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.

Still Waveland

It occurs to me that I should describe the New Waveland Cafe, though you can find more detailed description in new_man's journal than I will give. It's essentially a medium-sized tent city that feeds residents and workers in the community. We serve about 1000 meals a day, and a few weeks ago they were apparently at more than triple that number. It's basically like making a large SCA feast three times a day.

Under the theory that we know how to cook feasts, new_man and I volunteered to handle dinner this evening. It went pretty well, and I think we managed to keep the amount of food thrown away afterwards to regrettable rather than embarrassing proportions. Certainly having volunteers who deal with meals this size several times a day meant a much more autonomous kitchen staff than at many feasts. We, or I at least, have come to better terms with the (lack of) infrastructure here and how to work smoothly within it.

The other new thing we did was some reconstruction work. The three of us drove around the hardest hit area of the city looking for people who needed help working on their houses. We found a nice older woman who mainly needed a tree removed from her roof, so we spent a couple of hours doing that. pax_industria got to put his climbing gear to good use in swinging around and sawing on branches. I got a couple of pictures demonstrating his monkeyness.

I feel like we've done good today, and yet... I dunno, I'm kind of morose. Maybe it's the situation here, although everything's been pretty upbeat today; maybe it's just my naturally bleak nature. I don't know that I feel much joy from what I'm doing here. I do think that it doesn't ultimately matter... it'd be great if I felt better about myself for doing this, but that's not why I'm here.

More later.