Crystal Bailey took the wheel, accompanied by Katie Stump and Melanie Twohy (not pictured), during fall break for a memorable road trip to assist victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in and around New Orleans.       Shortly after the levees broke and flooded the city of New Orleans late last summer, Fuld Fellow Crystal Bailey shared her Atlanta apartment with two evacuee friends, both public health students at Tulane University, until they could figure out how to resume their lives. It made for an interesting fall semester, especially when Bailey and two fellow nursing students hopped in the car during fall break to assist with relief efforts in New Orleans. Their trip was sponsored by the Emory International Student Nurses’ Association, which Bailey leads as co-president. She chronicled the experience, excerpted here, during a bittersweet journey to her childhood home.           Dear Friends and Family:     hope this letter finds you all doing well and enjoying the changing colors of fall. At the beginning of September, I resumed classes at Emory School of Nursing and eagerly anticipate next summer when I will become a registered nurse! I was also blessed by having friends from New Orleans [Whitney Fry and Jen Pollard] stay with me, though my little apartment could hardly hold the chaos of all our lives! It was a challenge to keep encouraging them through the daily changing “what am I to do now?” frustration they faced. We spent a lot of time volunteering at shelters and when the opportunity came to return to New Orleans, guess who went too? Me, of course! So the leash that had been holding me back from rushing down to help in this disaster was finally released, and I filled my car with gas, my friends [Emory nursing students Melanie Twohy and Katie Stump], and hit the road during fall break [a week after Whitney and Jen returned to New Orleans].                     At first glance     s we drove through southern Mississippi, we noticed how the tall pine trees lining the interstate were snapped in half, and the billboards all but destroyed. Crossing into Louisiana, just north of New Orleans, there seemed to be little destruction. After driving across Lake Ponchartrain and into NOLA, we kept our eyes peeled for water lines on everything, roofs torn off, and boats on freeways. Happy to say this was not the case. It’s pretty much all still there, with spotty damage. While some buildings looked fine, others showed signs of massive damage, with chunks of the building missing, windows broken, and—possibly the best indicator of damage—a huge pile of wet furniture and carpet out front. Keep in mind this is six weeks post-Katrina. While many have returned to clean out what is left, many also have not, particularly in the hardest-hit areas. Commendations are owed to the crews who cleared all the roads, restored power in almost all places, and pumped the city dry. The city was lively with people returning to open businesses and fix their homes. The French Quarter had very little damage, and Bourbon Street is leading the way in restoring the bar and music culture of the city. Each day the city became livelier, and returning neighbors greeted each other with huge hugs that’ll choke you up. We’d planned to stay with Whitney, but since her power was still off and mold was growing in the stifled air, we stayed at Jen’s, whose apartment in uptown was fine.                     Cleaning up at home     any people are coming home and finding their places have received much less damage than anticipated because for a month they had grieved the loss of everything they had. Piles of damaged goods are on the street curbs because many homes had some sort of flood damage. The U.S. Army Corps came around after the storm and tarped each home that had a leak, bless them. The funniest site, perhaps, is streets lined with refrigerators. Whitney cleaned hers, but after a few days without power, I opened it for a second and was about knocked out by the smell. They say it will take a full year to pick up all the destroyed property from New Orleans alone! Anyone want thousands of smelly refrigerators?      Many others returned home to find a house that had been filled with water and was rotting at the seams. As we drove our car full of flowers through these most desolate neighborhoods of New Orleans, we found few who had returned. (Before our trip, we collected money from the senior nursing class and purchased live potted plants from a nursery that had opened up in New Orleans to cheer up residents). Streets were lined with cars, layered in white film from water that had topped their roofs. Older, dilapidated buildings were crumbled. I remember giving a flower to a woman who was dragging the few possessions she owned out to the street corner. She told me of how she had been rescued by a boat and then had to wait for two days on the interstate to be picked up. She rolled up her sleeves to show me her tan line.           Disparities increased     lobalization is causing disparities between rich and poor to increase around the world. As if this isn’t unfair enough, the course of nature has just selected the poorest and taken all they had, while many of the rich and insured have gotten off with little damage. This is what I saw and perhaps had been the most discouraging part about grieving Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Why also is it that those who have lost the most also seem to be the ones that communicate how they feel so blessed? “God has taken such good care of us.” “People have been so nice to us.” What a challenge to me.           Hippie clinic     efore our trip, I signed us up to help out at a grassroots clinic in New Orleans called Common Ground Collective that sprung up in the aftermath of Katrina. Its mission is to be rooted in the community of Algiers, a poor part of New Orleans. The day we came, they were holding a block party for residents to take a break and see neighbors. I felt like I was in the 1960s. I was so amused and enthusiastic about this group of people who had traveled from all over the United States to serve this community. I almost decided to quit school and join this hippie commune of people who were passionate about finding the least served, loving them, and getting resources and health care to them. Hey, they’re my kind of people! We gave out some clinic supplies we had brought from Atlanta and helped give immunizations to the residents.           Dulac Dat Cajun Cat     ne of my most prized possessions that I got while I lived in New Orleans as a little girl was a book written in Cajun about Dulac, a cat from the bayou. So when I got the chance to take baby supplies down to the community of Dulac, I jumped on it! We had a trunk full of diapers and some baby supplies [collected from a second-grade class in California and sent to the School of Nursing]. We drove down Shrimpers Row, a narrow road that runs along the bayou south of New Orleans, and stopped to give supplies out to residents there. Several invited us into their homes. The damage was so depressing. This area was almost destroyed by the floodwaters of Rita. We stood next to water lines that were head high. “Shrimpin” boats were scattered around the land, and the yards were caked in this mysterious black tar-like mud that had cracked like a barren land. People who live in this community have lived there for generations and will continue to live there despite hurricane destruction. “Shrimpin” is their life, and we were offered to be deckhands on a shrimpboat! Hmm, tempting.       The day we were there was the first day the Red Cross had come to the region [weeks after Rita hit]—the sad reality of relief. Common Ground, in contrast, had bypassed the red tape (sometimes with fake IDs) and driven through flooded streets in the past weeks to bring water, food, and health care to the people in this region. Many of these residents were angry with the Red Cross and FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) because those in the city (and less affected) were the ones receiving aid, but not the ones still stuck in their houses without a way to the city. I still respect the Red Cross, but it was neat to see the need for small grassroots organizations to complement the larger bureaucratic organizations. The same is true in much of the world.                     Their response, my response     othing makes me more excited than being able to help someone out and see the joy it brings to them. I can’t describe the natural adrenaline I get when I hand a baby doll to a 3-year-old girl who has lost all of her toys. Or the price of a hug from someone who understands the hope you are trying to offer when you give that person a potted flower. What it’s like to stand next to a rubbish pile with someone who pulls out an old photo album and starts to show you each picture, water running across it, blurring the image, but the picture obviously still so vivid in their head and heart. How can we laugh and smile with people who have lost so much? I don’t know. Perhaps grace. Perhaps hope. Perhaps the value of love and family that keeps so many of them going. The stickers we put on the pots of flowers we gave out read: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)      There is so much to be done, but it’s the little things that keep hope coming. I hope that’s what we were able to share. And I hope what I gave was greater than all that I gained through this experience. They’re the same lessons of simplicity that I learned in Papua New Guinea, of vitality in Africa, and now of hope in New Orleans that allow me to hear news like that of the earthquake in Pakistan (in October 2005) and the trials in the lives of family and friends and know that in this endless battle, we can keep going. In peace and hope, Crystal
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