[StBernard] Pride (in the name of love)

[Westley Annis]

SUBURBAN DIARY
Pride (in the name of love)
By Melanie Lidman  |  April 6, 2006

Thornton Drive in Chalmette, La., looks a lot like any suburban street in my
hometown of Lexington. In the Thornton Drive of my imagination, I can see
children playing soccer in the yard, neighbors walking their dog, perhaps
someone mowing the lawn.

But the houses we saw on Thornton Drive were all abandoned. Like every one
of the 65,000 houses in Chalmette, the houses on Thornton Drive sat under 12
feet of water for more than a month after Hurricane Katrina. Today the
houses, overtaken by decay and black mold, are uninhabitable.

I never fully appreciated the community service requirement at Lexington
High School while I was there. But it must have meant something, because
here I am, 1,300 miles from home, encountering a reality I only saw on the
news and in the papers.

My current school, the University of Maryland, sent 130 students and staff
to volunteer in Louisiana over spring break last month with the National
Relief Network, a nonprofit that brings groups to disaster areas to help
with rebuilding efforts. Rose Golder-Novick, another Lexington High
graduate, and I were among those seeing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina
firsthand.

Our work for the week, as for the majority of volunteers in Louisiana these
days, was gutting houses. Everything had to go, from the beds to the broken
dishes to the door frames to the drywall, even the kitchen sink. ''We don't
demolish or destroy houses, we disassemble them," our guide John Gholson of
the National Relief Network explained. ''It's not just about rebuilding
homes, it's about rebuilding lives."

I could barely walk into our assigned house because everything was in
disarray: Beds were overturned, refrigerators were upside-down, and the
family's possessions were everywhere. The water had come so high that the
ceilings disintegrated, leaving 3 or 4 inches of shredded brown insulation
over everything. ''We saw a boat that was stuck between the roofs of two
houses," said Alana Yoffe, a participant from Baltimore.

I tried to imagine a boat stuck between two houses in Lexington. The
devastation in Chalmette was so incredible that it was sometimes hard for me
to remember that the place we were working was someone's home, a place that
holds thousands of memories about people we never met.

Within the first hour of work, I found a yellow envelope that I almost threw
away. Inside the envelope were moldy but still readable love letters
addressed ''To My Darling Wife."

Cleaning someone's home without knowing them was like putting together
pieces of a very personal puzzle. ''It was weird learning about the people
while we were working. We found his yearbook from 1939, all their CDs, their
old china," my friend Rose said. Chalmette resident Yvonne Landry had lived
in her home for 22 years and said it was ''heartbreaking to see all your
belongings out on the street. It's like someone evicted you, and I guess
it's like Katrina did."

Hearing the stories of the residents was an incredibly moving part of the
week. Resident George Dowd, who lived in Chalmette since 1958, was sure that
all but ''five or six" residents will come back to live on Thornton Drive.
''I weathered Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and it's been 40 years between [the
hurricanes], so I figure I'll be dead by the next one," he laughed.

But resident Donald Fraught disagreed, saying very few people will come back
to Thornton Drive. He planned to stay in his federally supplied trailer
until he can move far away from Chalmette. ''I always said we'll go back and
rebuild, but when I finally went back, I was like, 'no way,' " he said. ''I
still have grass stuck to the ceiling of our washroom."

At the end of the trip, we reflected on the work we did and the things we
learned in Chalmette. One group of 92 students finished gutting 11 houses
and started a few others. ''It's not just about the 11 families you affected
this week, it's also the people driving by who yelled 'thank you' out the
window," said Scott Harding, who founded the National Relief Network 12
years ago.

We got back on the bus for the 22-hour ride home bruised, battered, and
tired, but with feelings of accomplishment and pride. I'll return to
Lexington someday with a view of Louisiana that I could have never gotten on
the news.

Meanwhile, another group will come to Chalmette every week and clear the
memories out of more houses. Katrina may have been seven months ago, but
there's still much work to be done.

Melanie Lidman, a 2003 graduate of Lexington High School, is majoring in
Spanish and journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park.  
 


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