Elizabeth Wiegman Journal

2/26/06

I left the South nine months ago, before tragedy, destruction, and mismanagement sent my adopted homeland of Louisiana to the forefront of everyone's mind. I watched CNN coverage of the hurricanes as I moved into my dorm room in the Lawyer's Club, and I ached to return to Louisiana. I knew there was nothing I could do if I were there, but I felt even more helpless watching from 1,200 miles away.

I returned to the South for the first time yesterday. I didn't know what to expect. They say you can't go home again, but for awhile I felt that I had. Baton Rouge was relatively unscathed by Katrina, the debris of a Mardi Gras parade littered the streets, and my friends welcomed me back as if I had never been gone at all. Slowly, signs of the subtle but pervasive influence of the storms revealed itself: a cab driver from New Orleans who swore he would not return, float slogans making jokes about FEMA, talk of whether the crowds were "coming back" for Mardi Gras.

As I drove the two-hour stretch from Baton Rouge to Gulfport, Mississippi, I began to see physical signs of the storm's wrath. Interstate 12 runs parallel to the coast, just a short distance from the Gulf, and I saw large trees that still lay where they has fallen in the wooded areas to the side of the highway, and towering lightposts that used to illuminate the interstate now laying on their sides in the grass.

I was the eleventh of our group of fourteen to arrive in Gulfport. We convened at a Mexican restaurant, and over tortilla chips and enchiladas, we planned for the week. We bought some staple groceries at the local Wal-Mart, and set up two Sunday school rooms (one for the boys; one for the girls) to be our home away from home. The group seemed tired from a day of travel, but eager to roll up our sleeves and help in any way we can. We still don't have a complete sense of the work we will be doing here, and so we are eager for our first meeting with local attorneys tomorrow morning, at which we will learn more specifics of our mission.

2/27/06

Today has been a day of learning, legwork, emotion and exhaustion. We began the morning at the Mississippi Center for Justice in Biloxi, where three wonderful local attorneys explained our tasks for the week. There has been a fair amount of post-Katrina financial assistance to homeowners, they told us, in the form of insurance and government aid. For renters, however, the story is different. They aren't getting the same financial assistance, because they didn't lose their own property -- although they often still found themselves without a place to live. Even the lucky ones, whose rental property made it through the storm in a somewhat livable condition, were likely to face another set of perils. Some suffer opportunistic landlords who evict poor tenants on the hope of attracting new tenants at twice the price. Others face uninhabitable spaces and landlords who drag their feet in performing necessary repairs. Others face an unforgiving system, in which late rent due to Katrina-related expenses or job loss means certain eviction. Attorneys who could help suffering tenants are facing their own problem -- a breakdown of communication that prevents them from reaching those in need of legal help. That's where we come in.

Our task was to follow up on all of the domestic rental properties in the three coastal counties in Mississippi. We spent the day driving from property to property, surveying what was left and interviewing tenants about their experiences in the past six months. All of the tenants had stories of destruction -- roofs torn off, windows broken, carpets ruined. But some were in pretty good shape -- the repairs had been done, their landlords had treated them well, and life was returning to normal. Other properties didn't fare so well. One complex on our list was at 4042 Beach Ave. When we arrived, there was nothing but a concrete foundation with "4042" spray painted on the side. 

Talking with the tenants changed my perspective on the trip. All of them -- the little old lady, the ex-Marine, the twenty-something bachelors, the single mother -- overflowed with information that they wanted to share with a sympathetic ear. Once they found out we were on their side, their stories spilled out. Sometimes they told us details about their apartments, and sometimes they just spoke from the heart about their lives. As we listened, and jotted notes, I realized the scope of our mission went beyond information gathering. We are here to listen, to support people who have suffered in ways we can't understand, and to give them hope.

The day's work ended when we drove down Second Street, a formerly beautiful residential area that had been completely ravaged by the storm. All around us were the remains of homes in various states of decomposition. There was so much debris that I wondered where a garbage crew would even begin. There was the occasional stray person, surveying damage or rearranging piles of rubble. Spray painted on the side of one house, a silver lining: "We are blessed. Glenn is Alive!"


3/1/06

Time seems to be alternately creeping and flying by. I am amazed by all we have done and seen in three days in Mississippi. We have visited countless apartment buildings, in every condition from the pristinely perfect garden apartments to the complexes that are indicated only by the presence of a concrete slab amidst the rubble. The most disturbing are those in between -- complexes that are not inhabitable, yet inhabited. We have seen an apartment without a roof, in which four family members were crowded into a small living room, because the bedrooms were exposed to the elements. We have seen apartments infested with mold and rats, driveways with potholes large enough to fit a fair-sized child, windows broken and boarded up. We have smelled the migraine-inducing stench of sodden and decaying buildings and raw sewage. We visited an apartment ghost town, in which a 90-unit complex had about 9 lonely inhabitants, surrounded by gutted apartments, trying to eke out a life (while still paying full-price rent) in the tattered remains of their homes.

I worry that I am already becoming desensitized to the destruction around us here in Mississippi. When we drive through streets of rubble and the remains of homes and businesses, I look -- I cannot avert my eyes -- but although I am saddened, I am not as shocked as I was two days ago. The destruction has started to feel normal because it is ubiquitous.

I have heard it said that those who have the least give the most. In Gulfport, I find anecdotal evidence in support of that view. We have been hosted for the week by First United Methodist Church, the only church south of Gulfport's railroad tracks to be in usable condition, even six months after the storm. The church suffered some damage, and is in the middle of its own construction projects, but it embraced us and allowed us to set up temporary housing in its Sunday school rooms -- they even provided us with air mattresses! Tonight, in an additional expression of generosity and goodwill, several church members prepared a homemade spaghetti dinner for us, and joined us for the meal. A local dentist sat at my table and patiently answered an onslaught of questions from our group. He spoke from the heart about the destruction, the ongoing reconstruction, and his fears for the future. Like many residents, he knows that change is inevitable, but worries that it will come in the form of large-scale commercialism and casinos, and will wipe out much of the unique but already endangered Gulf Coast culture. I only hope his fears are not realized.


3/18/06

I returned from the Gulf two weeks ago, but memories of the destruction still haunt me, and memories of the people there still uplift me. As I reflect on the work we did there, I am grateful to have been a part of something important and meaningful, but I realize more than ever how much remains to be done.

As we prepared to travel to Mississippi, I feared that there were not enough of us, and not enough time, for our group to serve as a positive force in righting the wrongs faced by hurricane victims. I was pleasantly surprised. The apartment surveys that we performed required relatively little training time, so we could get started right away, relying more on our energy, enthusiasm, and patience than on extensive preparation. We interviewed hundreds of people at scores of apartment complexes, gathering data and providing sympathetic ears. The work we did enabled the attorneys at the Mississippi Center for Justice to locate apartment residents who were in need of legal assistance, and to set a process in motion to get them relief and fair treatment.

We gathered a colossal amount of data in our week on the Gulf, and saved the overtaxed attorneys at the Mississippi Center for Justice from a great deal of legwork that they just didn't have time to do. We also managed to give them much more work to do, in the form of leads and cases that will require many, many hours of attention from individuals far more skilled than we. It felt great to help in Mississippi, but it also made me aware of how much work remains to be done. There are four full-time attorneys at the Mississippi Center for Justice, and they work their fingers to the bone, but still cannot help everyone in need of assistance. They need more volunteers like us, to help out with the basic but time consuming groundwork, and they critically need help from attorneys and upper-level law students who can commit more time to help develop the cases, so that suffering apartment tenants (and other hurricane victims in need of help) needn't wait another six months for relief. We saw only a slice of the post-Katrina legal needs in coastal Mississippi. When I think of all the miles of the Gulf Coast, from Mississippi to Texas, that have been ravaged by the storm, the enormity of the tasks ahead, legal and otherwise, is staggering.

Now that I have been back in Michigan for two weeks, the true breadth of our group's mission has become apparent. It was not just to survey and gather data to help out the Mississippi Center for Justice, although that made a big difference for the Center and its clients. It wasn't only our role as advocates and listeners to those who had suffered and needed to tell their stories to someone -- anyone -- who was on their side, although I was glad to be able to help fill this human and emotional need as well. Another part of our mission had little to do with changing things in Mississippi, and much to do with changing ourselves. The fourteen Michigan Law students who traveled to Gulfport gained an understanding that one cannot achieve through television and newspaper reports. We thought we knew where we were going, but we didn't understand it until we saw the breadth of destruction, the emotion, the hope and continuing despair, the normalcy out of chaos, the uncertainty and upheaval. We return to Michigan with a new understanding --we didn't know where we were going, but now we begin to understand where we have been. The last, and possibly most important, part of our mission is to share that understanding with others, and to spread the word about the urgent need for legal assistance in the Gulf. I hope that, through these letters, I have begun to do that.