From One of our Volunteers Sunday
A Marshall Moment – 4.16.06
It is Tuesday night and I have been in New Orleans for less than twelve hours…and my heart is careening. Folks, you cannot imagine it! Pictures and newsreels cannot capture it. The devastation of this deeply cultural, antique city is absolute and complete. It’s crushing. Homes all over the city stand as stark, skeletal reminders of life that once teemed but has been instantaneously erased. No building is untouched. The scars are deep, striking.
New Orleans isn’t sad or threatening. New Orleans is still, and quiet. The city breathes an almost inaudible whisper to passersby. “Please – don’t go. Don’t leave me. Help me.”
My hostess for the week, Janet Hines, first drives me through the Lakeview subdivision, site of the 17th Street Canal breach. Beautiful modern homes, much like you would see in Plano and Richardson, destroyed…abandoned. Trash is everywhere and debris piled fifteen feet high fills every block. My soul begins to grieve, but this is only the beginning.
Ten minutes later, Janet drives into another ground zero, the Ninth Ward. This was a poor neighborhood before Katrina, now it is a war zone. Here, the second breach attacked the most desperate of people. Though most escaped with their lives, none were able to save their memories. Katrina took it all. Nothing is inhabitable – it is gone. Rotting houses sit, broken in two, on top of upside down cars. None remains on its foundation and all look like they are photographs taken through a camera with a broken lens. Some are nothing more than roofs. It just feels wrong. The stench of death and decay fills the air. Surely this isn’t America! It can’t happen here. Birds do not sing, they don’t even fly here. The silence is ear splitting, as if time stopped in an instant, and may very well never return.
Our next stop is Chalmette, a little burg on the “boot” of Louisiana and a tangent suburb to New Orleans. Here, among similar ruin, we find streets that you can’t drive through because whole houses sit in the middle of them. On nearly every garage, owners have painted instructions for any who would come their way. “Help us!” “Do not doze my home!” “Unlivable, please knock this one down.” Neat old, blue collar neighborhoods of small brick homes are ghost towns. Everywhere you look – those monstrous piles of debris cast their eerie shadow onto the lanes. Here we see a few people, living in small FEMA trailers in their own driveways, solemnly spending every waking hour trying to salvage what little Katrina had not stolen from them.
But the image that burns in my mind and will haunt my dreams is, interestingly enough, a type of graffiti, each one a story in orange neon paint. In the days after Katrina, teams of personnel searched house by house for survivors. On each, the team would paint a large “X”. In the top quadrant of the crossbars, they wrote the date that the house was searched. The left and right quadrants displayed coded initials, designating which state they were from and which team from that state had been there. But the bottom quadrant holds the most ominous figure of all, the number of bodies found in that building. Nearly every one, by the grace of God, had a “0”. But as we drove through the ninth ward, my eye spotted a “1.” In that moment, my heart finally broke for the city of New Orleans, and tears began to trickle down my cheeks.
This morning as you read this - Easter dawns over this melancholy city. The hope of Jesus rises in a two-story school building in the heart of Chalmette. There, you will find Hilltop Rescue and its small band of volunteers who, even today as we dine on the fat of the land, will journey into the tombs and offer love, hope and resurrection to broken, forgotten people. Though your heart may try, it cannot fathom this place. This city cries out to us. On June 25, Prestoncrest’s youth will bring Light into this darkness. Every hour of every day, Hilltop Rescue already does.
It is Tuesday night and I have been in New Orleans for less than twelve hours…and my heart is careening. Folks, you cannot imagine it! Pictures and newsreels cannot capture it. The devastation of this deeply cultural, antique city is absolute and complete. It’s crushing. Homes all over the city stand as stark, skeletal reminders of life that once teemed but has been instantaneously erased. No building is untouched. The scars are deep, striking.
New Orleans isn’t sad or threatening. New Orleans is still, and quiet. The city breathes an almost inaudible whisper to passersby. “Please – don’t go. Don’t leave me. Help me.”
My hostess for the week, Janet Hines, first drives me through the Lakeview subdivision, site of the 17th Street Canal breach. Beautiful modern homes, much like you would see in Plano and Richardson, destroyed…abandoned. Trash is everywhere and debris piled fifteen feet high fills every block. My soul begins to grieve, but this is only the beginning.
Ten minutes later, Janet drives into another ground zero, the Ninth Ward. This was a poor neighborhood before Katrina, now it is a war zone. Here, the second breach attacked the most desperate of people. Though most escaped with their lives, none were able to save their memories. Katrina took it all. Nothing is inhabitable – it is gone. Rotting houses sit, broken in two, on top of upside down cars. None remains on its foundation and all look like they are photographs taken through a camera with a broken lens. Some are nothing more than roofs. It just feels wrong. The stench of death and decay fills the air. Surely this isn’t America! It can’t happen here. Birds do not sing, they don’t even fly here. The silence is ear splitting, as if time stopped in an instant, and may very well never return.
Our next stop is Chalmette, a little burg on the “boot” of Louisiana and a tangent suburb to New Orleans. Here, among similar ruin, we find streets that you can’t drive through because whole houses sit in the middle of them. On nearly every garage, owners have painted instructions for any who would come their way. “Help us!” “Do not doze my home!” “Unlivable, please knock this one down.” Neat old, blue collar neighborhoods of small brick homes are ghost towns. Everywhere you look – those monstrous piles of debris cast their eerie shadow onto the lanes. Here we see a few people, living in small FEMA trailers in their own driveways, solemnly spending every waking hour trying to salvage what little Katrina had not stolen from them.
But the image that burns in my mind and will haunt my dreams is, interestingly enough, a type of graffiti, each one a story in orange neon paint. In the days after Katrina, teams of personnel searched house by house for survivors. On each, the team would paint a large “X”. In the top quadrant of the crossbars, they wrote the date that the house was searched. The left and right quadrants displayed coded initials, designating which state they were from and which team from that state had been there. But the bottom quadrant holds the most ominous figure of all, the number of bodies found in that building. Nearly every one, by the grace of God, had a “0”. But as we drove through the ninth ward, my eye spotted a “1.” In that moment, my heart finally broke for the city of New Orleans, and tears began to trickle down my cheeks.
This morning as you read this - Easter dawns over this melancholy city. The hope of Jesus rises in a two-story school building in the heart of Chalmette. There, you will find Hilltop Rescue and its small band of volunteers who, even today as we dine on the fat of the land, will journey into the tombs and offer love, hope and resurrection to broken, forgotten people. Though your heart may try, it cannot fathom this place. This city cries out to us. On June 25, Prestoncrest’s youth will bring Light into this darkness. Every hour of every day, Hilltop Rescue already does.
posted by Hines Family at 11:03 AM
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