the new waveland café and market - Rainbow Family of Living Light

the new waveland café and market - Rainbow Family of Living Light

THE NEW WAVELAND CAFÉ AND MARKET
THE NEW WAVELAND
CAFÉ AND MARKET
had a 60-foot domed
dining area (complete
with nightly musical
performances), open-air
kitchen and free
marketplace, offering
everything from health care
(traditional and New Age)
to Internet access.
The New Waveland Café’s geodesic dome tent provided a respite from common sights, such as this storm-trashed restaurant.
“Got down Biloxi, run into this contractor,” said
Floyd Agee, a traveling day laborer eating lunch at
the New Waveland Café. “He said he would pay me
to help him build this house. I contracted him for
$750. He said, ‘I’ll pay you when it was done.’
When I got done I went to get my money, and his
mobile home and the other contractor were gone.
If anybody wants to work down here, they better
get their cash every day. Every contractor I’ve
found has either lied or given me the runaround.
I’ve been down here a month. Very, very little work.”
Sean, Anna and baby Hope are missionaries who traveled from Mount Airy, North Carolina,
in their veggie-oil bus, combining Christianity and environmentalism to, in Sean’s words,
“be free from the powers of Babylon.”
Paradise after the flood — on a church bus.
Gallows humor also helped. As one Café patron said: “Katrina
was like an ex-wife. She took pretty much everything I had.”
Kim Newsome, from Nome, Alaska, is part of an
Adventist Community Services team who, with
students on mission trips from Christian
academies, ran drive-through supply distribution in
Waveland: “[Students] came up with an idea to use
Post-it notes, different-colored ones, for hygiene or
food or baby food or cleaning products, whatever
[survivors] needed. Two people at the beginning of
the lines would find out what they needed and
stick these notes on the cars. And as they came
along … [the students] would pull the stickers off
the car, and they’d put supplies right in their car
for them. We were servicing over 700 cars a day.”
THE NEW WAVELAND CAFÉ AND MARKET
Faye Jones, of Bastrop Christian Outreach Center,
arrived in Waveland with husband Pete 10 days
after Katrina: “People kept coming and kept
coming and pretty soon there was beginning to be
a lack of food, so [Bastrop congregants] decided
they needed to pray for food. Somebody said, ‘We
need to be specific.’ And somebody said, ‘Let’s
pray for hot dogs,’ because hot dogs can be spread
[around], they can be cut in pieces. About 10 minutes after they stopped praying, this small truck
drove up. The guy gets out and says, ‘I’m from
Florida. I’ve got 2,600 hot dogs on this truck. Can
anybody use them?’ A few days after, the Rainbow
people came down. We believe that they were sent
by God also. They took over the cooking and the
serving. Just an awesome presence. They have
servant hearts and the spirit of giving. We have
had such a cooperative, symbiotic relationship with
the group of Rainbow that’s been here. We’re not
here for the appreciation, but it does help. That’s
what’s kept us going, the hugs. We hug each other.
We hug Rainbow, and they hug back.”
Rainbow volunteer David Sanotovich, of Wisconsin,
who worked at both Waveland and in New Orleans
(pictured here). “When all the hierarchy’s gone,
who’s left is people who actually do the work. The
bureaucracy was pretty lost, initially. It reminds me
of that bumper sticker, ‘When the people lead, the
leaders will follow.’ [Federal officials] were literally
taking notes, looking at what we were doing.”
“It’s not really all that common to feed people without
proselytizing or politicizing or looking down on them.
Ultimately the vibe carries us.”
— Lawyer and Rainbow member Brian Michaels of Eugene, Ore.
(front), with Rainbow spokescreature Vermin Supreme
“I’m 33 years old, and my hobbies are ballroom
dancing and disaster relief. We’ve all learned to
drop all our preconceived ideas, and the people
here have also learned to do that. Some of our
favorite people are the police, the government —
they love us and in fact we love them too. Through
all the times or causes that I’ve been involved in,
trying to promote this or protest that, facilitating
change is really hard, it’s almost impossible basically. But here, just by the simple deed of feeding
someone, we have in fact changed the world.”
— Rainbow volunteer and Canonsburg native
Aaron Funk, of Berkeley, Cal.
“I just have to tell you: If you have the Lord Jesus he will save you,” Bay Saint Louis,
Miss., resident Mary Giveans kept saying as she was treated for a cut in the unfamiliar
surroundings of Rainbow’s Center for Alternative Living Medicine (CALM) tent.
Brighid Snowdon, a holistic healer, stayed calm herself: “Now, you cut this on a cardboard
box? It wasn’t metal? Are you comfortable with this tape?” As Snowdon said later: “If it
were me, I would have put some honey on it and been done.”
“So many people were discouraged by governmental agencies, Red Cross, saying ‘Don’t come,
don’t come.’ I don’t know why.”
— Rainbow volunteer Ann Mackle, of Philadelphia
“I was in Wisconsin, kickin’ it, and the storm hit. I go to Rainbow every year, [and] I have this
kitchen in my barn that can feed thousands of people. Therefore, I am responsible. I called up
Organic Valley [a farmer-owned cooperative in LaFarge, Wisc., for whom Siemon farms]. They
offered up their bus, with a walk-in refrigerator truck in the back. We didn’t have any clue
where we were going. My goal was to get in to help or get out of the way. I think our biggest
day we [served] almost 4,000 people. That was beyond anything I had ever experienced.”
— Rainbow volunteer Robert Clovis Siemon of Viroqua, Wis.
NEW ORLEAN’S LOWER 9TH WARD
In late November, some parts of
NEW ORLEANS’ LOWER 9TH
WARD, ST. BERNARD’S PARISH
and hard-hit outlying regions were
not yet open to the public. They
were occupied instead by National
Guard troops, who spent their days
in Tyvek suits checking abandoned
homes for bodies, helping also to
haul out large, sodden items.
Worst were the refrigerators,
which now smelled like Dumpsters
inside and sometimes opened to
reveal snakes that had swum in
with the floodwaters.
National Guard leave a spray-painted shorthand on each house already checked, including the date and the Guard unit (in this case, from Georgia).
The “0” at the bottom of the “X” means no bodies were found inside.
Capt Wendell Taylor, Alpha Company, 39th Support
Battalion, 39th Brigade, Arkansas National Guard,
was recently in Iraq: “Over there, we’re getting shot
at, we had mortars coming in. You have a much
better feeling about what you’re doing versus what
you were doing there. We were
delivering water and ice to this one couple. They
were elderly. The lady would talk to us, and she
would drink a little water, and her husband, God
bless his soul, he was trying to sweep off the patio
and the concrete. She looked over there finally and
said, ‘Honey, stop, just stop, it’s not doing any
good.’ But he wouldn’t stop, he just kept sweeping.
That kind of catches our hearts a little bit. That
kind of stuff you see all the time.”
Broken bleachers still swamped by flood debris and dead vegetation.
Boat in a channel on the way to Delacroix Island.
Guardsmen, hauling out a couch rendered many times heavier
by water, also found the house’s American flag. Remarked one
Guardsman: “Yeah, we found the colors on the ground and we
put them up.”
Lt. Phoebe Odessa Harris serves with the 39th
Infantry Brigade out of Little Rock, Ark. She was
stationed in St. Bernard Parish Disaster Relief
Center in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Her unit had
already checked 1,100 houses. “I’ve never seen
so many men cry. They call us saviors for coming
in. Even an item from a couple of Christmases
ago, we’ll go in and pull it out for them.”
WELCOME HOME CAFÉ
NEW ORLEAN’S LOWER 9TH WARD
The Lower 9th Ward: as if the hurricane and flood happened yesterday.
The Rainbow Tribe alone set up
WELCOME HOME CAFÉ in
Washington Square Park, on the edge
of New Orleans’ French Quarter. It was
a much smaller operation than the
facilities in Waveland. With 20
volunteers, the group fed mostly people
who had never left the neighborhood,
because they didn’t have a home to
lose. Street people and addicts who had
used the park and neighborhood in
better times were now lining up for
meals. Returning local residents
weren’t necessarily supportive, but it
was the only free hot kitchen in town,
serving more than 500 meals a day, by
organizers’ estimates.The cooking tent,
decorated with Mardi Gras beads and
a disco ball, employed its own waterfiltration system. Just down the street,
it still looked like the apocalypse had
passed through. At night, it was
quieter than country.
A cemetery in Reggio lost many of its residents.
Lower 9th Ward
Homemade memorial on a traffic island in the Lower 9th Ward.
Rainbow volunteer Felipe Chavez, of Wisconsin, arrived
at Waveland shortly after Katrina and later ran the
Welcome Home Café. “We were up at the apple orchard
in southwest Wisconsin. Like the old Blues Brothers
movie, we’re on a mission from God. We were confronted here at Washington Square Park because we didn’t
have a permit. We were confronted pretty heavy. Why
do we need a permit to serve our fellow man? They
haven’t been confronting us lately. I feel like we’re
providing a service for people the government should
have done a long time ago. ... A lot of [residents] are
depressed, and I understand that. There’s life coming
back, definitely. They’re coming back to New Orleans. I
know the music of New Orleans is back. It’s nice to
hear the second line of people in parades, the dancing.
That’s what’s bringing New Orleans back to life.”
WELCOME HOME CAFÉ
Duquesne University student Alison Roth: “I did dishes. That’s really what I did. We served a lot of people a
lot of food. In New Orleans, the camp was in a dodgy area of town. We would start [cooking] around five in
the morning, but not open the gate until 7:30. The street in front of you, Washington Square Park, before
the flood, it used to be a homeless, heroin-type park. There was this one guy who came up every morning
at 5:09. He would sit down and say how much he lost. He didn’t have a home but he lost his livelihood —
he lost the tourists who would come down. He was so angry that nobody would come down. You don’t really
think about it, [but] these people also lost their livelihoods — their survival.”
Richard Rawski, one of the original Waveland crew,
was a Rainbow volunteer at both camps
The French Quarter was still on its feet.
WAVELAND FOUNDER JIMMIE JONES, ON NOV. 20:
Pittsburgh activist Vincent Scotti Eirene was a conduit for some of the food aid that went to both cafés:
“It was an abandoned town a month-and-a-half ago. A lot of people have returned. Much of it is like a new
frontier. A lot of younger anarchists who have come are helping to put this together from the outside —
a new society on the shell of the old. There was not only the whole thing of feeding people: There were
people also opening health clinics and people fighting evictions [of absent residents from apartments].
You really realize how thin the veneer of modern life is, and how that can be ripped off at any instant and
you have to start all over again.”
There are still people sleeping in tents, and there are still
people who are cold and who have no electricity and no
water. There’s no quick solution to any of the problems. I
would like to think that America could respond even
more. Back home, I’ve had friends and family members
say, “Well, haven’t we done enough?” If you see what
happened on television and hear what’s been done, you
think a lot’s been given away, a lot of FEMA trailers, a
lot of hot meals — aren’t they ready to get back on their
feet? Well, that question’s answered immediately when
you watch the people come down the road walking with
their buggies or on their bicycles. I’ve thought and prayed about this. When I first got here
there was a sense of humiliation: They were embarrassed that they were hunting for
clothes for the first time in their lives. There are people today who came here for the first
time, asking for blankets, a tent, a cooler, clothes. We don’t understand the scope of their
situation. It’s kind of hard for me to walk away from that.
To donate to the continuing relief efforts in St. Bernard’s Parish, contact www.emergencycommunities.org/index.php, www.commongroundrelief.org or www.bastropchristianoutreachcenter.org/. Those considering traveling to St. Bernard Parish may want to contact Ben
Brubaker of HandsOnNetwork.org at [email protected],, 678-862-9236.
To see more photographs and hear the full interviews with these and other Katrina relief workers, see www.rainbowsandbelievers.com. The Web site also contains a suggested gear list for
working in hurricane areas. c
Romni, a Welcome Home regular: “This is a city for lost people.”