St. Bernard Parish
Camp Hope
by Miles Ross
last week july, first week august 2006
I remember seeing signs on campus for organized, one- or two-week trips to the disaster areas. a girl in class announced where you’d need to go to sign up and that anyone was eligible. it’d be over spring break. i told a roommate i wanted to go. i told someone else and they said if you’re going to go some place go some place cool that’s not fucked up. in the spring, in my public speaking class a student from tulane was introduced. the teacher said to help him out if he needed anything. i remember the question he asked after one of my speeches: ’so do you need to do anything to hike these mountains? or you just go and it’s free.’ i said ’yeah. you just go. you have to know where they are. you have to find the trail heads yourself.’ during finals when i was walking into the library to study i saw a free standing cork board with pictures from the organized trips. a bunch of students had their arms around each other and were all smiling. there were fallen trees and destroyed houses behind them. the ocean was in some shots. they were doing work with gloves and buckets in other shots. ’i should have gone,’ i said to myself. ’i can still go.’
in june, while working at my summer internship, i googled ’katrina volunteering,’ or ’hurricane relief’ - i can’t remember for sure. a small non-profit came up first. the application looked easier than the habitat for humanity route. the people in the pictures seemed ’cool’. the questioning pointed towards cooking experience. i wanted manual labor but applied anyway. my plane ticket was for the day after my internship ended. i stayed out with my friends until 4am the night before, drank beer, and smoked marijuana. i left the house while they chugged, danced and sang.
in new orleans my taxi cab driver had trouble finding camp hope. i didn’t have good cellphone service. he showed me the water line on the houses. when i got to the front office of the elementary-school-turned-volunteer-compound (camp hope) there was a confusion about who i was volunteering for. there were three groups - e.c., habitat, and americorp. e.c. ran the kitchen. habitat and americorp did gutting throughout the parish. a woman wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots from e.c. showed me around. i put my things down on a cot in what used to be a classroom. i went to the kitchen and signed up to help with kitchen preparation. the kitchen was empty except for two other new arrivals shaving carrots. i went back to my cot and laid down because i was tired. i looked at the cement floor, at flies landing on it, and at the metal studs where the walls used to be. wires snaked everywhere. an extension chord stretched into the middle of the room. i charged my cellphone. i thought ’everything is the same.’
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