Some Observations

Two trips to New Orleans to work on "rehabing" homes does not make me an expert on anything. But in the going, working, and listening to the different discussions, there are a few dimensions to the problems of assistance that were new to me and made me a little more tolerant.

The great horrors of destruction, evacuation, lack of centralized authority, and "red tape" are not the only sources of evil in the community. Most of us were surprised by the suggested percentage of out and out scams that were conducted in the area right after the hurricane. People posing as contractors who wanted up front money to get the supplies needed to repair, took the money, and never returned.

Another level of difficulties were the wonderful, good hearted, eager to help visitors who worked hard, did the repairs necessary, only to discover later that they had not learned all that was needed about the geography and building realities of the local area. Contractors, for example, who knew that in their home area you had to dig deep footers(one foot by one foot) to get below the frost line, did not learn from the locals that in the high water table you did not need to go deep but you needed to build wide (three feet by three feet) to hold up the homes.

There are lots of people still out of their homes who had good contractors, who did good work, and who worked with the owner, but somehow the amount of work to be done and the money did not match, and the home is 85-90% done but the home owner has no more money to finish the job and so still lives in an apartment and worries about if he will ever get home.

After five years it also seems that there is turn over in the leadership of some of the recovery efforts and programs. Young, eager, good hearted people who, in working with the volunteers who are coming down to help, discover that they themselves need more experience to make sure the planning for the volunteers is successful. It is not as easy as one thinks to make sure that the right tools, with all the right pieces, and all the necessary supplies are in place when needed. Volunteer groups come and find there is no work for them to do on a rainy day because the house only needed outside painting. Other volunteers found that they could not finish their work because not enough molding had been ordered. Other volunteers did by slow hand methods a job that could have been sped up by a cheap tool, but one that the young people may not even have known was available.

Administratively for those who run these recovery efforts they are caught in the bind between trying to get one house done quickly and having enough homes under rehabing to keep volunteers busy. One group found it was taking an average of 17 months to finish a house when they had a number of homes being worked on. But if they reduce the number of homes and get a shorter turn around on each home, they end up with fewer options for volunteer groups to work on.

I suspect that the obstacles in New Orleans are the same obstacles for most recovery efforts from disasters. This is not intended to be critical, except for the scams, of any one. These are the kind of problems that exist as one group of humans attempt to help other humans. They will be even more in evidence in Haiti and the time to rebuild Haiti will be even longer than Katrina.

The people in New Orleans say that something like 80% of the people who left have not yet come back to the city. Recovery is a very slow process. But like so much in our lives maybe we are not called to success so much as called to be faithful in the continuous effort to make our own lives and the lives of others a little better than they were. As the saying goes, every 1000 mile journey is made by one step after another.