People's Organizing Committee

-JEN HERRMANN
Seven us worked at the POC. It was divided into three different projects. Two were more traditional legal research projects, which have been written about below. I, however, was working on their third project: community organizing. Organizing is crucial to the POC because its mission is to be run by the community: instead of the organizers telling the community what it wants/needs, it aims to do what the community wants.

Organizing has to be done in the evening, since that's when most people are home, so I spent the morning gutting a house. Teamed with college students from Wilberforce and Florida A & M, we pulled, ripped, swept, and wheeled everything out of a house that was completely upside-down inside. It was almost impossible to think that at some point that mess was somebody's home, so first it was only a destruction project, purely physical. As we pulled things out, however, the lives of the people who lived there began to take shape. By the end of the week, we knew that older folks lived there, the husband a pastor. One of them taught science, it seemed, because there was evidence of a miniature classroom. A teenage or college-aged guy lived there; we knew which room used to be his bedroom. We knew a lot about them...but what we didn't know is whether they were alive or dead.

The houses in the 9th Ward were all like this--a few were gutted but most of them were just as Hurricane Katrina left them in August 2005. The home ownership rate in that neighborhood was extremely high (80-90%), and now (former?) homeowners are scattered around Louisiana and Texas, most of them in trailers.

There is a trailer park in Baker (outside of Baton Rouge) called Renaissance Village. It has 600 trailers with 1,600 evacuees. It's pretty much a refugee camp. Supposedly it's temporary housing, but the POC and the residents with whom I spoke thought no attempt was being made to get people home. It seems to be an impossible situation: Add 1,000 adult evacuees to a town of just under 14,000, set them up in a trailer park on a cow pasture 90 miles from home with limited transportation, and expect them to be moving out in 18 months. As much as people want and need to get home (I can't describe survivors' passion to get home), how can they? How do you rebuild with no money? (We're talking about poor people here, whose most valuable asset was their homes, which are gone.) How do you make money with no job? How do you get a job when your neighbors are cows and you have no car?

Our job at Baker was to go from trailer to trailer and talk to people. Not talk, rather listen. After hearing their stories, we invited them to the Baker Survivors' Council meeting, where the POC would find out what survivors want/need.