I Wear My Sunglasses At Night (and Always).
May 11, 2008 at 15:00 PST
This is an old essay I wrote about my trip to New Orleans two years ago.
The memory and joke that I’ll remember for the rest of my life only cost me five bucks. The day before our flight, my best friends (Becky, Dory, Matt, Megan, Steve) and I went shopping for supplies at Walmart. We stocked up on sun-block and bug spray...and found for ourselves six pairs of matching aviator sunglasses for five bucks. We all wore those sunglasses with so much pride, blasting ‘I Wear My Sunglasses at Night’ on our ipods and singing in uneven tones.
The moment I stepped off the plane at our destination I could feel the thick air in my lungs: this was New Orleans. As a New Englander (who, surprisingly, is not particularly fond of the frigid weather) coming to Louisiana in the middle of a cold March was nothing of short of heaven. But the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans that I came to know was more hellish than anything else.
During my spring break this year, my best friends and I took a journey defining us as individuals and binding us under the law that we are all one. I had never felt more connected to humankind than when I was gutting out houses or living in a destroyed school.
I stayed with a group called Common Ground, a group who’s slogan was “Solidarity, not Charity”, a group who worked together to not only work on changing the face of present day New Orleans, but also to house and feed over five hundred people who were working with us that week. Although there was every reason to get grouchy or upset in those conditions, everyone was optimistic to be where they were.
We lived in (as afore mentioned) a destroyed school called ‘St. Mary’s of the Angels School’, a school which, to many people, saved lives during hurricane Katrina. During the week of the storm, survivors lived in the top floors of the school, and were rescued off the roof. Some chalkboards in the classrooms still bear their horrific stories.
St. Mary’s had no electricity. We ran on a generator that often shut down on us during various parts of the day. The school barely had any running water, and the toilets often clogged up or simply stopped running. Like any other school the toilets were in stalls, but the doors were ripped off and our only sense of privacy was through a thin blanket or curtain hanging. Hand sanitizer was the demand here, you can imagine.
Of all the senses tantalized in this experience, the one that haunted me most was not my sight, but the smell. The smell of New Orleans was that of wet and rot. Of muck and mold. It was enough to stifle and gag you, make your eyes water and your stomach turn.
Our team (now respectively called ‘Team Sunglasses at Night’) got up at six to work from nine to five. We ate breakfast every morning in the school’s gym, which was now covered in blue tarps from the destroyed wooden floor. Volunteers cooked food for us, and every individual did their own dishes. Since there were no running water, we washed everything in four large containers: the first filled with regular water to rinse or dish, the second with soap water to wash our dish, the third to rinse again, and the fourth filled with bleach to kill germs. Almost everything was washed with bleach. It stung your nose and made your hands raw, but we needed to be sanitized.
Before the work day, we got our house address and assignment, mostly we gutted out houses, but there were other tasks to make Common Ground stronger as a community.
To work for the day, everyone has to take certain precautions to prevent us from inhaling black mold or staff infections, among many other problems. Each person had to wear a Tyvek suit. A Tyvek suit is made of a material that absolutely does not breath. Within the first five minutes of work, you’ve already sweated through your t-shirt and jeans. To insure that nothing gets into our suits, we have to wear two types of gloves: one tighter fitting latex glove, and then work gloves over that, duct-taped to the sleeves of our suit. We also had to duct-tape the legs of our suit to large black rubber boots, usually three times bigger than the size we usually wear.
Lastly, we all had to wear masks and goggles. Because the masks are soaked in bleach at the day’s end, in the morning we inhale nothing but the smell of bleach. Our team rarely wore goggles to work. Instead, we stuck with our trusty sunglasses. Soon everyone at common ground knew who we were because of those glasses.
Everyone warned us before we went down that people might not be particularly welcoming or kind to us in their current situation, but we had no problem with that. I didn’t understand why people warned us about that, because in my experience, either working on houses alongside the home owners or just meeting some of the locals, every one we talked to seemed exhausted but in very high spirits, eager to share their story with us. I think I appreciated that most during my time down there, how nobody seemed closed or shut down to us. What people had, they gave, and what people needed, they got (well sort of).
This was human kinship in raw form. Why does everything have to be destroyed to realized that this is there? Why does there always have to be distractions that turn us away from the bigger picture?
As a finishing statement, I suppose it’s important to tell you what an impact this experience made on me. After all, this was a defining trip for me that I’ll never forget, I feel as if it’s become part of who I am, or who I want to be.
As a student and young adult, trying to figure out what the hell is going on is a tricky task. I entered last school year with a major in art and theatre, and I left. I continue today to take classes at Mass-Art, but still I don’t know what I want to do, or where I want to go.
Before New Orleans, I don’t think I knew what I was really made out of.
It taught me, and pushed me, and tired me out. I worked my body to it’s limits, and found I still had a little energy and enthusiasm to keep exploring. I found that people’s connections in a devastated time are critical in surviving. As in life, what would it be if you had no one to share it with?
My friendships built in this expedition still last today.
And I learned, too, that it’s not enough to watch the news every night. Things are not always shown to you like they’d want them to be. If you want the truth about a situation, you need to become part of that situation, and part of that truth.
Surprisingly, the simple statement, “Education is a right, not a privilege,” made during the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School protest, made me think of my own education, and created a finer search for what education means. Just an example of how any experience should make you ask questions.
I learned this, and so much more. Sometimes I could spend hours writing about my experiences in New Orleans post Katrina, but sometimes writing and reliving it can be exhausting. The extent of the experience is unknowable, but it is instilled in me forever.
Me working on the... 
Genius Hell 
Random 
