Mad About Midd The Big Easy ain't easy

Author: Dave Barker

Curiosity drove me to New Orleans last week. My aunt didn't end up in a FEMA trailer. My roof didn't land in another zip code. I knew as much about the Big Easy as I did about the Big Dig, which is to say, very little, coming from the Pacific Northwest. I joined four friends with similar questions and landed in Louis Armstrong Airport with an address for the taxi driver, 1614 Pauline Street.

A week later, I can tell you why I went. You should also ask the close to 30 other Middlebury students who demolished houses, built houses, worked with kids, cooked meals, and spent money at businesses like the Maple Leaf Bar over J-Term and February break.

Jen Williams '08 decided to skip spring semester to continue working for the Common Ground Relief Organization on Pauline Street. Ask any of the 12 students from Associate Professor of American Literature and Civilization Will Nash's J-Term course that spent a week there why you should go. If they leave you unconvinced, try the eight students who were a part of the Middlebury Alternative Break trip. Sarah Applebaum '06, a New Orleans resident who went with Nash's J-term course plans on returning over Spring Break with a group of friends. Forget the Dominican Republic. You should go too.

Why go to New Orleans? Why buy an airplane ticket that will take you to a city where fewer than 20 percent of residents have returned? Why take the taxi to Pauline Street to work for Common Ground, a grassroots organization started in early September in one man's yard? From the morning meeting at Common Ground you'll be shipped into neighborhoods in the Lower Ninth Ward or in St. Bernard Parish to gut the interior of houses so they don't have to end up in the scoop of a bulldozer. You'll enter the houses clad in a tyvex safety suit and with a respirator clamped to your head. Expect to find glasses in the cabinets and light fixtures full of water. You might find a remote control lying on a moldy bed and a newspaper from Aug. 27 warning of an approaching hurricane, as we did. Why work in this toxic environment?

The residents who have come back provide the answer. People like a St. Bernard Parish resident named Bailey, who fled to Minnesota and returned to gut and rewire his house because he has lived in the city all his life. Talk up your taxi drivers, who are optimistic even while they drive you past the thousands of houses with a spray-painted diagram indicating whether any dead humans or animals were found inside.

These friendly and generous residents love where they live. No other city in America has such a high population of native-born residents. No other American city has such distinct traditions and culture as Mardi Gras, Creole cuisine and jazz funerals. "If you don't rebuild, the cultural cost is so great," said Nash.

Go to save a city, but know that you'll be enriching yourself and your education. "Getting out of what's comfortable is what's valuable about liberal arts," said Nash. Dan Berkman '06.5 gutted houses over Christmas break and returned with Nash's class. "Helping someone rebuild their house is a lot more important than an 'A,'" he said.

Go to New Orleans to listen to a local jazz band, to pound nails alongside the future home-owner, and to meet the returnees. "When you're in academia, you have tunnel vision. When you're there [New Orleans] you connect to the people and it's about the broader picture," said Emily Egginton '06 who spent three weeks in the city during J-Term.

I am still curious. How could you not go?