On housing innovation in New Orleans

Though a bit too focused on Brad Pitt, The Atlantic had a spot on housing in New Orleans this week. Check it out!

"If you look at the way ants behave when they’re gathering food, it looks like the stupidest, most irrational thing you’ve ever seen—they’re zigzagging all over the place, they’re bumping into other ants. You think, ‘What a mess! This is never going to amount to anything,’” says Michael Mehaffy, the head of the Sustasis Foundation, which studies urban life and sustainability and has worked with neighborhood organizations here. “So it’s easy to look at New Orleans at the grassroots level and wonder, What’s going on here?’ But if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it’s the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process.”

Actually, sounds a lot like how I spent my last two years.

Louisiana in the Economist

Two of my favorite things come together in this cautiously optimistc Economist article about Louisiana. Guess they must be reading my hopeful blog posts.

Hat tip to Dunc, the source of most of my interesting news links.

Looking forward

Jackie from Gramercy, Louisiana, isn't looking back. 'We a post-Katrina couple,' she told me proudly of the man she'll marry this weekend. 'We havin a blue-jean weddin, doin it our way, since we both done the deal before.' Her before was definitive and, in definitive south Louisiana fashion, pronounced something like bufowah. 'My ex-husband, he got some things uh mine there's a court order for me to go git, but I just about don't care anymore (ehnymowah).'

'Lookin forward, sounds like,' I said, 'No use in lookin back.' She gave a start and nodded. 'Yeah, that's right!'

It is now October of 2009, four years after the Gulf Coast was buffeted by the now-proverbial* storms of 2005. Finally - finally - the city feels to me as Jackie sounded: Looking forward. There's a mayoral election around the corner. Groups like 504ward and PlayNOLA are coming up with creative ways to build on the tide of young professionals flowing into the city. There's finally a comprehensive plan and a central office for coastal restoration, even if the funding hasn't come yet. The Saints are winning! And conversations don't all revolve around the storms and how people 'made out' anymore.

But don't for a minute think that all this fancy forward-thinking has anybody forgetting why they stuck around. After having told me all about her wedding, Jackie wheeled the conversation toward Gramercy and their Christmas Eve bonfires. She assured me it'd be every bit as fun as Mardi Gras as long I as I'm 'fine with drunk Cajuns and fireworks. Cause if not, boy, I tell you what...!'

Drunk cajuns, fireworks and a whole region lookin' forward? I could get fine with that.

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*Note: In the original version of this post, I misspelled proverbial as porverbial. Phonetically, I think that's indicative of my generally poor verbiage. My apologies.

Rosa (Or: Home)

When I traveled to New Orleans a few months after Katrina, my friend Lindsey and I spent an afternoon driving around gawking at the damage. At the end of the day, I was spent; I needed home. Not Shreveport, necessarily, but some place of refuge – a bookstore, a coffee shop, a Scottish pub.

Home doesn’t have to be a physical place, I've learned. Today I went home to a person – Rosa – who for me personifies that concept in a way that I hadn’t realized.

Rosa, mother of one of UBECI's co-founders, is about about sixty-five and served as my first mother in Ecuador. When I arrived in August 2007 I knew limited Spanish, immediately landed a level three sinus infection,* and was fitfully processing the previous six months as a social worker in Shreveport as I prepared for my team coming in September. Rosa listened, carefully. She also did enough talking to make me realize that this tiny old woman who guts her own guinea pigs, uses every drop of water at least four times before giving it to the pigs and is just now learning how to read, might be one of the sharpest, wisest, most determined human being I have ever met.

And for me, she is home. Not having visited in about six months, I had developed that Catholic know of guilt in my stomach that starts to form when you haven’t visited your grandmother in too long. So when Fabián failed to show up for our meeting this morning, I swallowed hard and pointed my nose to Rosa’s.

Thankfully, Rosa did not berate me for not showing my face more often, and seemed genuinely grateful to see me and take a break from feeding the pigs. We talked about Obama (“Have you heard about his family? He used to be poor, like us!), the Rafael Correa flag outside her door and what I thought about the new president, the dwarf beans from her son in Italy that she is going to try and plant soon, and the old grandfather who se fue a otro mundo (“went to the other side,” loosely) three months ago. We laughed at the social work stories I told her over a year ago, and she asked if I could find her the telephone number for Ecuador’s Vice President. He’s handicapped, and Rose thinks if she could get him on the phone, that maybe he’d know how to help her handicapped son, too. If he knows what’s good for him – or if he takes the time to get to know Rosa - he probably will.

When a nation becomes a community

Anxiously, I've been tracking from afar the movements of Hurricane Gustav. From the e-coverage, I draw an encouraging note: Americans of all stripes are demonstrating their concern for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. State governments are at the ready, the GOP convention is turned upside down, and Gustav dominates the electronic print media. There are all number of plausible reasons for this: leftover guilt from the pathetic response to Katrina three years ago, or political calculation of voters' sympathies in the run-up to November, for example. But even if national politicians are looking out for number one, their calculation must be that their constituents actually care about what happens to their southern brothers and sisters, and so they should too.

One of my chief drivers for traveling (and working with MPI) is this: to work and live and breathe in another country is to make that place and its people part of your own community. I follow Zimbabwean politics because I became friends with Zimbabweans during my time in Botswana; Zak tracks Gustav's path as obsessively as I do because, yankee that he is, he made New Orleans his home and New Orleanians his friends.

What I want - and what I hope we at MPI contribute to - is for Americans to extend their community a little farther south than Plaquemines Parish. The way that Americans now consider folks from Louisiana "us" rather than "them," can we not also do for those who have already battled Gustav in Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic? Sure, they talk kinda funny down there and eat strange things, but hell - have some boudin on a New Orleans sidestreet and then tell me that we don't, too.