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More Waveland
Yesterday we walked around Waveland a bit, including down to the waterline. The devastation near the beach is pretty much total. Most houses there are just foundations, sometimes with front steps intact leading up to nowhere. About a mile away from the water a railway car was lifted up and dropped in some trees, which is the kind of thing you get with a 30' flash flood. Near the gulf all the trees had their bark stripped off on one side by the wind. We saw a number of cars that were essentially undamaged, except for the trunk being violently ripped open... it's possible that's from the hurricane, but it seems more likely it's from people afterward, looking for food, looking for anything...
On a more positive note, we talked to a lot of the residents here, and they almost universally seemed upbeat, friendly, and more than anything else just getting on with their lives. We served a lot of them food in the New Waveland Cafe as well, and they were surprisingly cheery. I can't help but be impressed at our ability to adapt and keep going.
Actually, the circumstances here seem to have created a strong brotherhood-of-man feeling, where everyone you see waves at you, and if you're walking down the road people driving will just stop to chat with you. One guy gave us his business cars and told us to come have a drink with him. It was almost creepy, but that's just the level of friendliness all over here.
The Cafe itself, well, it's alright. There are a lot of people here doing good, most of them even competently, they just suffer from a few misguided people trying to manage them while loudly proclaiming how not in charge they are. They practice a push-me-pull-you form of seagull management that creates massive waste and inefficiency, which I guess makes them like normal bad managers. We who actually do work soldier on.
More later.
On a more positive note, we talked to a lot of the residents here, and they almost universally seemed upbeat, friendly, and more than anything else just getting on with their lives. We served a lot of them food in the New Waveland Cafe as well, and they were surprisingly cheery. I can't help but be impressed at our ability to adapt and keep going.
Actually, the circumstances here seem to have created a strong brotherhood-of-man feeling, where everyone you see waves at you, and if you're walking down the road people driving will just stop to chat with you. One guy gave us his business cars and told us to come have a drink with him. It was almost creepy, but that's just the level of friendliness all over here.
The Cafe itself, well, it's alright. There are a lot of people here doing good, most of them even competently, they just suffer from a few misguided people trying to manage them while loudly proclaiming how not in charge they are. They practice a push-me-pull-you form of seagull management that creates massive waste and inefficiency, which I guess makes them like normal bad managers. We who actually do work soldier on.
More later.
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By way of example, one day I was walking the levee in Baton Rouge, and a passing bicyclist did his very best to tip his bike helmet to me.
2) I think that you will discover that inefficiency is inherent in just about any relief effort, in one of three forms: a) it's cobbled together volunteers, and some of them have managed to end up in the hot seat. There's no huge reason to expect those guys to be logistical gods. It is easy to take the wrong lessons from real life - thinking that what works for your business of fifty in a normal environment neccessarily scales up to feeding thousands, for example. b) you have a semi-professional organization, with some logistical sense, like the Red Cross. They begin to suffer from what I think of as "the quartermaster problem" - i.e. quartermasters the world over tend to not want to give out stuff. Stuff is power. c) you have a very professional logistical operation, like the Army. This is almost always a government organization, and comes with the problems attendant on getting such organizations to open up the taps to begin with.
Soldiering on is precisely the correct behavior for you. You can have the best ideas in the world, but you're still only going to be there for six(?) days total, which will make implementing them extremely difficult to pull off, both because of the time constraints, and your position in the organization. It isn't an impossible trick - you could basically convince someone on the inside that doing things a bit differently would have some payoff to it - but I suspect you'll get a bigger payoff for the effort by putting in the sweat than trying to manuever around the political/organizational set-up.
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We're basically doing things the best way we can, and telling other people our thoughts on how we can collectively do these things better, without irritating them so that any good advice we have is lost.
A big part of the issue here is that there is no organization at all here. This is not a Red Cross project, or FEMA, or Rainbow, this is whoever happens to be here, and since they vehemently fight off any sort of attempt at organization (they're anarchists, after all), it's hard for them to make progress on establishing good process. Not impossible, and they do alright. I have no illusions that they would not continue to get their job done regardless of our presence, but we do what we can.
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Just for my own curiosity, do you know if Mike and Yoli Amr are still running supplies in?
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We have not seen any sign of Mike and Yoli, and no one here seems to know who they are... which doesn't necessarily mean they aren't still doing something. Were they under the auspices of FEMA? Because FEMA declared the disaster closed the day we got here.
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I think of anarchism from its etymology - "without rulers". I don't think that means "without structure", but rather that people cooperate together when it makes sense for them to do so.
Mike and Yoli were definitely not under the auspices of FEMA - FEMA tried to confiscate their stuff and threatened to arrest them a couple of times. It is certainly possible they've gone home - when I left they had been working solidly since Day 2, and said they needed to get back to Austin to take care of some business.
I'm a bit surprised that nobody at NWC has heard of them - I was with them delivering supplies caged from the Red Cross one day, and it was about the fifth run they had made that week. Could just be turnover, or could be selective memory - Mike struck me as a person who didn't mind getting a few jaws bent out of shape, when he thought things weren't going right.