New Orleans Spring

Towson Unitarian Universalist Church

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Script

Presenter: Alie Weisko

Worship Leader Tara McIntyre

Welcome Tara McIntyre

Good Morning. On behalf of our Minister, Rev. Clare Petersberger, I’d like to welcome you to the Towson Unitarian Universalist Church on this lovely Sunday morning. My name is Tara McIntyre and I’m a member of TUUC’s Worship Associates. We have such a special service planned for you today. I’m delighted to introduce our presenter this morning, to anyone here who may not know her already, TUUC member Alie Weisko. Alie will tell us about her trip to New Orleans this past April, taken with her teenaged son, Paul, to help in the volunteer rebuilding effort of this beautiful, timeless city.

But first …

I’d like to call your attention to the announcements page inserted in your Order of Service, and especially the notice on the last page of the Order of Service itself, which details how all of us can get involved firsthand in the rebuilding project. Alie will also make herself available after service to continue the discussion and answer any questions you have about her trip.

Do we have any newcomers or visitors joining us this morning? If you could stand and tell us your name and where you’re from, we’d love to get to know you better over coffee, a little nosh, and conversation, all of which will happen in the foyer immediately following the service. We’re very glad to have you with us today.

Aldous Huxley said “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music”. We begin our service this morning with the music of New Orleans.

Prelude Evening Breeze by James Rae Donn Tuebner-Rhodes, clarinet

Opening Words Alie Weisko

Do you remember August 2005? The Katrina storm surge that didn’t come, then Lake Pontchartrain’s levees breaking? Do you recall people jammed into the Superdome and the Convention Center, people with infants baking on the overpass without water? Did you see those signs that said “HELP US” and “This is America?” Maybe, like me, money didn’t feel like enough of a response. There wasn’t much I could do about that until my son Paul’s synagogue, Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, invited us to join their second work mission to New Orleans last April. Led by the intrepid Rabbi Elissa Sachs-Kohen, we spent a week working to rebuild homes and neighborhoods. And of course, since it was New Orleans, we had to party just a little too.

Chalice Lighting Alie / Tara (one reads, one lights)

Our Unitarian Universalist heritage bids us light our chalice
In the name of freedom and faith
In the light of reason and hope
In actions of tolerance and love

Together, as we read aloud the words of the Passover Haggadah, let us spread this rich heritage throughout our world and our lives today.

May the light we now kindle

inspire us to use our powers

to heal and not to harm,

to help and not to hinder,

to bless and not to curse,

to serve in the spirit of freedom.

New Orleans, Part One Alie

Nineteen months later. It looks like Europe after the War. Large X’s painted on houses everywhere: “Here on 9-12. No one found alive. No one found dead. Initials of the inspectors” In the middle class neighborhoods, some construction on each block amid the rotting shells. In the working class areas, trailers and the slow beginnings of a few fresh starts. The Lower Ninth Ward: gone. Nothing for blocks, then a smashed wooden shell atop a car. The brick homes of famous people still stand, empty windowed.

We drive past the Army Corps of Engineers’ materials. Pre-Katrina 8-foot steel pilings held the levees together in soil that shifted with every wave. The new 15-foot ones lie nearby. Our guide says, “It’ll break opposite the repairs next time.”

The School Yard

We are clearing the front yard of Frederick Douglass High School in the Upper Ninth Ward. This is where the community dumped its refuse as they gutted their homes. Afterwards, a bulldozer scraped their moldy belongings into a dumpster, along with the school yard’s grass. We will replant the grass. But the people and their lives have been hollowed out like melon from the rind.

We pick up small objects. These have escaped the bulldozer: batteries, a child’s marbles, pieces of a game. The frosted glass stopper of a perfume bottle. Broken pieces of the school yard fence half-buried near CD’s. So many CD’s. Music is oxygen here. Mundane, intimate pieces of lives. I dig out a half-buried, smashed, measuring cup. I feel my hand close on its handle as it would on mine at home. I add my tears to the dirt.

Tara: Please join us now in singing hymn #128, For All That Is Our Life

Hymn #128 For All That Is Our Life

Meditation Tara

Our meditation this morning, which will be followed by a few moments of silence, is by Susan L. Van Dreser.

In the moments when Word is silence

give yourself to it in wholeness

and wait.

Let the knowing of this primal sound carry you into circles where sound itself --

where silence itself -- becomes new, and the new, a song you sing from your bones.

[A few moments of contemplative silence]

New Orleans, Part Two Alie

We sit in a circle facing ninth graders from this “Recovery School.” They joke when we ask, “Why did you come back?” “Partay! The girls!” But the rind cracks.

“Anthony” is handsome with bright eyes and shoulder length dreds. His smile is quick. He uses humor to deflect the pain. But he is the first to tell his story. His father waded back and forth in the toxic waters, ferrying neighbors to safety while Anthony and his younger siblings were sent to Houston. Three months later, an older sister called from New Orleans. His father just died of infections contracted in the flood water. Anthony didn’t know he was ill, never got to say goodbye. Death rates tripled in the year following Katrina. How many were heroes like Anthony’s father? Where is his “Purple Heart?”

“Lynn” has big, watchful eyes that take in everything. In the large circle of teens, she says her name and then falls silent. When we break into small groups, she leans toward me and touches my arm, “Can I tell you my story?” Without raising her voice beyond what is needed to reach me, she tells of running with her Aunt, Uncle, Grandmother, cousins and siblings to an Up-Town school. “We stayed on the second and third floors. We had a pretty good time for two days. Then there was nothing to eat and no one was coming to us. Men from the neighborhood broke into a boathouse and got us boats. The kayaks held only one person. They took us all to the bayou. It was dry, but it got really cold at night and there were insects all over us. My grandmother couldn’t take the cold, so the men brought her back to the school. Then guards brought us by boat to an overpass. It was horrible. No food, no water. Real hot. No bathrooms. People fighting over nothing. They just left us there. We didn’t know where my Grandmother was, if she was alive.” Eventually Lynn and the remainder of her family were sent to Houston. “We stayed in the Astrodome there. The Red Cross helped us and I bless the Red Cross. They fed us. They fed us three meals a day.” At the Astrodome, they began to search for their Grandmother using the Red Cross computers. “There were so many people with her name, Bertha D. We looked through them all, and finally we found one with the same birthday. So we knew it was her. She was alive. In Baton Rouge.”

Sitting silently behind Lynn and watching me is “Ken.” His long face is immobile except for the sadness behind his eyes. When I lean over to him, he says, “I am so lucky my Momma didn’t go to work that day. Some other kids, their parents went to work. She stayed home. Otherwise it would have been just me, the oldest [he was 12 years old then], and my younger brothers. We would have died. My Momma got us on the roof.”

A tough girl from the Lower Ninth Ward no longer has a neighborhood. She stays with her Grandmother. Her bright yellow headband and tight orange clothes broadcast “I am alive and I am here to stay. Don’t mess with me.” Her anger at the government is loud and focused. Only later, when we ask directly, does she gaze downward, telling how her close friend died trapped in his attic from heat ranging well over 100 degrees.

I asked each student with whom I spoke what they would wish for if they could change one thing in their lives today. This is a question only an outsider could ask. Somebody who didn’t yet grasp their Diaspora or the fabric of three-generation neighborhoods, or being able to “sit-in” with a band from the time you could walk, or a hedonist-European-Caribbean culture which smells the roses before it smells the money. To a one, the answer was the same. “I want my life back before Katrina. I want my life back.”

Ken has been interviewed by Nickelodeon, and two of the teens went to Washington, D.C. to testify on the flood. But are they getting their lives back? Here they are, thrown together from different high schools in this “Recovery School,” bussed there and back each day. Their own schools are closed. Mass transit busses run at a quarter of their normal schedule. Scuffles break out in the halls between rival neighborhoods. Forty percent don’t live with their parents. Many work after school to help extended families with food and clothing. They have no physical place to call “home.” Yet here they arrive each day, fighting the odds to graduate, leaning on the fiercely committed and loving faculty. These teens talk to survive, to stop the nightmares. They go on ...

Offertory / Interlude Tara

Central to our religious tradition are the theological principles of freedom of conscience, and of religious liberty. We maintain our theological independence in part by accepting no money from any governmental authority, and no money from any ecclesiastical authority. In addition to their annual pledges, each week our members and friends may choose to give a small additional contribution as a public witness that we are, and remain, a free church.  The offertory will now be gratefully given and received.
 
The Chrysanthemum by Scott Joplin Donn Teubner-Rhodes

New Orleans Part Three Alie Weisko

The Store

It seemed very cosmic, finding a Judaica store on our first day in New Orleans. We went in to scout out a gift for Rabbi Sachs-Kohen, our leader on this mission, and chatted briefly with the owner. We were clueless about the Rabbi’s interests. After quizzing Missy, her partner, we returned later and made a selection. The owner knew the reason for our gift and kindly claimed to have mis-tagged the item to reduce its price. She laughed, “Since Katrina, I can’t even blame the help because it’s just me here.” I asked if the store was damaged in the flood. No, she said, but told us her story. She and her husband moved ten times in the months following the storm, living with several friends and in rentals. Their home was destroyed. Of her beloved artwork, two-thirds could be salvaged and cleaned. She put aside the book she was writing, and she and her husband slowly built an apartment in the top two floors over their French Quarter store. Finally, she had a home, “...I had a nail file, and a night stand to put the nail file in.” These simple items had taken on such significance during their disjointed months of rootlessness. As I looked around her store, at its sculpture and wall hangings, jewelry and light-filled mirrors, I said “You’ve made it so beautiful here.” She burst into tears. Where I saw only the present, she saw the past: two retail floors compressed and diminished into one, a home and its furnishings lost, a lifetime of work needing to be rebuilt.

From the upper-middle class to the poorest class, people are both moving forward and fragile.

Tara: Please join us now, rising as you are able, in singing hymn #318, We Will Be One.

Hymn #318 We Will Be One

New Orleans, Part Four Alie Weisko

Thank You

I am at a cashier, buying my son a T-shirt. It says, “There are places I remember...” and lists the neighborhoods destroyed in the flood. The cashier asks if we are on vacation. When I tell her why we are here, she tells us her story, with the familiar ending-still no home. Then she thanks us for coming down. The waitress at lunch thanks us. The man behind me in the A&P thanks me. The owner of the art glass store says, “It’s so humbling, how many people are coming from all over to help. Thank you.” We are pulling weeds from the “flood absorbing” trees newly planted in Central City, an inner city neighborhood. A local man walks by saying “I love you all. I love you.” A woman walks by and thanks us. Another man. We enter the community center to see their artwork and use the toilets. The man at the desk thanks us. We are working on a Habit for Humanity House in East New Orleans. A car slows, the driver waves and thanks us. Why are they thanking us, I think. Don’t they know this makes us feel less helpless? More connected? That we are the real receivers here?

Down the road from the work site, another of the endless X’s on house fronts. There is a smaller one, off to the side. It says “No cat found. SPCA.” More tears in the dirt.

Habitat’s Musician’s Village

Oh, the colors! Here is New Orleans’ joy. Mid-tone pinks, oranges, greens, blues and purples. Porches for jammin’ on, each raised a good four feet from the next flood. Some already have flowers planted. The family’s name proudly on the front railing. They are off working on their neighbor’s home. “Each one reach one” and pass it on. There are signs from volunteers all over the country: LA, Portland, Harvard, Mississippi, Oswego, Connecticut, on they go. Masses of workers arrive each morning, waiting to be assigned. Everyone eager. Feeling ownership. Of what? The houses? Of being part of the solution? Of our own ability to take action and reach out? Of hope?

The Quarter

The French Quarter is open! Go! Spend! It funnels green blood to the shattered body of New Orleans. The shops and art galleries, restaurants and music halls gleam. In New Orleans art, music and food cart channel the Life Force as nowhere else in our nation. Dance your way down the streets! Help bring them back to life.

Conclusion

Why go to New Orleans? Because when you say “Never again” you have to act on it. Whether you say it about slavery, holocausts, wars or any other form of human suffering isn’t important. You have to act. New Orleans needs everything. If you can’t lift a hammer, spend money on a vacation there. If you can lift a hammer, do so. Anyone over 16 can stay at Acorn’s Camp Hope. If you can fund raise, ask what they need and fund raise. If you can open a hospital, file a deed, pour cement, or teach arithmetic they need it all. And you need them. We are less of a nation without them.

Closing Words Tara

Thank you, Alie. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and insights with us. You bear deeply moving witness to the profound need of those on the Gulf Coast affected by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. You remind us how powerful the interconnected web of existence truly is, and of our consequent responsibility to our fellow humans. Alie has agreed to stay for awhile after service to answer any questions you might have and discuss further topics such as information circulation and the press, the government’s response to the crisis, and how to get involved individually. Let’s all thank her for her words this morning …

Our closing words are by the Rev. Lauralynn Bellamy…

If, here, you have found freedom,

Take it with you into the world.

If you have found comfort,

Go and share it with others.

If you have dreamed dreams,

Help one another, that they may come true!

If you have known love,

Give some back to a bruised and hurting world.

Go now in peace, and have a serene week.

Postlude Swipesy by Scott Joplin Donn Teubner-Rhodes