Zoe's blog

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Building Wetlands

Last night President Obama called for 30,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. Apparently, Obama hasn´t read his history. Everywhere in this country there are clear signs that we need to invest our money at home, but given the calamity of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is once place where everyone is clear on the correlation between defense spending and failing domestic infrastructure.
This weekend the BBC Worldservice carried a piece that talked about the disappearing wetlands here on the Gulf Coast. It´s estimated that it would cost around $1.5 billion dollars to rebuild the wetlands, thus ensuring that the local fishing industry can continue to operate, and that cities such as New Orleans, Mobile and Biloxi have some protection from tropical storms. The wetlands provide a buffer between the Gulf and the mainland, and they help to suck the energy out of a storm, slowing it down and lessening its impact. If there are no wetlands, though, well.....
This afternoon I went to the Federal Building to participate in a protest of Obama´s decision. There were 5 of us, and all the other people there were men who looked like they had been through the Vietnam era as adults. We did get some honks as we held placards towards the street (honk to end war), but the small turnout also made me wonder about more effective ways to be changing policy.
On a more personal note, I would like to get out and do some photography, but I don´t have any real community connections yet to do the kind of snapping that I´d like. I´m working on it, though. In the meantime, here´s a photo of a pretty typical home in the neighborhood next to mine. Truth be told, even the color scheme doesn´t come across as all that outrageous here, which I love.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

First Impressions

I arrived in New Orleans on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Adrienne, who I know from the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP) http://www.nedap.org/, picked me up from the airport, and we drove into the French Quarter to meet her boyfriend in a bar where he was watching the Saints game. There was basically no traffic on the streets, and Adrienne explained that the city shuts down for the Saints. Even the courts schedule times around games. When I explained to her that the Packers have a similar cultish following, Adrienne couldn´t believe it. This is something I have now seen in other people: it seems that New Orleanians have difficulty accepting that any other team can inspire a similar level of fanaticism. Even though I´m really not a sports fan, it is sort of annoying to be constantly told that your beliefs or fandom are of inferior quality. I guess that New Yorkers also often have this attitude, whether about the city or the Yankees (who suck, by the way), but the narrow-mindedness behind this attitude annoys me.
For the first day or so, my feelings swung back and forth between the aesthetic pleasure of New Orleans and resistance to abandoning my whole life. In some moments, I felt the door to return to New York was closed because returning would mean failure. In others, I just allowed myself to be in a sunny, warmer place. Now that a week has gone by, I am more comfortable, and those swings have disappeared.
Chris, a high school friend of my New York roommate, Sarah, has been letting me couchsurf. He has two roommates, David and Maura. But Chris mentioned almost as soon as we entered his home that David was like the secretary on Murphy Brown: every episode someone new was in that spot. Not surprisingly, on Saturday night David told Chris that he would be moving out, and Chris offered that room to me. So now I have an actual home and not just a couch to surf.
Maura lent me her bicycle. It´s an old beater, and the seat doesn´t actually stay attached to the springs, which means that I have to pay attention to more than the usual number of elements when riding, otherwise I risk getting the flesh of my upper leg caught between the two. In spite of this challenge, having a bike to ride has been fabulous. It has allowed me to get all over the city independently, not to mention getting a little exercise, and it is a great way to get to know the city and to take in its amazing architecture.
In New York, riding a bike often felt intimidating. Here, although of course I still pay attention to opening car doors and drivers who blow through stop signs, it just feels safer. Considering that New Orleans has only about 350,000 people compared to New York´s 8 million, that is probably not really too surprising.
Before coming down here, I kept telling everybody that I would be volunteering with an organization called the Kid Camera Project. http://www.kidcameraproject.org/ Last Monday I met with the two founders to talk about their work and what I could do for them. My idea was to help them raise money and to do some volunteering with the kids. I came out of that meeting feeling disappointed. The organization only has one group of kids that they are working with right now, and there wasn´t any room for me to observe it during their final session of the year this week. Additionally, since KCP began in response to Katrina, they are in the process of re-thinking their focus.
The following evening, I was in the supermarket and ran into one of the two women. Here was a tangible introduction to how small a community New Orleans really is. She confirmed that my misgivings were appropriate, which was not really what I wanted to hear. I´m hoping to help KCP publish a book with photos and writing by the children who documented the impact of Katrina on their neighborhoods, but it also looks like I´m going to have to find another place to volunteer with kids.
As I returned to Chris and Maura´s from this grocery run, I heard an ad on the radio for a fundraiser for a program called Art Docs. http://www.artdocs.com/ Art Docs provides healthcare (preventative treatment, chronic condition management, and emergency services) to artists and musicians in the New Orleans community who earn less than $20,000/year. It is a private organization that started because people recognized that art and music are a big part of what makes New Orleans special. Listening to this ad, I asked myself why this kind of program isn´t national, since healthcare is something that is so clearly important to everyone. Beyond that, though, I was really struck at the practical effort being made to create a supportive environment for artists. Although Bloomberg touts the "creative class" and its economic impact, I frankly don´t see him doing much to make it easier for creative people to make a life in New York.
One of the silly things about the home where I´m living now is that Maura has two cats and a dog. The cats are just cats who do their own thing, but the dog, Lily, is really a dog. Although she´s about a year old, Lily, who looks like a golden beagle, has all the energy of a pup. She is constantly climbing on our laps when we sit at the kitchen table, and she pees with excitement when someone comes home. I´m sleeping in the living room, and so when Maura comes back from an early morning walk, Lily will jump onto the futon (and me), walk all over me, and stick her cold, wet nose in my face as she tries to lick me good morning. Actually, it´s kind of amusing. It´s clear that nothing can tone that energy down, so, while I do try to get Lily to behave sometimes, at others all I can do is laugh and give in to the tail-wagging excitement.
There is certainly more to tell about this first week, but suffice it to say that I am settling in and appreciating the environment. While I think that New Orleans is not as international as New York (which, I admit, is a tough act to follow), I did hear people speaking Arabic in a neighborhood café last week, and I have met some other people from outside the US who aren´t here as tourists.
Thus endeth week one.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Kermit Impressions at ReBuilders´ Source

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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Photos from Mark Winston Griffith´s Campaign

http://picasaweb.google.com/zoesull/MWGCampaign#

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Campaigning in Brooklyn

For the first couple weeks of September, I worked on Mark Winston Griffith´s campaign for city council in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It was an amazing experience, and while Mark didn´t win the primary this past Tuesday, he only lost by about 600 votes. The incumbent, who was running against 7 other people, including Mark, squeaked by with only 30% of the vote.
Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights are really more one community than two. They share amazingly beautiful brownstones and a population that is almost entirely African-American and West Indian. Sometimes during my campaign work, I would have to ask an older person to repeat themselves because I am not accustomed to West Indian accents.
While the neighborhood has more than its share of problems, there is much to love about it, too. As I would head into the campaign office in the morning, I would walk up Nostrand Avenue and say hello to the people I met, who would actually return my greeting and my smile. The same would happen in the afternoons as I would head past the brownstones on my way to knock on doors: the families or Seniors working in the front yards or chatting on the stoops would return my pleasantries with real openness and friendliness.
Two Sundays ago, I went to a church to campaign for Mark. Unfortunately, I wasn´t allowed to make an announcement during that part of the service, but since I was there, I participated in the entire 3-hour ritual. It was amazing. Everyone looked good. Everyone was dressed up, everyone except me, although fortunately I had chosen a decent t-shirt instead of a tank top or a t-shirt with a snarky phrase on it. There were an abundance of ladies with big hats. One woman even had a silver dress that was cut in triangles and had tassles hanging from it. She had a hat to match, too.
The sermon was about recognizing old enemies in new situations, and the pastor made it clear that, even if we have a Black President, racism is alive and well. I wondered if this kind of sermon would be given to a more mixed audience. I was the only white person in the church. I also considered that all of the energy, hope and faith, that people expressed through songs, was probably one of the things that has kept African-Americans going in this country with its history of slavery and racism. The power of the music and the congregation´s response to it also made me wonder if this wasn´t a connection to a truly African heritage, in spite of the centuries that have passed since Black folk were first brought to this continent.
At a certain point, the Pastor asked those who were attending the church for the first time to stand, so I stood, along with a handful of other people. In the same way that people in the community offered smiles as I went about my canvassing, so again did people in the church come to extend handshakes and to say hello to me.
On the other side of this, there are many problems. The foreclosure rate in this neighborhood is one of the highest in the city, and one out of five families has lost their home because of unscrupulous lending. Jay-Z, the rap artist, is from an infamous housing project in this area, the Marcy Projects, and fellow campaign workers noticed gang signs around the projects. Just a few days before the election, three people were shot in a housing project, and some of the canvassers who had been brought on for the final push were terrified because they ended up walking by the bodies.
One older woman I spoke with told me that she wanted to return to her youthful home of Virginia because she was tired of everything in Bed Stuy. A day or so earlier she had seen a police office punch a woman in the face because she was asking about something that was happening to another man.
Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights are beautiful, and while there is crime and violence, there is also a substantial educated, middle class. A couple of the young men from the neighborhood who were working on the campaign attend the University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon.
I hope that Mark wins in November. The community needs someone who is going to put himself out there and do. It needs someone who is going to care, and Mark cares.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Link to my photos from Brazil

http://picasaweb.google.com.br/zoesull/Brazil#

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Se la

"Se la" is an expression in Portuguese that means "whatever" or "I dunno." It's just one of those things that I have learned to use as an interjection here, although, admittedly, my fluency with this is nowhere near a native Brazilian.
Anyway, this morning I went to the swimming beach near the hostel where I'm staying. For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, it's the same beach where I spent the day with a Frenchwoman when I was here in Salvador in March. It's the same beach where people applaud the sunset.
So, today I was swimming, and I thought I would share with you all some thoughts about the water. It was clean and clear and a greenish-blue color. The water is so clear that as I swam, I could see schools of fish swimming beneath me. The bottom was also clearly visible, with big, black rocks occasionally breaking the taupe-colored sandy floor.
About a week ago, Talia, the American writer, and I came to this beach at dusk because I wanted to swim at that time of day. There were fluffy, steel-gray clouds in the sky that the sunset highlighted with rose and orange. The container ships that dotted the horizon faded gradually into the blackness of the evening as the last rays of light disappeared. But the water below me seemed illuminated. Granted, it was the super-powerful floodlights pointed at the beach that kept the water looking like it was almost daytime, and that allowed me to continue seeing my feet as I floated around. Se la, I thought it was cool that the sky and everything else had become an oily black, and I could still see my feet under water.
A couple of days ago I tried to change my ticket to come back in mid-July, but Northwest told me that they didn't have anything available, even checking up to July 19th. Obviously I'll keep you all posted, but I'm starting to think that at least this segment of my Brazilian adventures is coming to a close. As a result, I've decided to start really acting like a tourist. Hence the beach today. And tomorrow a day trip to a nearby island. And more photos at the local market, which, once again, makes it clear that Salvador is the developing world.
Oh, if any of you have suggestions for temporary work that would let me save some money to come back here, please let me know. While I would consider things in New Orleans and maybe Madison, New York is the most likely landing place for me. Plus, I miss pub quiz. And all you people who make life so good. Love you all.