Sarah Davies

Nobody knew what to do after the storm in NOLA. Now the nonprofits are in a strange new world. People were inspired to start new nonprofits or new careers at nonprofits. Recovery is renaissance.

LouisianaRebuilds.info
How do we get information out about the city? Rather than each creating their own site, they brought everyone together to build one big site. Some people had come back and were looking for information about groceries, hospitals, utilities, and other basic needs. Some people were still displaced and were looking for information about whether they could move back. They were the registration site for state assistance programs. The information needed to be easy to find and easy to read. The information had to be at a seventh grade reading level and accessible within three clicks maximum. At their high point, they got 20,000 visitors per week. Now they get about 10,000 visitors per week. Traffic has dropped off from the displaced community and increased from the local community as people decided whether or not they were coming back.

We went on a cemetery tour at dusk yesterday with the incredible NOLA native, tour guide, and Voodoo priestess Bloody Mary. The picture above was taken at the Masonic cemetery, where there is a stairway to a rooftop where you can look down on the whole thing. It was dark, so that picture is autoleveled and grayscaled to show some definition. We sang to the spirits. Gave them candy and whiskey (although it was Scottish whiskey on St. Patrick’s Day, I hope we didn’t piss anybody off!) I think this quote from Mark Twain about summed it up:

“Our cities of the Dead look just like our cities of the living- long narrow houses, housing multi-generations of the same family with above ground basements .”

We also went to Holt Cemetery (warning – PDF). It’s an underground burial cemetery, mostly used by people who can’t afford expensive burial. There are handmade headstones, graves built with railroad ties, pvc piping, old chairs that were taken apart and repurposed. Some of the graves over a hundred years old. Lots of flowers, lots of decorations. It is obviously visited regularly. There’s no regular maintenance, so it’s overrun with weeds and plants, and since it’s underground burial, if you look hard, you can find a few bones popping up out of the ground. Fortunately, it’s on high ground, so the storm didn’t flood it too badly.

There are way more dead people here than living.

That’s me in the French Market. That blue above my head is actually my hair. Interesting mix of handmade arts and crafts and cheap imported electronics. I have ethical issues with cheap imported clothing or furniture or toys because I know there are ways to produce those items that exploit environmental and human resources less. However, I know that electronics are only made in sweatshop factories in Asia. Cellphone chargers probably cost about 50 cents a piece (in labor and parts), most chargers from the same brand all come from the same factory, so I think things like the French market are great for that. It looked like there were a lot of first generation immigrants who had their family ship over boxes of electronics from Asia, and sold the electronics at the market, undercutting the local electronics shops (not hard to do with your average markup being around 2000%). The impact of the production is the same either way. So in that case, I think it’s actually more ethical to buy at the market and put money into the pockets of immigrants than to buy at electronics shops. I’m curious why we don’t see this in Seattle at all. We have a huge first generation Asian immigrant population. Are there laws against it in Seattle? Am I just not going to the right markets?

As fate would have it, we are staying in a hotel with the same name as the Spitzer hooker who has made $204,000 so far from online music sales of her two (count them, two!) songs.

Been in New Orleans for 2 days now. Being vegetarian has been difficult, but fortunately I eat shellfish, so I’ve gotten by okay. I did get a bit of a shock the other day when we went to a seafood restaurant in the French Quarter. After we had ordered, our waitress brought a tray to our table full of round things that I automatically assumed were rolls, until I noticed they had eyes:



I sincerely entertained the thought that they knew we weren’t locals and were playing a joke on us to see what we would do if they gave us a plate of raw potatoes before dinner. Should we eat them just to be polite? Perhaps juggle them? As it turns out, the potatoes were actually baked, and these crazy people slather them in butter just like a roll and eat them before each meal! I think David Atkins would have fainted on the spot.

Eventually, we got so overwhelmed by all the greasy food that we we had to hit a sushi place we found on Decatur.


Yummy!