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A Symbol of Hope Amid Destruction in a New Orleans Neighborhood
Janet Brooks, Special to RedCross.org
Friday, December 16, 2005 — NEW ORLEANS – A seven-foot Christmas tree stands in the center of the empty living room of the gutted Gentilly home where Maria Radosta grew up.
Even though no one will be celebrating Christmas this year in the house on the corner of Hammond Street and Eastview Drive, Radosta decided to put up a tree anyway.
No matter that it was a discard from a neighbor who was back to empty out a flood-ravaged home. So what if the living-room ceiling is gone, the sheetrock ripped out and the buckled floor still silty?
For Radosta, the tree with its bright red balls and decorations provides a tiny antidote to the massive destruction of her childhood neighborhood, which was inundated with flood waters after levees were breached.
The high-water mark in Radosta’s home reached the height of the Christmas tree.
“The damage is unbelievable,” Radosta said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Every time I come into the neighborhood, I still can’t believe it.”
A middle-class district of modest brick bungalows Gentilly lies on one of 36 routes in the New Orleans area where the American Red Cross continues to distribute hot meals every day.
Since Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, the Red Cross has served more than 12 million meals in Louisiana alone.
Former residents are now dribbling back into Gentilly, which was off limits immediately after the storm, to assess the damage to their property and begin gutting their homes.
As the Red Cross emergency response vehicle patrols systematically up and down the largely empty streets, people emerge from ravaged houses or climb down from damaged roofs to collect a Styrofoam container loaded today with baked beans, wieners, bread and chocolate pudding.
Some arrive wearing face masks and white hazardous-materials suits.
“The Red Cross is definitely needed here,” said Joseph Robinson, an electrical contractor working to restore power to homes in the area. “You come in and deliver food where we normally couldn’t get food.”
A Red Cross volunteer nurse and mental-health volunteer tag along in a following car to treat cuts, take blood-pressure readings, urge residents to wear masks, or just provide a listening ear.
Near the corner of Cerise Drive and Grant Street, a dozen young men from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints line up for lunches, then sit down to eat on a nearby lawn.
The group drove 12 hours from Charlotte, N.C., to spend the weekend helping home-owners rip out sheetrock and lug flood-damaged furniture and appliances to the curb.
This morning, they worked on the home of an elderly widow on Camelot Street. They can gut a home in four hours.
On Gawain Drive, Tarik Griffin has returned to New Orleans after taking shelter in Jackson, Miss., for three months, and is gutting the home he bought just a year before Katrina struck.
“We appreciate this,” he told the Red Cross volunteer who handed him his hot meal. “We’re going to have lunch on the front lawn.”
More than three months after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the America Red Cross continues to distribute more than 20,000 hot meals every day in the New Orleans area.
All American Red Cross disaster assistance is free, made possible by voluntary donations of time and money from the American people. You can help the victims of thousands of disasters across the country each year, disasters like the Midwest ice storms, by making a financial gift to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund, which enables the Red Cross to provide shelter, food, counseling and other assistance to victims of disaster. The American Red Cross honors donor intent. If you wish to designate your donation to a specific disaster please do so at the time of your donation. Call 1-800-REDCROSS or 1-800-257-7575 (Spanish). Contributions to the Disaster Relief Fund may be sent to your local American Red Cross chapter or to the American Red Cross, P. O. Box 37243, Washington, DC 20013. Internet users can make a secure online contribution by visiting www.redcross.org.
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