Mississippi on My Mind One Year after Hurricane Katrina
20 October 2006
Oxfam America's president comments on the commitment to helping the poorest residents of Mississippi recover from the aftereffects of the Gulf Coast hurricanes, one year later.
What was originally scripted to be a two-hour town meeting—moderated by George Curry, a widely respected African American editor and journalist—turned into a raucous three hours of prayer, emotional testimony, pleas for help, confessions of exhaustion and confusion, and moments of despair.
Among some of the 450 folks in that room were hard-working Gulf Coast residents whose ruined homes and neighborhoods were not part of President George Bush’s anniversary tour through Mississippi. They were folks like Connell Lewis, whose story Oxfam America recounted in its new report on the Gulf Coast recovery, “Forgotten Communities, Unmet Promises.” It’s the story of a man who helped his country by serving in Vietnam, but is still waiting for his country to help him in his time of need. In Katrina’s wake, his house is nothing more than a shell with exposed studs and plywood floors.
Connell Lewis is just one of countless Gulf Coast residents who have waited, month after long month, for government at all levels to deliver on the promises offered in the first days after the storm. In a speech last September in New Orleans, Bush decried the deep and persistent poverty in the region and spoke of the country’s duty to confront it with bold action, charging us all to rise above the legacy of inequality.
But right from the start, the region’s poorest residents had to wonder about that commitment to action. The people of East Biloxi waited six weeks after Katrina before they saw anyone from FEMA or the Red Cross. Some waited three months for a FEMA trailer while they camped out with relatives or in tents or in nearby states. These are the folks who have, with the help of volunteers from all over America, worked uncompensated for months cleaning up their neighborhoods and scraping mud and mold from their homes. They have exhausted their savings and miniscule FEMA allotments. And still they are waiting on the federal dollars promised so long ago to help them rebuild.
We hear that smaller government is better and that the market will provide. But visit some of the neighborhoods in East Biloxi or the ravaged coastal communities in rural Louisiana or the streets of molding, sagging houses in the Ninth Ward, and the reality becomes clear: The market will not rebuild the levees around New Orleans, it will not provide credit to destitute families trying to get back into their homes, and it will not guarantee that their insurance policies are paid against legitimate claims.
Whether in East Biloxi, or anywhere else in the world, the most vulnerable people are the worst affected by calamity and the last to get help. Oxfam does humanitarian work in more than 100 countries, including the US, to change this. As Americans, we can and must make things right on the Gulf Coast. That means working together, with one voice, on a recovery that will allow the region to build itself back better than it was before—to become a place that has enough decent housing and opportunity for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.
Our government has a fundamental responsibility to guarantee the well-being of all citizens in this country. That’s our responsibility, too: We elect the leaders of this government. It’s our job to hold them accountable to the promises that inspired us with so much hope one long year ago. Together, we can rise above the Gulf Coast’s legacy of inequality.
Note: This article appeared originally as part of the Sharing Witness blog, an online community featuring social commentaries. Raymond Offenheiser is a founding contributor.
