Two Reflections

As some of you already know, I am going to be spending the first eight days of my winter break in New Orleans with a group from the Sheil Catholic Center, my church on campus. We are going down to work with Catholic Charities through Project Helping Hands, a project put together after Hurricane Katrina that is working to make homes livable again so evacuees can return home. I have to observations that have risen out of this that I want to share and would welcome comments on. They are almost contradictory in some ways.

The first is that when I tell people I am going to New Orleans for the first part of my break, no one asks me what I am going to be doing or why I am going. I was telling my acupunturist/chiropractor's wife this afternoon that I was going and her response was "Thank you for going down there to help for all of us" essentially. I'm realizing that even though it seems that the country has forgotton about the Gulf coast and the issues of poverty and the distruction that was caused by the storm, heightening the awareness of the poverty, most people remember the tragedy enough to know that if you are going down to New Orleans this holiday season, it is probably not to hear some blues or eat some Cajun home cooking.

However, that reflection brought me to another observation which actually makes me angry. I noticed this summer that certain "news" stations would have hours devoted to this missing girl in Aruba. These "news specials" continued for up to six months after she disappeared and I stumbled across one again the other day. However, it is hard to find images and news about New Orleans and the Gulf coast that was devastated less than three months ago in the newspaper or on any news channel. Occasionally they might have a two minute segment but it apparently is not as riviting as the search for a white girl who disappeared half a year ago in Aruba. Thousands of people lost their lives or disappeared in the hurricane tragedies but it is not enough for the mainstream media to devote valuable airtime.

So even though everyone knows what I'll be doing in New Orleans this Christmas, the things I experience and see will be hard to transfer to them because of how little is being shared with the world three months later. Our campus minister gave us a statistic the other day that out of the 450,000 people who evacuated fro New Orleans, only about 150,000 have returned. We will be cleaning out fridges that have been left since people evacuated. We will be clearing debris from houses and yard, coming into contact with the devastation of massive flooding, and doing the bare minimum in some cases to make the roof keep out the rain or the walls keep out the wind. But we have no idea really what is will look like or feel like because our news networks and media outlets have abandoned us. I am certainly planning on doing some online searches for information because I feel that may be the only place I can go to prepare myself mentally.

Keep the Gulf Coast in your thoughts and prayers. The hardships suffered in the South deserve more thought and attention by the whole nation. How can we even begin to help those outside our borders when we have so many in need on our doorsteps.