Friday, June 23: Meet Nola
Another day, another wireless network. ALA is the apt name of the one I’m hooking up to in the Morial Convention Center, where an army of people who look more or less like me or my mother-in-law have converged to talk shop and bag all the freebies we can charm out of the vendors who are here to woo. For better or for worse, I fit in with this crowd. I’ve seen more pairs of Crocs than I can count and several pairs of the bright lime green variety that I left back in Florida. I’ve seen numerous pairs olive green khaki pants and cotton print skirts. Tons of brown frame glasses, and of course a sea of blue Ebsco lanyards. Normally I feel a little out of the fashion step, but here I must sheepishly admit that I pass. Not that there’s anything wrong with the way we librarians tend to dress, but there’s a definite aesthetic at work.
I got up at 7 and slapped together a bagel-egg sandwich to devour on my way to the convention center to meet up for Libraries Build Communities, the first of two days of community service that ALA has organized for attendees who want to volunteer. I claimed my yellow shirt and waited for the Habitat for Humanity bus. We pulled onto the elevated interstate and headed I think west, towards the ninth ward. Needless to say, the barely marred if really empty Warehouse District soon gave way to scenes we all remember from CNN. The route was roundabout, and there was some speculation that the bus driver was giving us a special tour of the disaster zone, but I found out later that he really was lost. So we got to see quite a few side streets and quite a few spray painted messages that brought to life the stories that have been seeping out since the hurricane: 9-14 TFW 2 Dead Dogs. X. (I just Googled TFW and found out that it was code for Toxic Flood Water. The rest of the messages are pretty self-explanatory.) Those messages took a while to sink through the buzz of feeling like we were witnessing history. What struck me right away is how awful and deserted everything still looks. It’s been 10 months. 10 months. There is no flurry of activity or tentative stake on normalcy. There is still garbage on the streets. There are a very few homes that have been fixed up nicely and a few that haven’t been fixed up but have people living in them, back to stick it out I guess. It remains to be seen if physically being here will be enough to get them a say in what happens in their neighborhoods. All appearances point to a smoke out, in which real estate developers are simply biding their time and waiting for evacuees to sign leases elsewhere and give up on their homes. They’ll pay them dimes on the dollar and tear it all down. Everyone should see this, because my guess is that this is the future of our country. Those with private resources will be able to do whatever they want, like rebuild ruined homes, and those without will lose their stake forever because of one storm or earthquake or whatever happens to be in your neighborhood.
If there’s any reason to think that this scenario is not inevitable, it is projects like the one I worked on with Habitat for Humanity. The project’s name was the Musicians Village. They are building 75 homes in a block and encouraging as many musicians as they can find to apply to buy one. This will be neighborhood with spunk and hope. I could already feel it as I rolled white paint across the new siding. I met with a couple of the future owners and they are ecstatic. Hope was alive in this little corner.
After a shower, I joined the librarian crew for a vendor dinner at Colleen Salle’s house on Chartres (pronounced Char-ters, not the French way) which consisted of muffaletta’s and wine. Yum. The best part was the location, an old French Quarter apartment will tall ceilings and white walls, opening onto a verdant patio, tucked away from the street noise and shared among the block of apartments. All in all, an elegant introduction to the Quarter.
The other intern in our room arrived that evening. She is a Spectrum scholar from Hawaii and had already been here for two days attending a leadership workshop. We teamed up to go to Many Voices, One Nation. 13 authors, mostly from New Orleans and a few who had some other type of connection read. Strong words were had by all. Most of what I had suspected while driving the streets of the ninth ward was confirmed by their observations from the ground. They were angry but fierce in their love for the city and their refusal to lose it. If I were rich, I would have bought a copy of all of their books. There were quite a range—stories by New Orleans school kids collected by Abram Himelstein and the Neighborhood Story Project, poems by Martin Pousson (who proudly dropped the F-bomb twice, and in reference to George W—yeah library crowd), Kalamu Ya Salaam (whose harrowing performance of poetry as jazz about New Orleans and Katrina got me really stirred up), a first hand account of this wonderful life in the ninth ward projects and why it should be brought back as-was, not as some would like it, by Ashley Nelson, and more poetry by Lee Maitzen Grue. Loved it. And what better follow it up with than a midnight snack of beignets and coffee provided by the reception. They were tasty, but I’m reserving final judgment until I get to Café du Monde. I walked back to the hotel with my fellow intern and soon crawled between the covers, wondering if and how I would dream about the city I am just beginning to taste.
Way behind!
A series of posts will be forthcoming. There's plenty of wifi around here but not in my hotel room, and also so much to do. It's seemed silly to take time out of participating to keep up to date. Next week will be a heavy posting week I predict 
Okay, time to settle in for Open Source Programs for the Reference Librarian…
