted over. The team undertook this particular job with alacrity.

Young Sunshine worked until it was time for her afternoon flight to depart, but the others toiled onward.

I was an awful painter but no one seemed to mind.

Not a complaint was heard throughout the day.

The pièce de résistance for me was that at the end of this long day, Mr. Eckford committed to returning later to more completely address the work we had not finished. (True to his word, he appeared the next day and continued his work.)

At long last what I found I had discovered -- and right near Humanity Street at that -- was humanity.
The personal act of giving themselves, and their time and effort, to fellow human beings was moving and meaningful, will be appreciated always and, despite it impacting just one little house on one little street in little old New Orleans, will be remembered forever by my family, the surprised recipients of this gift.

This was the best of Oregon, of the United States, of the world, encapsulated in small acts of generosity, sacrifice and kindness which made a difference to folks who hadn't had too much to be thankful for in the aftermath of this natural and manmade disaster.

This last, unheralded, unpublicized, hardly planned and barely organized event embodied for me what this trip was all about: finding and filling needs, caring for people as the individuals they are (not as the media fiction or, worse, nonentities they have become), and realizing that if smart people of goodwill want to make a difference in the lives of New Orleanians, they have but to make it happen.

My exhaustion at the end of the day was the best tired I have felt in a long time. As I showered in the too-short shower and laid down in the too-small bed in the too-expensive but still too-tiny trailer, I felt that the trip was worth it.

I trust, hope and expect that Portland, and all of Oregon, will continue the momentum established by this hardy group of citizens and help New Orleans all the way back. I thank the Dozonos, Brent Stewart, Bruce Sampson and Randall Edwards (the co-chairs for Flight of Friendship) for providing me the opportunity to receive (as so many FoF members mentioned on the final gathering Tuesday evening) much, much more than I gave on this visit to one of the greatest U.S. cities.

New Orleans is us.