Residents vow to make New Orleans better

By LINDSAY VANHULLE
lvanhulle@record-eagle.com

January 25, 2008 10:24 am

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NEW ORLEANS -- There was nothing left of New Testament Baptist Church when the Rev. Jack Battiste returned to his neighborhood for the first time in months.

Katrina made sure of that.

He stood in the center of his Lower Ninth Ward church this week, now more than two years after the storm, and talked about how the building filled with 12 feet of water in the weeks afterward. The interior since has been gutted and stripped to the wood frames.

"When we left because of the hurricane, it was a beautiful little church," said Battiste, who spent several weeks with relatives in Jackson, Miss., after the August 2005 hurricane. "When we came back, it was a heartbreaker."

Students from Traverse City Christian School this week worked to rebuild homes and a church in New Orleans and nearby Chalmette, La., as part of a schoolwide mission trip. The homes they helped renovate were located in several different city neighborhoods.

Katrina ravaged many areas in New Orleans, but the Lower Ninth Ward was widely reported as sustaining some of the worst damage. The largely working-class neighborhood was inundated with water for weeks, and a large portion of its residents have not returned.

Now, the neighborhood is virtually silent.

Hardly any cars travel up and down the streets. Rows of houses stand in various states of decay, some with broken windows and most without occupants. The few people spotted outside working on houses are more likely to be contractors than homeowners.

And then there is the vast expanse of vacant lots, where little remains besides overgrown weeds and concrete slabs that once served as foundations for homes. These are the homes that were razed, the ones that could not be salvaged.

But those who stayed here don't doubt their neighborhood will come back, if not stronger than ever.

"God was forcing us to step back so we could step forward," Battiste said. "This neighborhood will return to its prior state slowly.

"When we come back, we'll come back twice as strong."

That sentiment is echoed by residents throughout the city. Their love for their hometown, they say, far outweighs their current challenges.

"It'll never be what it was," said Carl Kelly, who owns a home in New Orleans East. "The only thing I can see, it'll be better than it was."

The hurricane left seven feet of water in his house, and utterly destroyed the first floor. But the damage was mitigated slightly, he said, by the fact that his home stood higher than most of the others on his street.

Kelly began rebuilding just weeks after Katrina hit, and moved back in during fall 2006. It was hard to stay away. By now, he said, his neighborhood has about 75 percent of its residents back.

"My wife and I sat down and we talked about it," he said. "We put 17 years in this house."

But, he said, "If it happens again, I'm gone."

Lawrence Farve plans to stay, but he said the decision comes with a growing sense of frustration from what he says is a lack of concern by city leaders about the fate of the most-devastated areas.

Farve's home in the city's Eighth Ward sits between a house he said caught fire in October 2005 and another that partially collapsed onto the side of his home a few months ago. He said he called everyone from his city councilman to the governor's office to convince them to tear the buildings down, to no avail.

"No one wanted to come help me," said Farve, who moved back into his home in January 2006. "It seems like they're not worrying about the smaller neighborhoods.

"I was born and raised in New Orleans, you know. This is my home. But now I'm getting disgusted."

Battiste has focused on his church to help him through. He opted to renovate the church before his own home a few blocks away, and since has moved to the New Orleans suburb of Marrero. His former home hasn't been touched since Katrina.

In a month, Battiste said, he hopes to rededicate the renovated building to the community. Even though the size of the congregation dropped from 110 to just 30, and though the number of residents who returned to the neighborhood is just a fraction of the pre-Katrina count, it's making a comeback.

"The love of the city exceeds the hardship," Battiste said. "The vision has never diminished."

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