A Healthy Dose of Anarchy

After Katrina, nontraditional, decentralized relief steps in where big government and big charity failed.

Neille Ilel from the December 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Common Ground’s initial incarnation was a medical clinic in an Algiers mosque. Algiers is a decidedly poor and drab cousin to the rest of New Orleans; it’s hard to believe that its sprawl of nondescript homes and apartment buildings is just across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. But unlike the city across the river, Algiers didn’t flood. And within a few days of the storm, several young men on bicycles started knocking on doors in this unremarkable place, asking if people needed medical help. They called themselves street medics.

“A street medic,” explains Iggy River, a Common Ground volunteer, “is a person with an indeterminate amount of knowledge, usually from mass gatherings or street protests, of acute need first aid”—treatment for dehydration, cuts, broken bones. With his dark disheveled hair and giant wooden ear spools, Iggy looked like he would be more at home at a World Trade Organization protest than coordinating supplies in the ruins of a poor black neighborhood. Indeed, it was for such protests that the street medics learned their craft. After Katrina, street medics provided first aid and basic medical services such as blood pressure and diabetes testing.

The renegade volunteers soon ran into Malik Rahim, a neighborhood activist and former Black Panther, and Common Ground was born. By the time I visited, the group’s clinic had moved into a permanent storefront location and was staffed by three motherly receptionists, two acupuncturists, and one overworked doctor. The acupuncturists hailed from Acupuncturists Without Borders, one of the more curious groups founded after Katrina. To accommodate medical volunteers from all over the country, the state of Louisiana allowed out-of-state practitioners to provide treatment without a Louisiana license. The acupuncturists fell under that umbrella.

In the clinic’s waiting room a man with diabetes waited for acupuncture with his wife. Since the hurricane, Dennis Waits had come back to his job as a furniture restorer. But because only two of his colleagues also returned to work, the company was cut from its health insurance program. Waits, a solidly-built, middle-aged white man in a work shirt, did not look like an adherent of alternative medicine. But his diabetes had led to a condition called nephrotic syndrome that caused painful swelling in his legs and feet. It wasn’t easy for him to swallow his pride and get care from a free clinic, but he was up to two shots of cortisone a day, and it was wearing off after a few hours. In any case, he wasn’t afraid to have needles put into his wrists.

‘You’re Seeing Life Here’

Waveland, Mississippi, is one of those small Gulf Coast towns that wasn’t covered much by the national media but suffered Katrina’s winds and storm surge as much as anyplace else. It’s also where a band of hippies from the Rainbow Gathering landed just after the storm. “Waveland was as far as you could go then,” said David Sayotovich, a tall, skinny 51-year-old who has been attending Rainbow Gatherings since the 1980s.

Every year, usually in July, a group of like-minded folks get together for a week or so in a national forest to honor the ideals of peace, love, and cooperation. Begun in 1972, the Rainbow Gathering is an institution of the American counterculture; it brought an estimated 15,000 participants to the Routt National Forest for its annual gathering this year, according to the Denver Post. Most people associate the group with drumming and smoking pot, but the group also manages to cook and serve meals for a large number of people with no running water and no electricity. To people like Sayotovich, it was a no-brainer to use those skills to help people hurt by Katrina.

With encouragement from a local church group, a Rainbow busload of volunteers decamped in Waveland, pitched tents across from the police station, and started serving hot meals to the displaced. “The FEMA people said, ‘You can’t do this—it’s not in the manual,’ but we got away with it,” Sayotovich said with a grin.

Dubbed the New Waveland Café, the operation didn’t just feed residents. It encouraged them to participate in cooking, cleaning, and other details that went into running the aid effort, transforming the helped into helpers. Tales of how the residents of this small Southern town took to a group of hippies reached as far as the Chicago Tribune, which reported that the group ran its kitchen so well that one Red Cross volunteer quit to join them instead. The Gambit, a New Orleans alt-weekly, described a police officer looking the other way when the smell of marijuana drifted out of the Rainbow camp.

“You’re not just seeing a truck driving around passing out Styrofoam containers of food,” said Mark Weiner, taking a dig at the Red Cross. “You’re seeing life here.” Behind him a 40-foot geodesic dome—a tent repurposed from the 35,000-person Burning Man art festival in Nevada—was beginning to fill with the day’s lunch crowd. The 23-year-old Weiner is a founder and executive director of the nonprofit Emergency Communities, which set up shop in the parking lot of what once was Finish Line Off-Track Betting in storm-ravaged St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans. There it operated the Made With Love Café and other assorted services, including a clothing swap, Internet terminals, and a children’s play area.

Weiner had never run an aid organization before. He hadn’t really run anything before, which was at once obvious and hard to believe. His phone rang constantly. Young volunteers ran up with questions at a sustained clip. Weiner accommodated every request with answers that seemed to be pulled out of the air: “Sounds great.” “Whatever you think is best.” “Totally.” It sounds like a recipe for chaos, but behind him trays of coconut curry soup were being instantly replenished as the food line emptied into the cafeteria.

A fresh-faced graduate of Columbia University, Weiner was your typical young hipster living in Brooklyn and applying for law school when Katrina hit. Like nearly every volunteer I encountered, he tried to sign up with the Red Cross first. After he registered online, the Red Cross informed him he would have to wait weeks to attend a training session before he could see any action. “Basically,” he recalled, “I was impatient.”

Then he found out about the New Waveland Café. There he met Scott Ankeny, a 34-year-old magazine publisher who had been at Burning Man when Katrina hit. When the Rainbow kitchen organizers closed shop, the two decided to expand on the Waveland principles by opening a food kitchen in the denser New Orleans area.

They settled on St. Bernard Parish, where the devastation was so complete that some say there may have been only two homes in the area untouched by floodwaters. Weiner and Ankeny estimate that the food kitchen served around 1,400 meals a day to construction workers, relief workers, and residents who came back to rebuild. In February, there were still no restaurants or grocery stores open for miles. For most of the diners at the Made With Love Café, the only other option was eating packaged food brought in from elsewhere. Five months after Katrina, the few Red Cross trucks that had been seen early on weren’t coming around anymore.

Nearly all the ingredients at the café were donated directly from companies or individuals who were similarly frustrated with the bureaucracy of the traditional avenues for giving. The café’s roots in the Rainbow subculture were on vivid display. Twenty-six-year-old Lali, a slip of a woman in homemade clothes and a giant head wrap, was the “head kitchen mama”; she believed in using as many fresh organic ingredients as possible, which is not ordinarily a priority in the wake of a hurricane.

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