[Original post: September 9, 2005]
We’re about to head north for a week, up to St Louis and Iowa City, because it seems extremely unlikely we’ll be permitted back into Orleans Parish within the next seven days. Joy and Paul, our friends and landlords, returned to Jefferson Parish on Wednesday, but when they tried to drive towards our neighborhood, armed soldiers turned them away. We managed to find our place on a satellite picture yesterday: the roof looks fine, and the water doesn’t reach the second floor.
We’ll return to Marksville next Saturday, because Paige is having an art show to raise money for the Garan shelter, and we’re going to help.
Yesterday, we went to the Family Services office and lined up for food stamps. The women working there were extremely efficient and good-tempered, considering the unusual glut of people. The very capable woman in orange directing foot traffic, who might be a former Miss Marksville, told us there are 3500 evacuees in Avoyelles Parish, though I suspect that figure doesn’t include people staying with friends and families who haven’t registered for any disaster relief.
FEMA has been spotted in the Marksville area, she said, but they're not "on the ground" yet. They're looking for a place to set up - a big place, apparently.
Food stamps are a sleek card – a Louisiana Purchase automated debit card, with DISASTER ASSISTANCE printed across the bottom. After filling in a form (name, age, race, income, plus an assessment of how much we’ve spent evacuating and how much we’ve lost), a staff member assigns a monetary value to the card. Ours is $274 for a month. The woman in orange announces to the waiting room that we can’t spend the money on paper goods (like diapers – a number of people are disappointed),alcohol, tobacco, or cleaning products. However, unlike regular food stamps, this card is good for hot food in the deli section of a supermarket.
We drove to Alexandria to see Joy, Paul and family – twelve people in a rented house, including six kids in borrowed school uniforms. Lester arrived; he’s a colonel in the National Guard, and had some stories to tell – of a wall of water on Tuesday morning inundating Jackson Barracks and filling the building in which he was standing with six feet of water in minutes; of taking out his son Robbie’s boat to rescue people in the Ninth Ward – 90 people in three days, the water chest-high and slick with oil, children falling off rooves, people desperate and dehydrated and in shock, calling for friends and family members who could not be found.
The highest part of the Barracks, near the levee, is drained now, but there’s a thick pungent sludge everywhere – oil and excrement and debris, dark and stinky. The whole place smells of death, Lester says. The Ninth Ward and Chalmette will need to be entirely rebuilt. “It’s the worst thing to ever happen to New Orleans in my lifetime.”
It’s a world away from this parish, where the leaves are starting to wither on the cotton bushes and the cotton harvesting machines are moving into position. We’ll miss Marksville while we’re away. More reports to follow.
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