HELP NEEDED

Images of desperation among residents of southeast Louisiana who were ravaged by flooding and neglect after Hurricane Katrina are gone from current mass-media.

Still, tens of thousands in New Orleans and elsewhere in this region are struggling to regain and/or rebuild their homes. They're struggling against lacks and frustrations and spirit-sapping bureaucracy.

The Common Ground Collective and Rebuild Green need many more volunteers with trade and professional skills.

We need a battalion of lawyers to help residents secure their proper amount of federal Road Home moneys ($6.2 billion is available, but it's divided among more than 150,000 home-owners, meaning an average award of just $49K to rebuild after 2005's wreckage) and funding. We need architects, carpenters, electricians, masons, pile-drivers, plumbers, welders and others with trade skills. We need workers to remediate soil and restore wetlands. We need aid for psychological as well as physiological aid to survivors (the Common Ground Health Clinic in Algiers has served more than 13,000 patients in its first year; see www.cghc.org).

The battle for justice and housing and equity in New Orleans is far from over. It's a struggle that happens every day.

The same forces that wanted vast swaths of the Upper and Lower 9th Wards for "re-development" immediately after the Industrial Canal was breached and flooding submerged miles of homes east and west of the Canal still seek to grab block after block of land.

Obstructions are a commonplace. The Common Ground Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic had its opening ceremony on August 28, 2006, one day before the first-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. More than a month later this genuinely beautiful facility, the realization of a few months' combined work by 9th-Ward descendants and volunteers from Wisconsin and elsewhere, still has not begun service, as it's blocked by previously unknown City regulations. A half-mile north, on the 1600 block of Deslondes, the house of a woman who had her own blood-testing business before Katrina remains an unoccupied wreck, not the blood-testing laboratory it might be, as this woman's $36K insurance-settlement remains stuck in the unyielding grip of her mortgage-holder, the Chase Bank, while she must pay said Bank a $589 monthly note. A half-mile east of the would-be, fully equipped Lower 9th Ward Clinic, on the 6300 block of Dauphine, an elderly Cajun home-owner who'd reclaimed his house last December despite prohibitions enforced by National Guardsmen and a complete lack of electricity and running-water in the Lower 9th (so that darkness was entire, there and then, by 6:00 p.m.) died of a heart-attack while laboring to start some air-conditioning on his family's site.

So we ask you again to provide any help that you can. Your presence here would be the most vital contribution, but both the Rebuild Green and Common Ground Relief sites accept on-line donations.