University of Virginia, New Orleans Journals

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Ryan C. Fleenor, College of Arts & Sciences

It has been very easy over the last few days to get caught up in

large details -- the thousands of homes destroyed, the jobs lost,

or the amount of relief aid that has poured into the Gulf Coast.

While fundamentally critical to any meaningful evaluation of the

present situation in New Orleans, such information is, I think,

limited in its ability to convey the extent to which, for many

people, life has been rendered unintelligible since August 2005.

No piece of data could ever convey the pain and frustration

experienced by so many here; to even try, it seems, serves

only to compress the voices of this great city's residents into

one more statistic to be printed and forgotten in the annals of

public policy and history. These statistics, these hard facts,

comfort us by empowering us to see the situation here as an

equation to be solved or an engineering system to be tweaked

to perfection. Such data lull us into believing -- falsely, I think --

that we can fix all of our problems through the simple

application of cold reason and thoughtful public policy.

Unfortunately, the real world is not so clear cut. We must

remember that the disaster in New Orleans is as much a human

catastrophe as it was a natural disaster, and the people of this

city were as wounded as its infrastructure. Entire

neighborhoods continue to fear that they may not be allowed to

return home; with the stroke of one urban planner's pen, a

neighborhood's civic identity and collective memory could

potentially be forever lost. Many people have lost all faith in a

government that seems at best incompetent and, at worst,

malevolent toward its citizens. This was made abundantly clear

when the city made public its audacious and contentious plan

for reconstruction during a press conference yesterday. The

anger and sense of abandonment welling up within the men and

women who rose to confront their government was like nothing I

had ever seen before.

The human scale of this catastrophe was made real for me

today as I undertook the task of recovering, cleaning and

repairing the statues, plaques and historic artifacts of St.

Mary's School in New Orleans East. Founded in 1867, St.

Mary's has a long and proud heritage of providing educational

opportunity for the African-American women of New Orleans. It

was this sense of memory and place that "Team Trophy" (as we

dubbed ourselves) set out to preserve, and I am very proud of

our work. As Sister Greta Jupiter, the school's principle,

reminded us at lunch over Po-Boys, these artifacts may seem

small and insignificant, but they will be the small tokens that help

provide continuity and identity as the school tries to secure its

future in the face of damage estimates exceeding $4 million.

In our own small way, I hope we are helping those we meet

return their lives to some semblance of normalcy and regularity.

Whether that be gutting a house to begin the process of

reconstruction or polishing an obscure trophy from the 1960s, I

am glad we are here to do whatever we can. I just hope and

pray that we don't forget people like Sister Greta at St. Mary's,

or Father Joe in the Lower 9th, or Sister Eileen here at Xavier

Prep. It will be people like them who reconstruct the spirit of this

city, and it will be up to them to preserve its connection with its

storied past. I have every bit of faith that they are up to the task.

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