Family returns to put Katrina to rest (Connecticut)

WATERBURY — The DaSilva brothers and their mom are going back to New Orleans today.

Four of their friends and two more mothers are going, too. All to volunteer helping to assist in the recovery efforts in the hurricane-ravaged city.

Three years ago as Kennedy High School students, Joseph and Michael DaSilva made their first trip to the Big Easy.

They pulled rotten food, garbage and soggy drywall out of a storm-soaked home. The March heat was oppressive, and the volunteers sweated inside plasticlike protective suits. They breathed through respirators and their goggles fogged. Cockroaches prompted screams from the moms for the first few minutes, until they got used to the sight.

Last year, swarms of red ants attacked as the boys labored on ladders, painting a home perched on stilts in a small seaside town near the Texas border with Louisiana.

Elizabeth DaSilva jokes about the hardships her boys faced. As repeat visitors, the DaSilvas are typical of the tens-of-thousands of volunteers who will visit the still-battered Gulf Coast this year.

The DaSilvas will be joined by more city residents this year who are also leaving today: Dillon Costa and his mother, Maria; Adam Meehan and his mother, also named Maria; James Palomba and Igli Cyreku.

Since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Greater New Orleans has had more than a million volunteers, said Janet Pace, interim executive director of the Louisiana Service Commission. The volunteers have repaired hundreds of homes and dozens of parks, she said. These days, most are repeat visitors dedicated to making to making the recovery complete, she said.

"You kind of get addicted to the feeling you get because the people are so appreciative," said Elizabeth DaSilva, a science teacher at Waterbury Arts Magnet School. "You go down there and see all the work that needs to be done."

Last year, the Waterbury group worked on the home of Cesar and Peggy Reyes in the tiny town of Cameron, La. The elderly couple was eager to get home. Cesar Reyes, in his 90s, tried to help with the labor and had to be convinced to leave it to the boys.

The DaSilvas are Catholic, but work with a charitable arm of the United Methodist Church to find work. This year they'll be posted in New Orleans again.

Tom Hazelwood, an official with the United Methodist Committee on Relief, said more than 80 percent of his volunteers in the disaster area are repeat visitors, mostly church and youth groups. But that's not unusual. He's seen it time and again during 11 years organizing relief missions.

"The repeat volunteers are absolutely the lifeblood of the long-term recovery," Hazelwood said.

The abysmal economy has taken a bite out of the volunteer pool. Several Gulf Coast aide groups say they haven't been harmed by the trend yet, though a couple directors predicted consequences down the road.

Darryl Tate, head of the Louisiana Conference of United Methodist Church Vestry Response, said a few of his volunteers canceled this spring because they were afraid to leave work. Fewer volunteers means more money spent on contractors, Tate said.

"It burns the money up quicker," Tate said. "That means less people can get the help."

Each year the group collects money from businesses and through fundraisers under the John F. Kennedy Co., a nonprofit the boys named after their high school. In their first year, after paying for airline tickets, lodging and food, the group had $2,148 left over and gave it to the United Way of Greater New Orleans.

This year the group could only cover $60 of the expense for each volunteer. Cyreku, one of the boys going, took $540 out the money he's made working as a busboy.

The Waterbury team visits the historic French Quarter. Joseph DaSilva, 19, now studying at Princeton University, said he enjoys working with friends. Both boys say they're warmed by the gratitude of locals. And both intend to keep going.

waterlogged homes suck no matter how they get that way. Katrina? Get over and move on already. How much have we heard about the devastating floods THIS SPRING in a more self reliant area like the midwest? Nothing, nada. I betcha they are pretty close to done fixin it up by now. How about here in FL, where floods THIS spring have taken their toll in N Florida, Daytona, Miami, and several other locations to lesser degrees? My area had terrible flooding. Several inches of water in thousands of homes this spring. I sure don’t hear about that. What about the tornado affected areas THIS spring?

The only reason you hear about Katrina is because it was ON BUSHES WATCH. They garner hate with it for BUSH. Nothing else matters. Many of the areas hit hard by flooding this year down south were black areas. Mid west, poor areas (tennessee Ice storm for examp.) but they were conservative areas all.

Its been 4 years!! I almost lost my mother in Agnes (1972), lost a car in Gloria (1985), and lost my apartment and quite a few belongings in Hugo (1989). We just cleaned up and went back to living our lives every time. What is wrong with these people?

(The funny part about my experiences with hurricanes is that I’ve lived in Florida most of my life and every time I’ve been hit by a hurricane, it’s when I was living outside of Florida. I’ve never so much as lost a lawn chair to a Florida hurricane.)

"Oppressive" March heat? Baloney. I live in New Orleans. March is not hot.

That said, I do not understand how anyone who has lived through Katrina thinks government-run anything is a good idea. I've posted on several threads:

Louisiana got a ton of money. The problem is that it went to politicians who doled it out to bureaucrats so they could create committees to hire experts to write studies to submit to a panel who created guidelines, requirements, rules, and procedures for people who lost everything to abide by in order to protect the state from being cheated out of money by people by people pretending to have lost everything when in fact they did not. (breath) Then, they hired a bunch of appraisers who low-balled the value of a home so the homeowners would appeal the amount to another panel and the state then had to hire more appraisers, accountants, actuaries, and attorneys to testify that the state’s amount was correct only to have said panel agree with the homeowner’s appraisal. (breath) THEN, the state created another bureaucracy for the homeowners to submit their paperwork to, only to refuse to give the homeowner a check because the owner had lost some piece of paper along the way and didn’t have sufficient information for the bureaucrat to determine the accuracy of the homeowner’s file (sadly, the bureaucrat did not have ANY of the homeowner’s paperwork in his files because that information is stored in a different department). When the homeowner returns after finding the paper, a new “public servant” has been assigned to his file and is unaware of conversations with the previous bureaucrat because no notes were taken and again denies the homeowner because of a different piece of missing paper. When the homeowner finally gets everything he needs together, the billions of dollars given to the state has amazingly disappeared. (Whoda thunk?) Meanwhile, the state was cheated out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by people pretending to have lost everything, but did not.

Tax dollars at work.

Unless I missed it, I didn’t see any mention of government money in this article. Seems like it was mostly church work.

I was down there last April (’08) and would have gone again this year but had some health issues. The area is still devastated.

Yes, the whole place, the whole response was one big cluster. There’s enough blame to go around, from Blanco, to Nagin, to FEMA to the shysters who showed up to scam the money.

But for everyone of those stories there are dozens more struggling just to put their lives back together. I’ve been there and met them.

The people like this family are doing the work that no government program and no amount of government funding could do. The number of volunteers coming down to help have decreased greatly because it’s no longer “trendy.”

But the need still exists.

By the way, Katrina ‘victims’, thanks for trashing Houston.

Amen to that. They came here as well. They seem a bit better than the average N O'ian but they're still causing problems. The church "gave" them a huge amount of ***P-R-I-M-E*** acerage (highest appraised land in the entire county) to start their own church but from what I see it's still just the original families living on the compound. They have loud speakers that I can hear inside my house a good mile (as the crow flies) away. The kids cause problems on the school bus and are sneaky little liars at school.

Volunteers have helped much more than any government agency. From my homepage: "The generosity of the American people is humbling and endless. We still have charity groups and students coming to help renovate homes. Maybe as individuals they only do one house, but because of their numbers and unceasing stream of help, they've done more to help New Orleans than any public entity."

I understand people's frustration with New Orleans' constant "we-need-more-money" refrain. Use it a testimony of how government involvement DOES NOT WORK. The cluster was not caused by Bush, Nagin, Brown, or Blanco; it was caused by the bureaucracy.

The cluster was not caused by Bush, Nagin, Brown, or Blanco; it was caused by the bureaucracy.

Exactly. The whole system failed. Each of those folks played a part in it (with multiple others). But it's not fair just to point the finger at one person, or one group of people.

We helped drywall the home of a pastor whose house had been under 9 feet of water. It was a month before he could get back in. He told us the same thing you did.

Please allow me to harrumph just a bit.

The writer of this article I would guess has never left Waterbury, CT. Katrina was all about AL, MS and New Orleans. Yet the article also speaks about “... the tiny town of Cameron, La.” Cameron is south of Lake Charles and is a LOONNGGG way west on I-10 (and then south on barely two lane roads) from New Orleans and FAR from anything Katrina did. Different storms tore up Cameron Parrish.

I used to live in Youngsville, Lafayette and Baton Rouge Louisiana. March ain’t hot, compared to the real summer weather.

Gotta snicker about the roaches though ... Florida ‘water bugs’ run in fear from South looosiana bugs. Even Nutria won’t mess with ‘em ;-)

Anyways, I am glad to see some nice text about volunteers. Be nice if the same writer would drive EAST out of New Orleans and see how, amazingly, Mississippi has manged to re-bloom in comparison.

rant now off.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.