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 3 of 4)

Lali began volunteering in Waveland with friends from the Rainbow Gathering, going on to set up the St. Bernard Parish operation with Weiner and around a dozen others. “We’re looked at as outsiders in the rest of the world,” she said. “This is a great opportunity for us to prove ourselves, to be seen in a better light, not to be judged as people who freeload”—a reputation that haunts the hippie Rainbows. The meals at the café were delicious: curried vegetables, roasted organic chicken, homemade apple pie. I tried to eat there whenever possible, as did every resident I talked to.

One of the first principles of Emergency Communities was that anyone was invited to come down and help. “If you’re a volunteer and want to come down for two days, we say come on down,” Weiner said. “You don’t need ‘training.’ We’ll give you two hours of orientation right here.” And so behind the tents for eating, cooking, picking up free supplies, and checking email were a hodgepodge of more ramshackle tents connected by a makeshift boardwalk of moving pallets. Volunteers, who ran the gamut from homeschooled high school students to a father-son duo on a bonding weekend, just had to get as far as the New Orleans airport. Emergency Communities housed them, fed them, and put them to work. According to Weiner, 1,400 volunteers came through the camp, and the café served about 160,000 meals to 15,000 residents and workers in the six months it was open. (It’s impossible to verify his numbers independently. For that matter, it’s impossible to verify the Red Cross’ numbers independently.)

Disaster Relief As Civil Disobedience

“The most important thing to remember is that this was a catastrophe rather than a disaster,” says E.L. Quarantelli, co-founder of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. The Red Cross tried to operate as it has in most American disasters—and that usually works just fine. But this wasn’t a typical situation. The relief groups’ own headquarters were destroyed, as were local trained workers’ homes. You couldn’t reliably reach people by phone or email. And when the Red Cross was prevented from going into some areas, by physical hazards or by local authorities, it didn’t react like the Rainbows, a group used to operating without the law on its side. It simply turned back.

Quarantelli says it’s not unusual to see informal community groups stepping in during a crisis. But traditionally it’s religious groups that engage in this sort of decentralized relief. The Mennonites, for example, have been at it so long they’ve developed a formal organization, the Mennonite Central Committee, which sends workers to disaster areas all over the world. Grassroots relief organizations like Common Ground and Emergency Communities, with no religious affiliation and with members and organizers who are overwhelmingly from outside the community, do not fit the Disaster Research Center’s model of what kinds of groups emerge to deal with disasters. Their emergence, Quarantelli allows, can be attributed in part to the Internet, where people who wanted to volunteer could be matched with groups that needed them instantly, without an existing social network such as a church.

Relying extensively on Internet communities like Craigslist and Tribe.net, the volunteer groups are technically savvy; all had wireless networks in their headquarters. Perhaps more significant, they have a do-it-yourself culture and a concept they call mutual aid. “We take your house, we help you in repairing it. You help us by putting up our volunteers,” explained Sundjata Koné, a spokesperson for Common Ground.

In dealing with the disaster’s victims, this approach seemed not only natural but also necessary. Most were not used to standing in food lines or asking strangers to come work on their homes for free. They wanted to pitch in.

Take Amie Roberts. She used to cut hair at a St. Bernard salon before it flooded. When she started coming to eat at the Made With Love Café, it didn’t take long for her to realize that what was left of the parish citizenry needed somewhere to get their hair cut. She mentioned the idea to the volunteers at the café, and they provided her with a tent and some chairs. She brought her own scissors and a donation can. “I wanted to do it for the residents,” she told me while snipping away at the head of a Red Cross worker from Arkansas. By all accounts hers was the only functioning hair salon in the entire parish, attracting dozens of residents, contractors, and relief workers a day.

The term “mutual aid” isn’t as touchy-feely as it might initially sound. The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin advanced the concept in the early 20th century as an argument against the idea that people are naturally inclined to compete against one another. The concept remains popular among radicals today, and some of the relief workers in the area espouse anarchist politics.

When locals trying to rebuild asked Common Ground for help getting the proper permits, the group’s policy was to help rebuild, building permits or not. “We’re essentially breaking the law,” Koné told me, pausing for emphasis. “That’s civil disobedience.” If it keeps people from living in mold-filled houses, he said, then Common Ground will do it. The logic of the approach became clear to me after I spent weeks trying to get in touch with anyone at the New Orleans Department of Safety and Permits. I was hoping to get the department’s reaction to Koné and other critics who called it inefficient and unresponsive to ordinary residents. No one ever returned my calls.

Common Ground’s call to action is “Solidarity Not Charity.” Its logo features a fist holding a hammer on one side and a medical cross on the other, á la Bolshevik-era posters. Volunteers argue online about whether the group is too authoritarian or not authoritarian enough, whether there are too many anti-oppression workshops or too few. As Owen Thompson, a college student and Common Ground volunteer, has pointed out in the webzine Toward Freedom, it makes sense for New Orleans to be attractive to anarchists right now: Here is a place where government failed absolutely, and as such it could be the perfect place to argue that government itself is a failure.

Koné was happy to do just that. “They [FEMA and the Red Cross] come in, and they have all the money,” he said. “They do much less than we do. And they put their volunteers up at hotels, or on cruise liners. And that’s our tax money that FEMA’s using for that.” Like other organizers, and many locals, he marveled at the money donated to the Red Cross—$2.1 billion at last count—and how little he’s seen them do with it. “They pay themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries,” he said. “And they claim they’re broke!”

Is It Enough?

The smaller groups’ nimbleness deserves a lot of credit for their successes. Allowing residents and victims to shape the services they receive is a necessary part of disaster relief and is done best by small local groups, says Joseph Trainer, projects coordinator at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. The sheer exuberance of creatively organizing to help others is also an important factor. The same naive eagerness that inspires skepticism in some of us is an asset when none of the traditional avenues for getting things done works.

The first time I met Iggy River, the young man who told me what a street medic is, I was sitting in a coffee shop in the Bywater section of New Orleans. He was one of two men in their early 20s whom I overheard talking authoritatively, maybe a little self-importantly, about supplies for a health clinic in Algiers. They spoke with a pride that bordered on giddiness.

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