Video Recap

Please enjoy this brief video recap of our trip!!

Coming Full Circle

Two years ago, I wrote several posts about my experiences in New Orleans as a first year law student. On that trip, I learned a lot of things. I talked to a client for the first time. I learned what it’s like to have someone depend on me to meet his or her legal needs. I discovered that helping an overworked office means being patient and may not always be as fun and glamorous as one might hope.

I returned this year as a different person to a different city. In the past two years, I’ve worked in several different arenas of indigent defense, and I’ve taken four more semesters of law school classes. In the meantime, New Orleans was growing too. As our caravan of three minivans crossed the bridge into the city on Sunday night, lights shone brightly in areas that stood dark two years ago. The Orleans Public Defender Office, that didn’t have its phones set up in 2006, has a much bigger staff and a more fine-tuned office.

Yet, many things haven’t changed. The houses on our drive to the office are still boarded up from Katrina, and I even worked on a case based on an incident before the storm.

Working with a busy office also hasn’t changed much. I’m not counseling clients or arguing motions but instead working on legal research and writing projects. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s necessary work. The research that I did today was research that my supervising attorney doesn’t have the time in her busy schedule to do and helped ensure that all of her clients were getting the best representation possible. It may only be a week-long project, but I know that what we’ve done matters. We might not see it now, but we lightened the load of several attorneys and we brought peace of mind to several defendants.

Thanks again to all of you who have supported our trip. And, thanks to all of my fellow classmates for your work. Even if you don’t realize it yet, you are making a difference.

Public Defender’s Office-Team 1L.
The first year law student team working in the Public Defender’s Office was assigned to conduct first appearance interviews. These interviews provide an initial assessment of potential clients entering the prison system to see if they qualify for assistance. We met in the intake room of the prison with prisoners awaiting their bond hearing and observed the magistrate court. After collecting information about the potential clients we made follow up phone calls to their families to provide information about their bond.
Our work with first appearances continued the second day. One of the most fulfilling parts of our work has been letting the new prisoners know their rights as they enter the prison system. We have observed first-hand how unsettling the entry into the prison system can be for people that often don’t know what awaits them, what exactly they are charged with, or how to work with the system. Our general knowledge of the legal system and the training provided to us by the Public Defender’s Office has enabled us to alleviate some of their anxiety by letting them know what will be happening next and simply showing that someone cares about their case. This experience has really opened our eyes, and we look forward to learning more about the criminal justice system each day.

Working for the Pro Bono Project-Day 2

The other half of our group has spent two highly productive days volunteering for the Pro Bono Project.

The Pro Bono Project was founded in 1986 by the Louisiana Bar Foundation to help provide legal services to the poor. Over 1400 attorneys in Louisiana contribute at least twenty hours of volunteer legal assistance to the Project each year. The Pro Bono Project receives funding from the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corporation, the Louisiana Bar Foundation's Interest on Lawyer's Trust Account (IOLTA), Title III funds, and private donations.

Our small group is helping The Pro Bono Project file pro-se divorce cases. Due to post traumatic stress resulting from Hurricane Katrina, the divorce rate has increased in New Orleans. In the last two days, our group has written seventy divorce petitions, contacted clients, and has arranged to meet our clients as well as other Pro Bono Project clients who were unable to attend their scheduled meetings due to a snow storm last week. I have automated the pro se divorce templates so that we can process client files more rapidly. One of our talented first year students has assisted multiple Spanish speaking clients.

Our group has enjoyed working on the 49th floor of the Shell Building in the law offices of Liskow & Lewis and with our supervising attorneys from Kilpatrick Stockton, Robert and Steve.

Below are several pictures of our group working for the Pro Bono Project.

Louis, Alexis, Najib and Meghan hard at work writing client petitions.

Ann Benoit, an attorney from The Pro Bono Project, answers Sarah's questions about a complex case.

We made it!

Hi everyone! Our amazing team made it to New Orleans on Sunday night. We've enjoyed great seafood and jazz music, but most of all, we've really enjoyed working hard in our respective offices to make sure that New Orleans' citizens rights are protected on both the home and criminal justice fronts. My smaller group has been with the New Orleans Public Defender office for the last two days. Our incredible first-year students are working on the First Appearance project, doing interviews with potential clients to determine indigency and family/community ties. The first appearance is a critical stage in the criminal justice process, as this is an opportunity for the attorney to argue why the defendant should be released pending her next court appearance. Our students are working hard to provide the attorneys with helpful information about the clients to help send them home so they may be with their families, continue their employment, and effectively aid in their own defense. Our second- and third-year students are working one-on-one with attorneys, completing research projects and investigative tasks. Thus far we've had students research important jurisdictional questions, construct an investigation plan for a serious murder case, and examine a client's right to a Speedy Trial under the Sixth Amendment when a warrant sent post-Katrina never reached him. Our students are providing the attorneys with answers to tough legal questions that will aid in their effective and zealous representation of clients as demanded by the Constitution and Louisiana law. Many of these clients are struggling in the aftermath of Katrina--attempting to regain employment, receive government benefits, and resolve old cases where evidence and/or transcripts were lost in the storm. With the help from Seema Kakad, Sonal Raja, Allison Standard, Alicia McClendon, Josh McIntyre, Rob Lamb, Joe Vossen, Claire Sauls, Alex Finamore, Ryan Caban, and myself, the Public Defender office's clients are receiving top-notch representation and protection. I am proud to be a part of this amazing group, and we are all deeply appreciative of your efforts to send us here. We could not do this incredibly important work without your support. Many thanks.

Come party with us!

2008 New Orleans Team

Our 2008 New Orleans team is in full force and very excited about our upcoming trip this Winter Break! This year our team consists of 22 individuals (listed below) who will travel to New Orleans from December 14 - December 19 to help with ongoing post-Katrina problems. Half of our students will partner with the New Orleans Pro Bono Project, helping low-income clients handle family law issues that have arisen because of Katrina. The other half of our students will work at the Orleans Public Defenders Office, interviewing potential clients whose records were lost during Katrina.

We would really appreciate your support! Here are ways that you can donate to help subsidize our travel costs:

1. You may write a check payable to UNC School of Law, with “Pro Bono Discretionary Fund” in the memo line. Checks can be sent to: UNC School of Law Pro Bono Program, c/o Dean Sylvia Novinsky, Campus Box #8880, Chapel Hill, NC 27599.

2. Or you may donate online at http://giving.unc.edu/gift/. After selecting your method of payment, please select “School of Law” as the University Designation, “Other” as the University Fund, and then indicate “Pro Bono Discretionary Fund” in the box for Other Instructions below that.

2008 New Orleans Winter Break Team
Najib Azam
Ryan Caban
Katie Carmon
Alexis Chappell

Melody Chen
Alex Finamore

Justin Flores
Shayla Guest
Emma Hodson
Tarik Jallad
Meghan Jones
Seema Kakad
Rob Lamb
Louis Massard
Alicia McClendon
Josh McIntyre
Sarah Oettinger
Heather Powell
Sonal Raja
Claire Sauls
Allison Standard
Joe Vossen

The Work

The work that we are doing for the New Orleans Pro Bono Project involves successions. In order to receive settlements or government aid for damages resulting from Katrina, clients have to prove they own the affected property.

Many of the properties in New Orleans are historic homes that have been passed down through generations. The problem that we are addressing arises when the legal owner of the property dies and there is no succession opened to legally transfer the property to their heirs. The resulting problem is that when people go to get money for their recovery, they are turned away because they are not legally recognized as the owner of the property. This problem disproportionately affects low-income residents because it costs money to open a succession and it may result in tax obligations.

Many intricate issues arise while we are trying to figure out these successions. The law firm of Kilpatrick Stockton, who has supported our efforts from the very beginning, has again sent two of its attorneys - Brian Corgan and Maria Baratta - down to help supervise us. Our supervising attorneys have been an amazing help in resolving the complex issues that pop up. Pictured above, Kilpatrick Stockton attorney and Tulane alum Brian Corgan helps UNC Student Julie Zibulsky go over the pleadings she has drafted.

The work is intricate, challenging, and often frustrating but we are figuring it out together.

Students In Action...

The drive down here took 15 hours, but the students put the time to good use.
















UNC Law students Suzanne Buckley and Julie Zibulsky get into their case files and research how to resolve any of a number of issues.















The law firm of Jones Walker is graciously hosting us this week. At left, UNC Students Nana Atsem and Willie Spruill are busy trying to learn Louisiana law in order to start helping their clients.















One of the great things about this experience is how we all work together to help resolve the legal issues facing our clients as they try to get ownership of their property.

**photo credit to Carmen Boykin**

UNC Law Back in New Orleans

Twelve of us make up UNC's fifth contingent to New Orleans. We will be here from December 16th through the 22nd doing what is asked of us in order to help the people of New Orleans recover. As always we are working with the wonderful people at the New Orleans Pro Bono Project. Please check back regularly throughout the week in order to get first hand accounts from the students on the trip as they experience a city being reborn.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

Back to "Reality"

Let me first start by apologizing for my inability to count. In my last blog I said “closing in on three years after Katrina,” and I meant to say closing in on two. Thankfully, basic math is not required in order to graduate from law school.

I am home from New Orleans and reading for my classes tomorrow. I have caught myself saying “back to reality” several times only to laugh at myself… I am actually leaving reality and headed back into my 1L law school bubble. This transition is difficult because I had become so invested in my client’s situations. I was not yet ready to leave New Orleans because there was so much more to do on each case. After talking to several peers and Ellen Artopeus of the Pro Bono Project, I have learned that this is an issue with many students. Successions take many months to complete and we only have five days to work on them. Nevertheless, once I have started something, it is more than difficult for me to leave it unfinished. However, I must remember that I did move each case along, if only a little bit. My phone calls and research saved the New Orleans Pro Bono Project a minute here and an hour there. That alone makes a difference.

My time spent in New Orleans was eye opening and valuable for me both as a law student and a citizen of the United States. New Orleans is a resilient, vibrant city that still needs the support of the country. It is easy to forget about Hurricane Katrina because it has been one and a half years since it hit. However, the city still needs all the assistance it can get - including helping hands, contractors, materials, and money.

What I found most striking and troubling is that as a tourist, you can fly into New Orleans, take a cab to the French Quarter, stay a week and take a cab back to the airport without seeing much effect from the hurricane except maybe for a "For Sale" sign here and there. Basically, unless you are really looking for it, you wouldn't notice too much difference in the city. There is jazz music on every corner, drinking on Bourbon Street and tourists EVERYWHERE. But, if you drive out of the French Quarter and into District 6, the 9th Ward or over to the Canal Street breach, it looks as if the hurricane hit last week. Some homes are gutted but many have been left untouched. Some homes are leveled with only cement foundation remaining, but many display "No Bulldozing" signs and "we are coming home" messages. Those signs have been there for one and half years and who knows if and when those people will actually have the means to rebuild and come home.

These areas were the areas hit the hardest, but unfortunately they are easy to avoid, if you want to avoid them. It is clear from talking to any citizen that the city of New Orleans has not forgotten about the Hurricane, no matter where you live and work. However, I worry that our country has now started to forget when the city needs our help the most. New Orleans is attempting to rebuild their homes and communities from the ground up, and they cannot do it alone.

Fortunately, there were a number of other organizations including other law students and undergraduate students who chose to spend their spring break working to help the city of New Orleans. Law students from Iowa, Indiana, St. Louis and Howard were all working for the Pro Bono Project this week. In fact, it was the largest group they had taken on since Katrina. Also, during our drive through the 9th Ward on Wednesday morning, we saw a hefty group of students forming at the Common Ground 9th Ward headquarters. Each was wearing a protective suit and carrying a mask. Each was ready to help clear and gut homes.

Support is there, but I say the more the merrier.

Rebirth Got Fire

New Orleans, and our work this week, has been a study in stark contrasts. Tourists bustle in the French Quarter; parts of the city are still silent. We work in a fancy firm conference room on successions for some of New Orleans’ least well-off residents. Colorful yellow flowers bloom in Jackson Square; a yellow waterline mark still runs through houses and roofs in the lower 9th Ward.

When I traveled to New Orleans last year, I saw how much hope and little help existed in the region. Returning a year later, I’ve discovered that the strength of this community is in its resiliency, but the government is not making anything easier. Community residents seem to have come to the conclusion that the government isn’t going to help them.

We’ve worked all week on successions, helping area residents prove they own land, so they can receive government assistance and insurance payments. I’ve been proud of how dedicated my Tar Heel peers are to helping their clients. 1L Amy Dessel refuses to be slowed down by holes in her cases, and has literally been on the phone all day. Justin Flores, also a first year student, has almost finished a succession in a mere 2 days.

In addition to working on successions, supervising attorney (and recent Carolina Law grad) Diane Standaert has allowed us to help on a research project for the Center for Civil Rights, and a consortium of other public policy entities. Land partitioning has adversely affected many lower-income residents of the rural south, and each day several Carolina Law students help Diane mine through the New Orleans Pro Bono Project’s files, looking for further evidence of the problem. To me, this task initially appeared to be overwhelming. However, after sorting through the files, it has been a striking to realize how many of the clients’ stories are similar. It’s frightening to discover that the structure of many states’ laws, not natural disasters, could prevent low-income residents from living on their land.

My favorite part of traveling with the UNC Pro Bono Program is getting to talk to people and interact with the community. Luckily, Diane afforded myself and 1L Ashley Erickson the chance to get out into the community after work yesterday.

We met up with Professor Oscar Barbarin, of the UNC School of Social Work, who took us on a tour of District 6. Professor Barbarin is part of a UNC consortium made up of the School of Social Work, the Planning School, the Law School, and several other University departments that is adopting District 6. Currently plans call for UNC to set up information resource centers in the district, and work on clustering plans.

Professor Barbarin grew up in District 6, and took us on a tour of the area with his sister, Sylvia. Ms. Sylvia is a current resident of the area, and in addition to providing a candid assessment of how the city is progressing, she provided a rich commentary on the culture of the city. The sense of community was palpable in our trip around District 6. However, people are sick of planning. Hopefully the UNC programs will provide constructive help to the area.

I was tremendously bothered by several housing projects we saw that were boarded up. Ms. Sylvia told us buildings hadn’t suffered any damage from Katrina, rather the landlords used the evacuations as an opportunity to buy out their tenants’ leases. Now the landlords want to tear down the projects and develop the properties. With the majority of New Orleans’ residents displaced or in FEMA trailers, it was shocking to see habitable buildings empty.

The New Orleans Pro Bono Project was kind enough to set up a meeting with Judge Zainey of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana and Louisiana Civil Court Judge Giarrusso. Yesterday we attended one of the first Katrina insurance trials in state civil court, over which Judge Giarrusso presided.

The trial was something out of a movie; the plaintiff was a 91 year old holocaust survivor from Poland, who ended his testimony by yelling, “America is the greatest country ever, God Bless America.” Yes, the insurance company did look evil.

I was also perplexed how the insurance company was going to get a fair trial. To find 12 people that don’t feel like they have been screwed by an insurance company in this city has to be impossible. A bench trial probably wouldn’t help the insurance company either; all but 2 district civil court judges lost their homes.

Driving back from the 17th Street Canal yesterday, 2L Matt Liles and I discussed how you can see solid improvements in the city. In the 9th ward, you can see a house or two in each block where people have moved back in. It’s not a lot of progress, but it’s something. I don’t know whether to say New Orleans is back or will be back; I guess time will tell.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4307972.stm

District 6

I will blog more on my overall experience later – the following is my time with Professor Barbarin and District 6:

Tuesday evening, I had the opportunity to tour District 6 with Professor Oscar Barbarin from the UNC School of Social Work, his sister Sylvia who is a life long resident of District 6, Boz Zellinger a 3L, and our supervising attorney Diane Standaert, from the UNC Center for Civil Rights. Professor Barbarin and Sylvia were both raised in District 6 and Sylvia is currently working on renovating her home with plans to move back into her neighborhood as soon as she can. Due to his close ties to the district, Professor Barbarin has chosen to focus his and the UNC School of Social Work’s relief efforts on District 6.

Professor Barbarin first drove us through the district. The Pontchartrain Park area was one of the worst hit in District 6: a middle class African American community built around a golf course which is now completely devastated from the storm. We saw a sprinkle of FEMA trailers and vehicles; however, on the whole, the neighborhood is vacant. In fact, this is true for a lot of District 6 neighborhoods. This becomes most apparent when the sun goes down. Driving down streets lit only by street lamps… no people, no cars, and no lights in windows. Empty.

We also attended two community meetings. At those meetings Professor Barbarin introduced his two pronged “proposal” to help move District 6 forward and ultimately set an example for the rest of the city. The first part of the proposal is “clustering.” “Clustering” is an attempt to get citizens to move back into their neighborhoods by grouping them in houses close to each other in each neighborhood. Essentially, those who move back to their neighborhoods literally cluster around each other regardless of whether they are in their original homes. Everyone really seems to like the idea of clustering; however, everyone wants the clustering to occur around their home.

The second part of the proposal is information centers that would be placed throughout the district and would serve as a data base for citizens to get their lives back in order. For example, at the second meeting we attended, a man from Global Green introduced environmentally friendly energy conserving construction measures in order to “re-build right.” These measures would be beneficial to all citizens of the city and exactly the type of information that would be placed in these information centers. While some data would be helpful to the entire city, other information would be better suited only in certain areas. Therefore, the goal is to tailor each center so that it fully accommodates each district or area.

My feeling from both meetings was that the citizens are extremely thankful for any and all help they can get. Both groups seemed responsive to Professor Barbarin’s proposal. However, it is clear that the community is tired of planning. They have been planning since August of 2005, and now, in March of 2007, they are ready to do. Sadly, what they are most in need of in order to do, is money.

Touring District 6 and listening in on the meetings gave me a very real look at where the city is today, closing in on three years after Katrina. It opened my eyes to the fact that each effort, no matter how small, does not go unnoticed. In fact, as we were leaving the second meeting, a man tapped me and said that he had been reading our blog, and thought is was great. That brought a smile to my face and should give each person who has given their time to the victims of the hurricane a great sense of fulfillment. Seeing the community band together to literally rebuild their neighborhoods is inspiring and telling of this city’s character as a whole. The people here are resilient and the least we can do is help them stay that way.

Destruction and Rebirth

Greetings from New Orleans! First off, I wanted to thank everyone for supporting our trip. We've had some great experiences so far and are looking forward to finishing the week out strong.

Almost from the start of the trip we've been amazed and saddened by all the destruction around New Orleans. On our ride in to the city, almost every single house along Highway 10 seemed to be damaged in one way or the other. The landscape was littered with piles of trash and debris.

But as bad as this was, the damage we saw on the way in to New Orleans really paled in comparison to the damage we saw on our tour of the 9th ward. Whole sections of the ward were gone, the sole remnants of many houses just the concrete porch steps leading up to nowhere. Other houses were just piles of debris, waiting to be demolished. Perhaps most sobering of all were the spray paint markings left on houses by the National Guard and other authorities looking for survivors. Most markings we saw indicated that the house was found empty, but occasionally we did see a circle with a slash through it, indicating that a person inside had died.

But not all in New Orleans is bleak. We've enjoyed getting to know the French Quarter, from the bars and restaurants on Bourbon St. to the Cafe Du Monde for breakfast (I'll leave these adventures to our other bloggers). My most enjoyable experience by far, however, has been seeing the "Rebirth" brass band perform. The band was fantastic and it was definitely one of the best concerts I've ever seen. I felt like I was taken back to a previous era, and i could only imagine our grandparents swing dancing to this New Orleans sensation "jazz". The Rebirth brass band was slightly different from New Orleans jazz of old, as it combined elements of hiphop, funk, rap, you name it. But the band was amazing, and the crowd was loving it. Large parts of New Orleans might have been lost to Katrina, but New Orleans culture is alive and well.

We're in the Herald Sun!

http://www.heraldsun.com/
orange/10-828652.cfm

It's in their Chapel Hill section today!

Donate money to support our trips!

If you are inspired by what you read here, please support us and our community partners with monetary donations. All donations are tax deductible and you will receive a letter from the University recognizing your gift. There are two easy ways to donate:

1) You can send us a check payable to UNC School of Law, with “Pro Bono Program-New Orleans” in the memo line, to this address:

Sylvia Novinsky
Assistant Dean for Public Service Programs
UNC School of Law
CB #3380
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3380

2) You can also donate easily and safely online at https://s4.its.unc.edu/ALDevCPS/Type_Of_Gift.jsp. Please select “School of Law” as the University Designation, “Other” as the University Fund, and then indicate “Pro Bono Program-New Orleans” in the “Other Instructions” below that.

Thank you for your support!

We're in the Chapel Hill News!

http://www.chapelhillnews.com/108/story/5687.html

Lawyers Weekly article....

Our work is featured in a piece in last week's N.C. Lawyers Weekly -- check it out if you get a chance!

We were in the campus paper!

http://media.www.dailytarheel.com/media/
storage/paper885/news/2007/01/12/University/
Students.Spend.Break.Providing.Free.Services-
2628330.shtml?sourcedomain=www.dailytarheel.
com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com

Bourbon Street....

Katie mentioned in one of these fine blog posts a small musical band we ran into on our first evening in New Orleans while walking down Bourbon Street to dinner. I actually shot some video of them as we walked past -- not all that much footage, but here you go, along with a couple stills I took....

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c23/jderrick/
?action=view&current=bourbonstreet.flv

My first trip to New Orleans

Close your eyes and imagine a neighborhood full of people. Children are running down the street, maybe on foot, with others riding bikes or skateboards. Two weeks ago we drove through this neighborhood… with one thing missing – the people. Much of New Orleans is alive. Bourbon Street is thriving, with scantily clad tourists laden with beads around their necks and long-necked plastic hand grenade shaped cups in their hands who are walking, laughing, talking down the street. The voices of karaoke singers ring through the open windows of “Cat’s Meow” and music from brass bands leak out into the dark nights in the French Quarter. So much of the city is here, so many people are back working, living, and playing. However, we visited a part of New Orleans that isn’t so lively. We went to St. Bernard’s parish, one of the hardest hit areas outside the city limits of New Orleans and a parish that is still trying to begin the rebuilding process. As we were driving down the dark, empty streets we talked in our (ever so stylish) van about the fact that this neighborhood probably held so many happy memories for families. Some have returned, with their FEMA trailer now a permanent structure on their front lawns and masking some of the emptiness in the house structure behind. There are Christmas lights, and wreaths hung on the doors.

Everyone has seen the pictures and heard the stories, but seeing just a fraction of the destruction of the storm is still so powerful, even over a year afterwards. So much of our trip has been filled with orientations, videos, case files, preparations, instructions, interviews, walking, prisons, food, and laughter. It has been a great time with some even greater people. However, it was nice to be reminded today of why we are in this special city, the city where (as Mindy will confess) people create their own way of life that often influences much of the rest of the country. Paris Road is pronounced by locals as “Parish Road” which can be confusing to out-of-towners. A “roof” and a “room” are said with the same vowel inflection that we North Carolinians give to the sound a dog makes (ruf). New Orleans is such an amazing city, full of life, sound, smell and taste. The French Quarter has some of the most beautiful architectural structures I’ve ever seen. I will come back to this city for many, many reasons (the aforementioned hand grenades maybe?) but I am so glad that I got the opportunity to remind myself of the reasons I made my very first trip.

Did It Matter?

As my friends and classmates return to Chapel Hill for the start of classes on Monday, I’m often asked to tell my New Orleans story. I tell of interviews with inmates in Orleans Parish Prison, the hoops that we had to jump through to get interviews lined up, and the chaos that Katrina left on not only the legal system but also the city in general.

Often, the recipient of my story will ask, “Were you really able to help anyone?” or “Did you make a difference?”

Unfortunately, this is not an easy question to answer. Months later, the inmates that I interviewed will, unfortunately, still be sitting in jail, and the destruction that I witnessed will be far from gone. I didn’t change the world in a week, and it would be naïve of me to expect that I could. Having to answer this question has really made me think about what we accomplished in New Orleans and why we went in the first place.

One of our goals in going to New Orleans was to continue to make others aware that the devastation of Katrina has not gone away. A year and a half later, people are forgetting and New Orleans is no longer front page news. With our stories, we hope to remind others that the battle to rebuild is much more than just building houses and is far from over. At a university so engaged in community service, it is important for us to go beyond Chapel Hill, the Triangle, and North Carolina, and hopefully, we have spread this message.

Another way in which we helped was through our support, care, and understanding. Our presence alone told the inmates, the divorce and succession clients, and the attorneys that we want to help. One of the inmates that I interviewed didn’t realize that she had a lawyer, and when I explained to her that the state will provide her with representation, her surprised and relieved smile said it all. If our interview that afternoon brought that inmate some reassurance and optimism, perhaps we did make a difference afterall. Conducting inmate interviews also allowed the inmates to tell their stories. I will never forget the inmate next to me, pressing pictures from a photo album against the Plexiglas with tears in her eyes as she spoke to her interviewer. This was a woman dying to tell her story, and through the interview project, she finally had that opportunity.

Finally, working in New Orleans gave me a new perspective on the legal system. I understand now that change takes a lot of time, and problems cannot be solved in a day. I will never forget the horrors that the inmates in OPP faced (http://www.aclu.org/prison/conditions/26198res20060809.html), and I will never again see an inmate as an orange suit with a number. These are lessons that I will take with me throughout my legal career and will hopefully make a difference in my interactions with clients for years to come.

No, we didn’t change the world, but we definitely did some good.

Success in Successions

I think it was very appropriate that we took this trip to New Orleans just before Christmas. With exams having just ended and being on break, the last thing that I was in is a Christmas spirit. Two days after exams ended, we left Chapel Hill at 6am for our journey to the city of both despair and hope. When we arrived in New Orleans it was nighttime and we couldn't see anything, including the miles and miles of devastation that we would see on the way out of the city at the end of the week. Having never been to New Orleans (or even LA for that matter), I wasn't sure what to expect, but on the first night as we walked to dinner, we stumbled across a group of musicians playing on the sidewalk. It looked like a group of about six or seven, each playing a different instrument, wearing street clothes and attracting quite a few listeners. That was the last group of musicians I saw playing on the sidewalks and I was surprised. I thought that there would be music everywhere, livening up the city, but this emptiness seemed to be the theme of the week. As we began our work, we were given instructions on what we were to be doing and we hit the ground running. My group worked on successions, which is a process which one must go through to have a deceased relative's estate passed on to their heirs, regardless of whether or not a will exists. This process is unique to LA because of their civil legal system and it is very tedious. There are over 26,000 successions to do in New Orleans alone and as a group we only worked on about 35 so it sometimes felt like we weren't making good progress, but I got over that feeling very quickly when I began to speak with my clients. Those people whose successions the pro bono project is able to handle are of little means and are very grateful for the time that the pro bono project volunteers spend on their file. They were very eager to speak with us and would respond so quickly when we asked for documents and information. Our clients were so kind and grateful to us. It was amazing the kind of spirit these people still had after all that they have been through. They cannot even rebuild their homes until they can collect insurance and FEMA money, which they cannot do until they have their home in their name, which will not happen until these 26,000 successions are done. So we got to work and made good progress as a group. We got our first taste of writing petitions and affidavits and it tasted better than I had ever expected. Especially because we were working hard to make sure that by next Christmas, some of these people would be back in their homes. I left New Orleans in the best Christmas spirit I think I've ever been in. It was amazing to think what these people gave me this holiday season when they have so little to give, but that is what Christmas is about. Giving what you have when you can, even if it is the last you have to give may be just what someone else wants or needs. I am only a first year law student and my time and my service is about all I have to give these days, but it was appreciated. Some clients were surprised to hear from us when we would call, thinking that they had been forgotten and part of going down to New Orleans a year and four months after Katrina is to remind everyone not to forget and to remind ourselves not to forget what happened there or how many people still need help. There are still families with no home, no power in their FEMA trailers, no job, and no neighbors. But these people do still have a lot of hope and spirit and although nothing else was, that was beautiful to see. The last day as we drove out of town, we saw more of what we saw on our tour of the 9th ward, which was desolation and emptiness. Empty apartment buildings, empty homes, empty stores, empty motels, empty restaurants, and even an empty Six Flags. It will take time for the city to rebuild itself and to fill itself with laughter and music and people again, but with the help of those who have just a little bit of time and service to give, it will happen. Thank you to everyone who supported us in our efforts!

Judge Landrieu and The Misery Tour

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c23/jderrick/
?action=view&current=judgetour_0001.flv

The morning before we took The Misery Tour through some of the hardest hit areas of the city, we met with Judge Madeleine Landrieu, and here is some of what she had to say and some more of what we saw....

More video of the 9th Ward....

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c23/
jderrick/?action=view&current=9thward2.flv

9th Ward, Lakeview....

"Noah's Arc, No Politicians"

A little video from the 9th Ward....

Well, today we got up, had a debriefing about our experiences over the past week, and started driving back to Chapel Hill.

It's now past 3:30 a.m. and I'm headed to bed. but before crashing I had the chance to rough out a small bit of video I shot while we were in the hard-hit 9th Ward.

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c23/
jderrick/?action=view&current=9thWard.flv

We did some good things and completed some files, but the duty of rebuilding New Orleans is larger than I can understand.

Some of us are already planning how to get back down there....

Bittersweet

When I moved away from St. Bernard, a small town 15 miles southeast of New Orleans, people would often ask where I was from, and my answer was always "New Orleans." For me New Orleans connoted a truly unique culture that didn't disappear when you crossed the city limits. The fact that I lived on the other side of the sign that read, "Welcome to St. Bernard" made me no less a New Orleanian than those that resided on Esplanade or St. Charles. I camped out at 5am to secure a "good spot" for the parades during Mardi Gras, I grew up listening to Fats Domino and Irma Thomas, and my family's favorite take out place was "Levi's," a small po-boy shop in St. Bernard . My point is that I know the culture, the uniqueness, and the grandeur of "The Crescent City", and unlike many of the rest of my classmates on this trip, when I come to this city, I'm coming home.

I've been back three times since the hurricane, and while I could write all day about my experiences, I would like to make two points. First, that while the physical devastation appears to lessen every day, it takes more than money to repair the devastation that resides in the souls of New Orleanians. Second, Even though surrounding parishes do not bear the name "New Orleans," the devastation in these parishes is unbelievable and should not be forgotten.

Our first night here, we walked out of our hotel, crossed Canal St., and ate at one of my favorite downtown restaurants-- Acme Oyster House. The bars on Bourbon were open, the street musicians were entertaining, and the tourists were partying. It was a typical night in "the quarter." The next day we drove down St. Charles Avenue gawked at the enormous houses and pointed at the Mardi Gras beads on the power lines. Sure there were areas of the city that were still in need of major repair (see other blog postings) but to me it appeared that Mid-City was well on its way to recovery. Then I spoke to the people. Our welcome speech at the Office of the Public Defender gave us insight into how the storm affected the justice system in New Orleans, and while I am not allowed to go into great detail, I stress that Katrina touched every aspect of the legal system. Even the small things such as having the ability to makes photocopies were taken away. When I had the opportunity to speak to the prison guards, the prisoners, the lawyers, and any other person I came into contact with, there wasn't a word that came out of their mouths that wasn't laced with the despair brought by Katrina. I sense that they are reluctant to mention Katrina because they feel people are tired of hearing about it, mostly they talk about how much they miss family members that have been relocated. Many of the prisoners don’t even know where their families are. The TRULY amazing thing about the people in this city is that despite their grief, their loss, and the unforgettable images that surely haunt them daily, they are full of hope.

On our third night here, we went to what the locals refer to as "da parish," what the map labels as "St. Bernard Parish", and what I call home. Even though I have been there since the storm, I know I'll never get used to what I see when I arrive. My house is in lower St. Bernard Parish, so on my way home I drive past my high school, the baseball parks where I spent the good part of my childhood summers, the Burger King where my sister and I ate breakfast every morning in high school, the doughnut shop where my grandmother and I ate beignets after church on Sunday, and the many neighborhoods where my friends and family lived. These places are gone, the school gates are bent, the windows are broken, and many of the houses are rotting. We didn't get to my house on Wednesday, but when I leave this downtown hotel on Friday, I know what I'll be going home to, and while I always look forward to seeing my family, I don’t look forward to living the life of a post-Katrina resident of St. Bernard Parish, not even for two weeks!

Not So Easy in the Big Easy

A few memorable observations from our week in New Orleans:

-The District Attorney’s office has one copy machine, and it was broken all of last week.

-The Sheriff’s office is still run on a generator. When the generator was down on Tuesday morning, they had no power, no phones, and no internet, and the databases run by the sheriff were inaccessible.

-Louisiana law allows a person to be held for 60 days until the DA decides whether or not to press charges.

-Temporary prisons have just been built next to Orleans Parish Prison. They look like a colony of giant bubble shaped tents surrounded by barbed wire.

-It is difficult to interview a client through Plexiglas using telephones, especially when the client is incompetent. (And it is a long, difficult process to get that client into an interview in the first place.)

-The McDonald’s across from the public defender’s office now only consists of a sign, a set of concrete picnic tables, and an empty lot. The sign still advertises McGriddles from before Katrina.

-Many streets are completely abandoned, with no sign of any residents returning. Some homes look as if they have not been entered since the hurricane.

-Food is amazing in New Orleans.

The lower 9th ward....

... isn't there anymore.

This afternoon one of the lawyers from The Pro Bono Project of New Orleans drove with us outside the islands of urban normalcy we've become accustomed to in the business district and the French Quarter. We saw some of the hardest hit areas and they hit pretty hard.

Personally, I'm from Eastern North Carolina and I've seen my share of hurricanes. And I was on the Gulf Coast immediately following Katrina. I've seen a little meteorological nastiness.

But this looked like a bomb had gone off.

There are blocks of houses that just aren't there anymore, front porch steps leading to nothingness, and this afternoon there were UNC law students walking through it and we were pretty quiet.

I've shot some pictures and some short videos on my camera. I'll be posting them as soon as I get back home.

The real story...

Let me begin by saying how much I love this city ... New Orleans has always been and will always be to me the home of excellent jazz, incredible people, and one of my favorite NFL teams. However, this particular trip has given me new insight as to the happenings in this city and the devastation still experienced by the people of this city. A New Orleans native said to me today something that I will always carry with me, no matter the tragedy or location. She said that the people of this city are utterly grateful for the volunteers giving of their time and efforts to aid in the recovery still yet to be had in NO. However, she brought to my attention the injustice that occurs when the volunteers become the spotlight and not the victims themselves. In the same vein, I am not going to innundate you with the day to day efforts of our group, their efforts being amazing notwithstanding. I want to share with you the story of the victims, and the recurring obstacles they face in their respective trials for normalcy.

I interviewed a client in prison today, we'll call him Mr. Doe. Mr. Doe told me of his "storm story", and relayed to me that he was not removed from NO's maximum security prison until nearly five days after Hurricane Katrina hit. He was without food and water from a day before the storm until he was rescued. Although water was plenty in this time, he made sure that I understood that he was standing in it, nearly chest high on his 5'7" frame. This was not drinking water. This, he said, could have been his death. Mr. Doe also wanted me to understand that my pity was unwarranted- he committed a crime for which he had been convicted and he realized his wrong. However, no matter how heinous his crime, he is still a human being, and articulated that he did not deserve what happened to him during the hurricane. This was an incredibly humanizing experience for me- no matter what crime Mr. Doe had been convicted of, I realized that his suffering was that of any other human being trapped in circumstances beyond his/her control and definitely beyond his/her wildest imagination. I think that Mr. Doe's story of the storm is what I will take away from this trip ...

We must realize that we, as human beings on this planet cohabitating in the same environment and using the same resources, deserve to be treated as such. We deserve food and water. We deserved to be rescued. And, when that doesn't happen, we deserve to be able to voice our concern and our tragic memories to those who will listen. I am but a 1L law student, not nearly a lawyer, and yet I was completely humbled by Mr. Doe's story. All he wanted were the basic needs of our existence, and someone to talk to. I am honored to have been able to provide him with an ear to listen. I think we all should, and perhaps even have the responsibility to provide the people most tragically affected by the storm our unwavering support, patience, and empathy. In my young life I have never experienced such pain and uncertainty as Mr. Doe, and I do not wish that for anyone. However, I am incredibly grateful to have heard his story, and to pass it along to you. Do not let the victims fade into the background. They are the main characters, the bit-part players, the directors, and the audience. Listen to their stories, and advocate for them to be heard. Please don't forget that our efforts, however incredibly valiant and praise-worthy, pale in comparison to the victims' stories. The victims, like Mr. Doe, should take centerstage, and deserve all of the attention, publicity, advocacy, help, and support that they can garner. Remember the victims- they are our number one priority here.

Calling all Heels

I can't pretend to know what the city was like before the hurricane (beyond a very touristy visit in the fifth grade), but it is obvious that the drastic effects of Katrina on the city are just beginning to heal, and it is going to be a long, hard road to health. Our small contribution to a broken legal system was truly a drop in the bucket. However, we met many very dedicated professionals who realize what they are up against and are ready for the challenge. I think it will be a daunting task, and I encourage any UNC law students reading this to take advantage of the spring break trip or other future trips. You will not be disappointed.

I expected to be affected by this trip, but I had no idea that I would be infected by a deep respect and admiration for the city and its residents. I can't wait to return.

So this is how it feels...

Too exhausted to think, to move, even to sleep. We spent the day in and out of Orleans Parish Prison interviewing inmates who have been declared incompetent and been remanded to Feliciana, the state mental health facility, in an attempt to restore them to competency so that they can stand trial. However, since Katrina, all the mental health facilities in the city of New Orleans (including group homes and halfway houses) have been closed, meaning that Feliciana is always full. No patients are being transferred out to transitional housing, so no inmates can be transferred in for treatment and potential restoration of competency. The end result is that a large number of mentally ill or mentally retarded defendants are being held indefinitely without trial in violation of their constitutional rights. Our job has been to interview a handful of these defendants in hopes of finding a good exemplar case or two for habeas corpus petitions that will potentially provide some impetus for a change in the system.

It's probably obvious to all that this is easier said than done. Today, Allison and I interviewed an OPP inmate who was declared competent in April, then incompetent in July and again in September. He was remanded to Feliciana, but because of the lack of beds, he is still being held in OPP. At first he was absolutely silent, nearly catatonic, in response to our questions, but later began to speak. He told us that today was March 27 and that all he had to do was wait eight and a half months until September 16, when he would be getting out, so he had nothing to say to us. We tried to explain that we were there to help his lawyer get him out, but to no avail. When he saw us taking notes, he decided that we were reporters with the Washington Post, and refused to speak to us further. We couldn't even get him to give us his birthdate, let alone tell us about his medical treatment, what medications he should be taking, and so on. After 10 minutes of trying to coax him to tell us more, we gave up and left, feeling bereft and powerless. Clearly the man is in need of significant medical treatment that he is not receiving, which is pretty much all we can tell his lawyer. So, more likely than not, he will continue to sit in jail for many more months, perhaps more than the presumptive maximum sentence for the crime with which he has been charged, but not tried or convicted. And there's very little that anyone can do about it. At least for now.

None of us need belabor the fact that the criminal justice system here, especially after the storm, is in desperate need of reform. In fact, before we started our work here, we were asked to sign a contract stating that we would not make any public statements about the quality of the system or the work of any of the partners in the Katrina Gideon Interview Project. But there's really nothing I can say about the system that hasn't already been said. What I can say, however, is that I am utterly exhausted from only three days of trying to manuever in the system, trying to stay on the sheriff's good side so that we can keep going in and out of the jail, trying to figure out when and if inmates will be available for interviews, trying to hear them through the thick plexiglass that separates them from us in the interview rooms, trying to squeeze in a midday meal in the midst of the chaos, walking the several blocks from the public defender's office to the jail and back in the rain, and generally ending each day feeling completely ineffective.

If what I am feeling is even one one-thousandth of what these attorneys go through every day here in New Orleans, I can't imagine how they manage to pull themselves out of bed in the morning. I have the deepest respect and admiration for their courage and their determination in the face of tremendous obstacles. If I turn out to be even one one-thousandth of the lawyer that most of them are, I'll consider myself pretty good.

The group working on divorces....

Let me give you a little background on what we as a whole are working on and what specifically my smaller section is working on.

We have a group of folks doing criminal work. This is the side of the legal field that deals with folks who may or may not have broken some official law. Our students have been spending time at a local prison -- interviewing inmates and working to aid them.

We've also got a group doing civil work -- not the cops and robbers side of the law -- but wills, contracts, administrative stuff.... One part of this group is working on successions -- property getting passed from one person to another by way of lots of paperwork.

Another part of the civil group is working on divorces. This is the group of four students I'm working with.

The idea of helping folks get divorced raised my eyebrow. Folks and families getting split up isn't a warm and fuzzy thing, but these are uncontested, pretty amicable splits and our work helps folks get on with their lives.

Some of these cases may be linked to Katrina, but a lot of them are cases that have simply been in the backlog since the storm hit and so many things have been put on the back burner.

These cases involve an amount of paperwork -- things need to be signed, filed, mailed, drafted... and done correctly in the right order. The lawyers we're working with give us some files, we figure out what's the next step in the process, and we take care of it: so and so needs to be mailed a waiver of service, the next thing needs to be filed at a courthouse, somebody needs to be informed that their divorce has gone through....

And that's my little corner in a nutshell....

Day three....

Well, today my group, which has been working on helping some divorce files along, is going on what I've heard call the "Misery Tour." So far we've stayed in the business district and the French Quarter -- working, exploring and eating at good restaurants. But today after meeting a judge and doing a little more pro bono work, we'll be seeing some parts of the city that haven't fared so well.

I'll be taking pictures and will keep folks posted....

A City Still in Need

Thirteen hours in a van, two Wendy’s stops, and six states later, we arrived in New Orleans Sunday night. As we drove into the city last night, we saw the first signs of Katrina—entire neighborhoods still unoccupied and dark. Seeing those dark neighborhoods showed all of us just how much work was yet to be done.

As a member of our criminal group, I’ll be spending the week interviewing inmates in Orleans Parish Prison. We got our first glimpse into the state of the New Orleans legal system today when we met at the Office of the Public Defender for training. During training, we heard stories of inmates lost in the system, flooded evidence rooms, and a huge backlog of cases.

Many of the inmates that we will be interviewing have been held in prison without convictions longer than their sentence would last even if convicted. Our job is to conduct an interview with the inmate and compose a memo for the public defender assigned to the case. This way, the public defender will have a good head start when he or she gets the case.

Katrina may have hit over a year ago, but its impact still overwhelms the city. From the flood line marking the abandoned houses to the box of “Unidentified Floating Evidence” from the basement of the courthouse, the struggle for normalcy is far from over.

Back to the 5-0-4

Did you miss us? The blog’s been quiet for a few months, but never fear, we’ve been busy behind scenes working on our next event. That’s right -- the UNC Pro Bono Program is returning to New Orleans for this year’s winter and spring breaks!

This year, in addition to our civil work with the New Orleans Pro Bono Project, we're expanding our work into criminal justice issues. The winter break trip is scheduled for December 18 through December 22, 2006. We’ve got 20 students committed and raring to go.

Watch this space – exciting things are coming up!

If Only Every Week Were Spring Break Week

Several of the posts on this blog allude to the reality that one week is not nearly enough to make a dent in the havoc that Katrina wrought. It is awesome (in the true sense of the word) that so many students and others with a spring break week to spare spent the past week in New Orleans working on clean up and recovery efforts. See http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1142581987218460.xml?nola#continue. And helping each "starfish," as Aaron wrote last week, is surely important. I am proud of the work that the succession workgroup was able to do, even if our contributions only helped to push our files a little closer to completion and even if I wish I could have filed papers for at least the one client I worked with whose father had died in the flood.

Still, as I sat in the airport on Friday waiting to leave town along with other spring break travellers, I couldn't help feeling sad. I think the sorrow stemmed from the fact that there were, literally, hundreds of us leaving town -- students on spring break leaving after our five or six or seven days of work and contractors who spend their weeks in New Orleans and surrounding areas, but escape on weekends to go home to Chicago or Saint Louis or other, similar places that are far-removed from the storm -- and, simultaneously, merely a trickle of people coming in to the city. As it had been on Sunday when I arrived, more than half of the gates at the airport were deserted. And I don't just mean that there weren't people travelling; the airlines had pulled out, leaving the information screen behind the gate desk dark and blank, and restaurants in both the gate area and the terminal were shuttered. The contrast became ever more clear on my layover at O'Hare in Chicago, which looked like an airport is supposed to look on a Friday evening -- people everywhere, crowds at the food counters, lines in the bathrooms. How long, I wondered, before New Orleans's Louis Armstrong International Airport -- where ghosts of those who were stuck there for days during Katrina still linger -- will approach even one-tenth or one-fifth of that level of activity?

Spring break comes only once a year. True, there were students in town the week before us, and more are likely on their way this week and next, but a massive and sustained effort is needed to help New Orleans and other Gulf areas get back on their feet. And its not just about the bandaids that we apply retroactively by cleaning up destroyed houses, helping survivors with divorces or successions, or figuring out how to address particular unmet legal needs that have been brought to light by hurricane recovery efforts. The social, economic, and political barriers to true recovery are much larger and require more attention than students on a week of spring break can provide. If only every week were spring break, maybe we could make a larger difference, but even then, the problems are bigger than that, and, frankly, I'm not sure that outsiders are best-equipped to deal with these issues or find workable solutions. As I reflect on my week in New Orleans, I think I agree with Mike Petrusic's blog comment that the most important thing we can do going forward, in lieu of (or in addition to) our continued labor, is to keep the attention of policymakers focused on the deep-seeded problems that were brought into focus so sharply last August and September. The state of the Ninth Ward speaks for itself -- Katrina did a lot of damage but, as Aaron wrote in his blog entry, things clearly were not all that great before Katrina.

Thanks to the UNC Pro Bono Program, Diane Standaert and Dan Harrison for their unbelievable organization of this trip, the New Orleans Pro Bono Project for allowing us to help them with their work, Phelps Dunbar for housing us for the week, and the Donald & Elizabeth Cooke Foundation and the Carolina Center for Public Service for covering part of our expenses. This truly was the capstone of a nearly-concluded law school experience.

Vicki

Succession 101

If you are anything like me, then to hear us say we are working on succession probably doesn’t mean a whole lot. Therefore, I am going to give a brief introductory lesson on what a succession is and how it is achieved.

When someone dies, her land is transferred to her successors. This is called a succession. Depending on the type of property and who was alive at the time the decedent died, the procedure for a succession can get pretty complex.

But before I get too far head of myself, let me explain why an heir needs to establish a succession in the first place. Before an heir can get possession of the property, use it as collateral for loans, or, in the case of the people of New Orleans, receive insurance payout or governmental assistance after the hurricane, he has to open a succession and show that the property is now legally his. To complicate matters even more, sometimes previous generations passed down their property without opening a succession. This means that the new heir has to prove not only his immediate succession, but also that of the previous owner. Let me given an example. Even though a son remained on his parent’s property after their death, title was never transferred to his name. So in order for this son’s daughter to now prove her legal possession of the land to get FEMA assistance, she must first show that the property was legitimately transferred from her grandparents to her father before she can show that it was transferred from her father to her. When someone who is dealing with the death of a loved one is faced with this daunting task, it is easy to lose hope.

Herein steps The Pro Bono Project—and us.

Most of the property we worked with this week was owned by someone who died intestate (or, in other words, they didn’t have a will). The first question to ask is, Was the property was acquired before or after marriage? If it was before marriage, we call this “separate property.” This kind of property first goes to the children, then to the siblings and parents and finally to the spouse. If the property was acquired during marriage, we call this “marital property,” and a slightly different order of inheritance is applied. The only heirs that we consider are those that were alive at the time of the property owner’s death.

The second question we ask is, Is the heir going to accept the property or renounce it? If they accept it, then we make sure they qualify for our assistance. If they renounce it, then we have to send them a letter and a form to secure from them a written renunciation. But wait, you say, why would anyone want to give up free property? There are a few reasons someone would want to renounce their property. First, the process of opening a succession is a hassle, and some people might not want to deal with it. Second, if one heir qualifies for pro bono assistance but another doesn’t, then the two might decide to just let the pro bono office handle it. Finally, the family members might decide that one heir in particular should have the property because they have already been living on it, or because they simply need it the most. Regardless, every eligible heir must be contacted to see whether they want to accept or renounce.

While we are requesting and receiving these renunciations, we are also doing separate research to make sure we have all of the information necessary to complete the documents that must be submitted to the court. For example, we need to know the value of the property and other assets, how much debt the property owner had, and the amount of funeral expenses. We also need to have the property description, any marriage certificates, divorce judgments, birth and death certificates, and adoption papers. Finally, we need to have information on any possible heirs.

Once all of this information is gathered through trips to the court house, city hall, and the convention center, and through numerous phone calls, we can prepare the necessary documents. The first of such documents is the Affidavit of Death, Jurisdiction, and Heirship. This document testifies who the property last belonged to, who the eligible heirs are, and why the petitioner is entitled to possession. Next, we have to write a Petition for Possession. This explains step by step why the property belongs to this particular successor. After the petition, we write the Judgment of Possession, the document that, once signed by the court, actually passes possession to our client. Finally, we have to write the Sworn Detailed Description, which specifies the property and assets in question, as well as any liabilities. Once these documents are completed, the client has to come in and sign them in front a notary public.

The final paperwork to prepare is the tax form. Here we determine whether any inheritance taxes are due. If there are, then the client needs to pay them. Once they are paid, or if there are not any due, this form needs to be taken to the tax office to obtain a receipt. This receipt, along with the affidavit, petition, judgment, and description are all taken to the court house to be signed by the deputy clerk.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a succession is done.

For the Good of the Gulf: UNC Law Winter/Spring Break Pro Bono Project

I am writing this blog while on the plane headed back to North Carolina. I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to New Orleans. It has been nice to bond with and get to know some new UNC law students whom I wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise. Everyone on the trip had such interesting backgrounds. For example, I recently learned that Diane was in the Circus as an undergrad at FSU. She performed the double trapeze and the Mexican cloud swing -- whatever those are. Apparently FSU has a circus to go along with their nationally ranked football team.

Speaking of Diane...I was not sure how organized or disorganized the trip, as a whole, would be but I was very pleased with how smooth everything has been and Diane deserves most of the credit. I have been on several service oriented trips similar to this one and having a good group leader is crucial to the trip's goal and everyone’s enjoyment. Diane is amazingly well organized and good at relating to the different personalities in the group. Having talked to my fellow travelers I know we all appreciate her hard work and dedication.

I was in the group working on succession files. It was exciting for me because as a 1L, it was the first time I was able to apply material I have learned in my law school classes to a practical legal task. I was very pleased that the work we were doing had a direct connection to Katrina. In order to receive FEMA money, one’s real property has to be in his or her name. By filing a succession, heirs are able to legally claim their dead relatives real property, in which they are already living or at least were before the storm, and thus receive their FEMA money. We each had our own succession case to work on which was beneficial because we got to see all the steps/paperwork required to file a succession action. More importantly, I could say "my case", which made me feel important and I felt a certain connection and responsibility to "my client". There was some client interaction over the phone which was the most fun aspect of working on the succession files. Personal client interaction is one of the reasons I wanted to become a lawyer. "My client" was extremely nice and thankful which made her a pleasure to speak with on the phone.

Emily, Rachel, Elliot, and I went over to the Garden District on Monday night to check out a local bar, The Bulldog that Ellen (a lawyer with the New Orleans Pro Bono Project) had suggested. I felt that I was being helpful to the injured New Orleans tourist economy by eating out in the French Quarter and going out for a few drinks at night. We stopped in another bar while we were in the Garden District called Ms Mae's. While at Ms. Mae's I met a woman who had to be at least 70. She was born and raised in New Orleans and told me she had ridden out the storm in the bar drinking…only in New Orleans.

While on the trip we had the unique experience of seeing the 9^th ward and one of the larger levee breaches. The 9^th ward was a ghost town….it was eerily quiet and the neighborhood next to the levee breach was just flat out destroyed. It was hard to get a feel for the destruction from outside the homes. I think the gravity of what was lost really struck me when I peeked inside one of the homes near the levee breach. As I stuck my head in the door I was hit by a wave of mildewed air that made my eyes water. What I saw was a room just like my living room except it looked as though it had been sitting at the bottom of a muddy lake for months…which when I think about it, I guess it was. Everything was destroyed.

Finally, I was fortunate enough to be able to tag along with Ellen to the only men’s shelter in New Orleans that had reopened at the time. The shelter was called the Oz. We went to do uptake which basically involved listening to any of the homeless men’s legal problems and getting them into the Pro Bono system if appropriate. The most interesting thing about The Oz was the fact it was a self contained community. The men that stayed there also worked there, either in the kitchen, at the front desk, or as custodians. According to a man working the front desk a lot of the homeless have already moved back to New Orleans, or never left, because they didn’t have anywhere else to go.

I accomplished what I set out to do on the trip: I provided aid to a Katrina victim, got my first real taste of pro bono work and the UNC Pro Bono Project (I liked both and was extremely impressed with the UNC Pro Bono project), had my first practical legal experience, met some great new people, and hopefully represented the State of North Carolina well.

Back in North Carolina

We’re back and school starts tomorrow. Here I am trying to capture over two months of planning and a roller coaster of a week in just one blog post. So instead I will focus on just one day.

Thursday

Earlier that week, Ellen asked one of us to go in her place to the weekly succession clinic at the New Orleans Legal Assistance Coalition (NOLAC) on Thursday afternoon. Thursday was her birthday and she hoped for the afternoon off. Since I had been working on the succession cases, I thought it would be a fairly simple task to conduct intake for folks seeking to begin the probate process. I was wrong.

By Thursday afternoon I was emotionally and physically tired. All week we had been immersed in the lives’ of our clients. The husband of Vicki’s client died in the flood. Mike’s client can’t recover her insurance claim and the probate process cannot continue because the co-owner is missing. One of the clients for the divorce workshop showed up from Houston the day before coming into the Pro Bono Project’s office to sign her divorce papers. In addition, coordinating the week’s activities was in full force. Thursday, the van we shared among the 14 of us needed to be in about 5 different places. Cory, Boz, and Dan had a 10 a.m. appointment with Common Ground’s legal coordinator in the lower Ninth Ward. The Divorce Workgroup needed to be at the Gretna courthouse at 12 p.m. to file their clients’ petition for divorce and then they were to head to the 17th Street Canal levee breach. The Succession Workgroup was scheduled to head to the canal breach at 3:30 and we needed to get Rachel Hundley to the airport by 6 p.m. Not only did the van need to carry us around town, but the Succession Workgroup had to close out and print all of its files by 1:30 that afternoon.

Yes, at that point, I was a little bit tired about hearing about Katrina, FEMA, recovery, rebuilding, etc. I was tired and frustrated that the process is going to take so long and that the need far outweighs the resources. As Ellen provided me the instructions for the afternoon’s clinic, I was bearing all these emotions and serving as point person (but luckily not the driver) to make sure than van made it to its scheduled destinations. As Ellen spoke to me, all I could think was: “Can I really handle this?” Well, I had already committed and Ellen had made her birthday plans with her husband. I had no choice. Plus, I knew I could handle it since I was certain that my emotional exhaustion was just one tenth of that experienced by those who live there.

Before heading out, I made sure Donna knew where our extra office supplies we brought for the week were located, said my final goodbyes to Rachel Piercey and Catherine Drake, gave Pro Bono Project staff t-shirts from UNC’s Pro Bono Program, and talked with the Iowa law students about their invitation to meet up later to discuss how they might be able to start a pro bono program at their school.

I headed to NOLAC’s offices on the 14th floor at 1010 Common Street. I was glad to have an excuse to walk around during the business day to see what else was going on. Even at midday, the streets were relatively empty. I was worried because it meant I might have few people to ask for directions in the event I got lost. Ironically, while walking from the Pro Bono Project to NOLAC, I ran into a law student from Columbia. We had seen each other about three times that week – at the airport, at the Rebirth concert, and now again on a street corner. He was headed to the courthouse to meet up with the rest of his group for lunch. We exchanged comments about how our week had been going. His group was working with the criminal justice system. He happily reported that they found a man who was improperly detained in jail. He couldn’t discuss much of the details, but said it had happened as a result of digging through individual files and finding dates that did not line up. In a wonk-like fashion, we both discussed the importance of well-maintained data entry systems to catch errors such as the one they found. I was excited to hear that other law students were wading through files in a manner similar to those of us in the Succession Workgroup and that their work had paid off. I was glad to be a part of this group of law students who had come down to help push the city’s recovery along. It was apparent from those empty downtown streets that if we had not been there doing this work, not many people were around to do it.

I continued making my way over to NOLAC. I called Rachel to make sure she knew where to be in order for the van to pick her up to head the airport. Then, after calling into Vicki to let her know that I would be back to Phelps Dunbar later that afternoon and to discuss some last little details about wrapping up my file, I arrived at NOLAC’s offices. The intake room is literally no bigger than a closet, with a metal desk and two office chairs. Sheila and Yvette showed me the appointment calendar for the afternoon and where I could make copies. I settled in, reviewed the notes from my conversation with Ellen, and settled into wait for my first client.

The purpose of the intakes was to meet with low-income individuals needing to go through the probate process. The clients had already been provided with a checklist of the documents they needed and the clients had gathered the documents. The intake process consisted of coping of the documents they had, talking with them about who passed away, finding out what property was at issue, explaining to them that the Pro Bono Project will be helping find a private attorney to take on their case for free.

I am not sure if I can fully portray the emotions elicited by what happened in that client intake room that afternoon, but the stories of the clients provide a unique glimpse into the difficulties of the probate process as a result of the storm, the importance of successful successions in order to aid recovery from the storm, and how low-income families are effected differently than others. Since the property owned in the destroyed areas is pretty much the only asset they have, without the ability to gain access or title, I feel that these families literally are beginning at ground zero. (Thus, new meaning is given to Ed Chaney’s description of New Orleans as ground zero for racial and economic justice.) Here are a few of their stories.

One client needed to go through the probate process because she needed to make repairs on her family home which had been badly destroyed by the storm. Her youngest brother passed away, and she and her two siblings, wanted to go through the probate process to divide his share among them. She first wanted to see if it was possible to be reimbursed for the money she spent on repairing the home and paying insurance policies over the last ten years from her siblings’ interest in the home. I told her I could not answer that, but hopefully someone from the Pro Bono Project would be in touch with her within two months regarding the status of the case.

Another client’s husband passed way. He owned three pieces of property in Orleans Parrish. His medical bills were still outstanding, and she hoped to sell the property to pay off his debt. We spent an hour going through and making copies of the documents she had gathered – death certificates, social security number insurance policies, property assessments, etc. She had everything. She even managed to find her way to the Notarial Archives where deeds of sale were recorded in its temporary home at the Convention Center. Again, all I could tell her was that hopefully someone from the Pro Bono Project would be in touch with her within two months regarding the status of the case.

One of the clients was the rightful heir to his uncle’s estate. He had a waterlogged, unsigned copy of the will. When asked if could locate another copy, he responded that he couldn’t. The attorney who had drafted the will lost her files when her office flooded. He also carried with him a large check made out to his uncle from the insurance company. It was a check he cannot cash until he is legally recognized as the estate’s heir. He and his uncle lived in the same home, but he can no longer live there because everything in it is “turned upside down.” I told him that someone from the Pro Bono Project would be in touch with him within two months regarding the status of the case and that if did not hear from someone at that time, to call back.

Of the telephone intakes, one lived in Houston, the other in Los Angeles, and the other in Mobile, Alabama. All of them wanted to return one day, but none knew if it would be possible. The client from Mobile had reached NOLAC because of intake conducted by the Mobile Bar’s Young Lawyers’ Division. It gave me hope that the emergency response system was working.

Of the three telephone intakes, one in particular stood out. Her husband passed away shortly after the storm. He left a bank account and two pieces of property. Only his name was on the account and she could not access it. After going through the checklist with her, it was apparent she had almost every document she needed. The two pieces she could not gather were the property assessment and the obituary. She was not sure what to do about the property assessment because you need to show the value of the property at the time of death, which was one month after the storm. She received notice that one of her husband’s properties had been recorded as 50% destroyed and that the other was 80% destroyed, and marked with a red marker. She didn’t have the obituary because her husband passed while they were in Houston, and the only thing they had to time to arrange was his burial in New Orleans.

I left NOLAC with seriously mixed emotions. On the one hand, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry a lot. I wish there was more I could have done other than copy their documents and let them know that someone may contact them in a few months. On the other hand, it made very clear the importance of the progress each of us in the Succession Workgroup made on our files that week. I also wished that Dan Fishbein had come with me. I think he would have appreciated the experience. As Mike Petrusic said in his post, every little bit helps. It became clear from those intake sessions that it does.

I joined others in the van at 5 p.m. I hopped in to join the Divorce Workgroup as they returned from filing their divorce papers and from the levee. Boz and Rachel were also there as they returned from serving as legal observers at a school protest in the lower Ninth Ward and then had subsequently gotten lost as they tried to walk their way out of the neighborhood. I knew that the stories from my day could be equally matched by theirs. We all rode back fairly silently.

Although we ended up rescheduling the Succession Workgroup to revisit the levee breach Friday afternoon, we did manage get Rachel Hundley to the airport in time for her flight. While others had headed the Gumbo Shop for dinner, and then onto the Ghost Tour, I met up with Vicki, Kelly, and Jocelyn after dropping Rachel off at the airport. I met them in time to have some amazing peanut butter pie from Frankie and Johnny’s. We then proceeded to Juan’s Flying Burrito on Magazine Street where we ate dinner with a 2nd year Loyola law student, Vanessa, who shared her experience as a displaced law student and her own perspective on her role in the relief efforts.

Thursday was a good day; and it was a good week. Many thanks again to the Carolina Center for Public Service, Donald & Elizabeth Cooke Foundation, Phelps Dunbar, Kilpatrick Stockton, the Goodsons, the New Orleans Pro Bono Project, UNC Law's Pro Bono Program, and the students and staff who gave up their winter and spring breaks.

Diane

"When the Levee Breaks, Mama You Got to Move."

“Taste My Justice!” – The Tick

I am at the airport, waiting for my flight home. Leaving New Orleans this morning was hard. The actual leaving was easy, because I was so tired from self-induced sleep deprivation you could have led me off a cliff and I wouldn’t have cared. The mental leaving, however, was much harder. I bonded to New Orleans differently and more quickly than I have bonded to any other place I’ve ever been.

On Thursday (March 16th) we went to Jefferson Parish to file the pleadings we had gotten signed the previous day. It was not, as you can imagine, a very dynamic experience, but still it provided a feeling of resolution to the work we had done over the past week. The Jefferson Parish courthouse is in Gretna. I didn’t get a chance to see much of Gretna, but I got the impression that it was not a large town. The people were all very friendly. I think the lady who file-stamped the pleadings at the clerk’s office was amused at the fact that there were six people standing around her while she went through what appeared to be a very routine procedure. It was like the start of a joke (How many law students does it take to file a petition?…) In another reminder of Katrina, the assistant clerk stopped Kelly when she took a business card to jot a note down on the back and gave her a post-it instead. She told us that supplies had been short since the hurricane.

Since Katrina had displaced so many people, some of our cases involved service of process to other states, so that complicated things somewhat. Other cases involved petitioners who were so poor they couldn’t even pay the court costs, and had to proceed in forma pauperis. This meant that an additional application had to be filled out during the interview for review by the clerk. One case involved both issues, and for some reason it had to be signed off on by the (or maybe just a) Parish Commissioner himself.

Undaunted in our quest for justice, five law students (sans Kelly Podger, who is fantastic and awesome) took the elevator upstairs into the bowels of the Jefferson Parish administrative/adjudicative labyrinth to deliver the application, pleadings, and cover letter prepared by the parish Collections Officer. (How many law students does it take to deliver an in forma pauperis application?…) We were supposed to give the application to the Commissioner’s Clerk. Unfortunately, she didn’t answer when we knocked. A helpful lady sitting in the hall told us she had gone to Subway. Desperate to conclude our business at the courthouse and refusing to leave without a handful of delicious justice, I knocked on the Commissioner’s office.

The Commissioner was in. He cracked the door and asked me what I wanted. I told him I was on a quest for justice. Then, out loud, I told him we were asked to bring an IFP application up from the clerk’s office for his signature. He reminded me that those things go through his clerk. I told him she was at Subway, and that I was from a pro bono volunteer from North Carolina, which was why I was unfamiliar with the protocol. Then, in retrospect, I kind of invited myself into his office, and then I also, I guess, kind of invited everyone else into his office too. We all sat down and he asked us what years we were in school. He told us he had lived in Chapel Hill for a couple of years while his wife was in school, and told us what a Parish Commissioner’s job description entailed. Then he signed the petition (yay!) and shook our hands, thanking us for giving up our time to come down and help. Jessica Loung was so excited to be hammering out justice firsthand that she was radiating delight, almost literally bouncing off the walls on more than one occasion. I could tell that her enthusiasm for the judicial process was both shocking and refreshing to the ladies working in the clerk’s office.

Having completed our mission, we took a moment to congratulate ourselves on a job well done, almost strutting out to the parking lot. We were spread out side by side in a line, walking purposefully to our minivan. Kelly Podger (who rules) said it was like the opening credits of Law and Order. Now there’s a Law and Order that still hasn’t been made: Law and Order – Pro Bono Project.

I Heard Screams in the Silence

Buoyed by the recent conclusion of our project, we headed out to see where the canal had breached. As we neared the end of the directions Diane had given us, I got this strange feeling that we weren’t in the right place. Nothing seemed very messed up. Sure, there were some Katrina repairs going on, but for the most part the neighborhoods and shopping centers looked fine. It seemed like there would have been more damage right at the breach. Boz showed me on a map what had happened. Apparently, floodwaters backed up into a canal. One side of the canal held. One side didn’t. We were on the side that had held, so there was no damage. When we crossed over the canal, I saw that there was a very fine line between life and death. That line was precisely the width of the canal.

On the side of the breach, the sheer force of the collapse was immediately apparent. It looked like a war zone. There was no grass, no shrubs, no small trees. Just dirt. Some of the huge oaks had survived. Some huge oaks were lying on their sides. Or on cars. Or on houses. Houses had been ripped from their foundations and spun. Not just a foot or two. More like tens of feet. One house had the canal side completely sheared off, exposing the kitchen and dining room. The chandelier was still hanging in the dining room. It looked like a Barbie house where there was no fourth wall. Cars were crumpled and crushed and lying everywhere. One car was lying pointed downward through the roof of a garage, as if it just had been picked up and thrown on top of it.

There were some contractors around, but not very many. I couldn’t tell exactly how much work was going on in this area. There wasn’t as much debris around as I would have imagined, but I was unsure if that was because of cleanup efforts or because the force of the water had scoured the land clean and left the debris farther downstream. We were standing at ground zero, so the water pressure must have been unimaginable.

I did see some renovation going on in the area. On one of the main through-streets, there were signs offering various services such as tear-outs and mold treatments covering every telephone pole as far as I could see. Maybe we were there towards the end of the workday so there weren’t as many contractors plying their respective trades. I wouldn’t be surprised if they completely redevelop this area. The houses are nice. Really nice. Not mansion caliber, but definitely upper middle class. I’d be happy to have one like that someday. I was surprised that the land right next to the canals was so valuable. Then again, I imagine no one living there ever seriously considered that the canals could break.

One house in particular stuck with me. It had banners outside of it that say “Hold the Corps Accountable”. The orange spray paint used to mark the front says “Danger.” Underneath it is a skull and crossbones, and next to the skull are the letters “RIP.” There is a picture of a different house with the same markings further down this blog, and pics of the one I'm talking about in the album I posted.

I already knew that people had died the day the levee broke, but knowing that someone in particular had died in this particular place finally broke me down. I cried as I walked down the street. I’m glad no one was standing near me. Then again, I’m sure I’m not the only one of us who wept as we stared at devastation that may have been, as the country is learning, entirely preventable.

As I walked down the street, I thought to myself that this is the closest I’ve ever been to a site that looks like a war zone. I thought briefly of the war in Iraq, and how neighborhoods must look when we drop bombs on them. I flashed back to a T-shirt I had seen in the French Quarter that said “Make Levees, Not War.” All of the sudden it seemed like more than just a catchy modification of a 1960’s cliché. It seemed like a legitimately good idea. I’m not a news buff, but I don’t think anyone would dispute that the war in Iraq has been expensive as hell. There WAS money there to fix these canals. There IS money there to fix these canals. There IS money there to reclaim the Ninth Ward. There IS money there to clean the mold out of the untouched schools. We just would never spend it that way. As a country, we are like the heroin addict who never has money for food or shelter, but always finds money for more heroin.

When I’m at a museum looking at an artifact, or when I’m walking through an historic property, I often try to transport myself back in the time and place of the event. It’s probably the one shred of creativity and imagination that debate, a master’s degree, and law school was unable to program out of me. Sometimes I am really successful. I can hear things, smell things, feel things from the past. I usually don’t see things though, beyond still-motion flashes. That happened to me on the streets where the levy broke. I doubt my impressions were factually accurate. Someone told me the hurricane had already passed when the levee finally broke. That didn’t happen in my imagination. It was dark, and raining hard, the wind was blaring, and the waters were rising. I thought what it must have been like to be alone that night. Or to be with someone you wanted to protect but couldn’t. I felt the fear. I heard the screams. It was terrible.

And Now For Something Completely Different

The ride home was somber, much like the ride home from the Ninth Ward had been. We got back to the hotel and regrouped, regrounded, and put on our tourist hats. We decided to contribute to the community in another way: by leaving them with many of our fat tourist dollars. After a fantastic meal of crawfish etouffee, shrimp creole, and jambalaya at The Gumbo Shop we (me, Boz, Fang, Elliott, Jessica, and Corey) walked down to Rev. Zombie’s Voodoo Shop. It was laughable, full of kitschy stuff that didn’t seem like it could possibly bring pain and suffering down on your enemies. It was more like what you’d get if you crossed the Halloween section at Wal-Mart with a head shop.

While Boz and I were making fun of things, Elliott took a picture of something we had been pointing at. A voice from the counter said, politely but firmly, “No Pictures.” Once we looked around, we could see No Photo signs everywhere AS IF THEY HAD APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE. Not ten seconds after that happened, Elliott’s camera FLEW OUT OF HIS HAND (or he dropped it, depending on who you want to believe) and it hit the ground, spewing batteries everywhere. The telephoto lens was broken from the impact. In retrospect, as Boz pointed out, Elliott was probably startled by the reproach of the weird looking ska-zombie clerk and didn’t have a good grip on the camera. OR….it could have been a VOOOOODOOOOO SPELL! In either case, Boz and I stopped making fun of things in the store, just to be safe.

After that, we all went to a praline shop next to Café du Monde for dessert. I had my first praline. It was decadent and delicious and it made my teeth hurt, as anything made primarily of butter and brown sugar should. We met up with Dan Harrison. Then we headed back to the Voodoo Shop to get our tickets for a walking Haunted New Orleans Tour. Corey decided to watch the basketball game. Boz wasn’t into going at first, but he acquiesced after Dan said he’d go. Once we were almost there, Dan said he hadn’t actually planned on going but was just helping us get Boz to go, and split from the group to watch basketball. Boz tried to bolt several times, but we kept prodding and cajoling him until one of the tour guides came over and gave him the soft sell. After that, he pulled out his $17.00 (with student discount) and surrendered to the magic. Mike and Vanessa met up with us there.

I personally think it was well worth the price of admission (although Boz, in true lawyerling fashion, noted as we were on the tour that we could have just followed them around even if we hadn’t paid because they were on public streets and they couldn’t stop us from being there). I love walking tours and I love ghost stories, so I was already predisposed to approve of the experience. We got a quick history lesson of the violent roots of New Orleans, from its founding by the French to its days under Spanish rule and its brief second stint as a French colony before passing to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. We learned about fires that twice burned down most of the city. We saw old buildings and had their histories explained to us along with some creepy ghost stories. One house in particular had a horrible and gruesome tale associated with it. After the tour, walking down the streets of the French Quarter was different because I realized that the buildings that housed most of these cheesy daiquiri shops and t-shirt emporiums were actually a couple of hundred years old. The new context provided by the tour helped bring the history of the area alive for me even more.

We regrouped again, and later everyone decided to go down to Bourbon Street for one last night of fun. We walked the length of the street, enticements and sins hiding behind every door. Bourbon Street is a bizarre place. Part carnival, part red-light district, it epitomizes the bacchanalian ethic of Mardi Gras. It’s like the pilot light in the New Orleans oven. It burns steadily throughout the year, and ignites the entire city once a year in a bonfire of hedonism before retreating back down to simmer at this one street. It’s like a Mardi Gras concentrate. Just add liquor and beads, wait ten minutes and serve.

Iron Chef!

We were the recipients of another unexpected treat this week. Iron Chef Sakai, the French-trained Iron Chef, was in town too doing some sort of exhibition at Restaurant Stella, the restaurant associated with our hotel, Hotel Provincial. We had been seeing these Japanese guys walking around with shiny black pleather jackets that said “Japanese Television Press” on the back, but it was a couple of days before we found out why. I personally only saw him once and said hi, but others had more intimate encounters such as hand shaking and high fives. Elliott and Eric even had their pictures taken with him! Luckies! They would make good paparazzi celebrity stalkers. Too bad that luck didn’t hold with them at Harrah’s though. Iron Chef Sakai seemed like a super friendly guy. I only saw him for a second, but he looked very shiny to me, like John Edwards.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehn, Good Night

The next day we all met back at Phelps Dunbar, the law firm that had graciously donated conference space for students to work. We had a roundtable and debriefing, where each group reported on the work it had done, their responses to the experience, and we all handed over our files to Ellen, an attorney for the New Orleans Pro Bono Project. The most interesting part of the morning was when Boz and Dan and Corey told us what they had learned about different groups and social movements in the City, particularly the Ninth Ward. There is a lot of talent out there, many people willing to help, and even more people who need help. The challenge is to effectively connect the helpers with the helpees. Housing is, obviously, the paramount concern in the area. Coalition building and a certain degree of centralization appear to be important to most effectively use the resources and goodwill that have emerged from the tragedy.

After that, we checked out of the hotel and started heading our separate ways. I went to lunch with Dan, Corey, and Boz, where I rounded off my Cajun experience with some boiled crawfish. Immediately thereafter, we headed off to Café du Monde so Boz could indulge his passion for beignets one final time. Diane and Elliott met up with us there. For several days there had been talk of a Beignet Eating Contest between Dan and Boz that finally came to fruition. It was a tough battle, but Dan eventually prevailed, consuming a full dozen beignets to Boz’s nine. To be fair, Boz’s beignets were bigger than Dan’s. On the other hand, Dan consumed some Crawlicious Potato Chips and several glasses of water after finishing his fourth plate and waiting for Boz to clear his third plate. Complaining about how hungry he was, he attempted to eat the remainder of Diane’s muffaletta, and even asked Boz for some of his beignets. Halfway into the contest, he revealed that he had consumed an entire El Gigante Burrito from Banditos as an undergrad. This was probably relevant information for Boz, and would have affected his decision to challenge Dan in the first place.

After Diane took Boz, Corey, Dan, Jessica, and Fang to the airport, Elliott and I decided to spend the rest of the day in the French Quarter. We went to St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, where we found the tomb of the first black mayor of New Orleans right next to the tomb of notorious “Voodoo Queen” Marie Laveau. What originally caught my eye about Laveau’s tomb was the fact that it was covered with “XXX” symbols. Wikipedia says: “The tomb continues to attract visitors who draw three crosses (XXX) on its side, hoping that her spirit will grant them a wish.” There were coins all around the tomb, flowers, necklaces and other offerings. The flowers looked fresh. Apparently the voodoo queen has not been forgotten.

We also got to experience the Quarter during St. Patrick’s Day. I imagine it was closer to what the city looked like before Katrina, except that everyone was wearing green. The streets were awash with green shirts and hats. After having dinner at a café on Decatur and listening to a jazz band, Elliott and I were privy to a St. Patrick’s Day parade. As parades go, this one was pretty short, but we met this drunk older lady who basically reached into a passing carriage and robbed them of many beads, which she generously gave to Elliott and myself. Adorned with our new Mardi Bling, we spent the rest of the evening on Bourbon Street, listening to jazz and blues bands before Diane and Jocelyn swooped in and picked us up.

Dénouement

Overall, I had a very holistic and well-rounded experience this spring break. I performed community service, but it didn’t feel like a sacrifice. All week, people told me how grateful they were for us giving up our spring break to come to New Orleans and help their city. I appreciated the kind words, but didn’t feel like I had given up or lost a thing. Sure, I was giving, but I was also receiving. I worked during the day, took some educational fieldtrips in the afternoon, and played at night. I helped out an overworked and understaffed organization, but I lived in the French Quarter and ate like a King. This spring break was probably the best one I have ever had. I am not exaggerating, and I am not forgetting my appearance on Girls Gone Wild – Cancun 1993 (out of print, regrettably) (and I'm kidding). Coming down to the Big Easy was a good call on my part, and I recommend this experience to anyone who is committed to service but still wouldn’t mind having a good time. The UNC Pro Bono Clinic has planted a seed here, and I hope it continues on after the urgency of Katrina fades. There will still be work to do, and this will still be a great place to do it.

For those of you who have waded through this post, here is your Easter Egg:
Pictures From the Ninth Ward
Pictures From the 17th Street Levee Breach
Pictures of the French Quarter and Student Volunteers

Coffee Talk

Meredith Says "Thank You"

Anyone who knows me well is aware of my penchant for (okay, "addiction to" might be more accurate) strong, flavorful coffee. As our group walked to work on our first day in New Orleans, I couldn't contain my excitement at seeing that the little, independently owned coffee shop that my other half and I discovered three and a half years ago when we were here on vacation had survived the storm and is open for business. They have the best iced coffee ever.

Lepetit Espresso draws an eclectic mix of locals and, because of its location on Decatur Street, tourists. As I learned today, when I told the baristos how happy I was to see that they were still there, the shop closed for about a month and a half after Katrina. The building, circa 1780, survived intact and the owners of the hotel above the coffehouse even cleaned up the shop, allowing for a smooth reopening. Now, Lepetit Espresso is a gathering place for a cadre of regulars and city residents, as well as for the steady stream of visitors who have come to help New Orleans get back on its feet.

Yesterday morning when I stopped in on my way to work, I sat at the window ledge tables facing Decatur Street and the Riverfront Park next to a woman named Meredith, a local candle designer. We got to talking and, when she heard that I was here from UNC, told me that she had evacuated to Asheville, NC during the hurricane. Without much prompting, she told me the rest of her story:

Meredith evacuated New Orleans with three adults and five cats, not knowing when or if she would come back. She left for three weeks initially, and returned to find that--to her surprise--her Bywater apartment had no damage inside at all. However, because of the lack of power, toxicity in her neighborhood and a dearth of city services, she had to leave again. She came back for good right before Halloween (two full months after the hurricane) and told me about how, upon her return, she had tremendous survivor's guilt at the lack of damage to life and property that she had sustained. Although she told me candidly that she used to cry every single day just thinking about the devastation that Katrina wrought, things are getting better.

Still, life is not anywhere close to what it used to be. For example, access even to basic supplies and grocery stores is limited. Her stop at Lepetit Espresso yesterday was a respite during her trek to the A&P Minimart on Royal Street, a good few miles from her home, where she going to do her grocery shopping; she does not have a car, so this is the only supermarket that is accessible to her at the moment.

Asking about the nature of UNC Law's work here, she said it took a long time to be able to accept the fact that she and others here needed help; at first, she turned away offers of assistance because she just couldn't believe that she had to rely on strangers for support. Eventually, though, she realized that this city and its residents cannot rebuild alone. And, so, she said to tell all of the students here this week that "Meredith says thank you."

I blog about this story because so much of what we have done and seen this week has been one step removed from the people (other than lawyers) who were here and survived the storm. The succession group, in particular, has been cloistered at a posh law firm working with files. Although we've spoken with clients and navigated government bureaucracies, we haven't had much time to talk to people in a more casual way. Also, because we have spent a lot of our free time travelling in a pack, it has been hard to meet "real" people. Sitting alone with my coffee, I debated for a while whether to talk to the woman next to me. I'm glad to have reached out--and glad that Meredith was willing to talk.

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Every bit helps

In my first three days in New Orleans I have worked on two cases with the New Orleans Pro Bono Project. My group has been working on succession files, which means we have been helping clients resolve the estates of deceased family members. I think some people would think that isn’t much of an impact for three days of full-time work. It just doesn’t sound like much of a contribution for that amount of time. But the fact is that every little bit helps down here.
First, it helps the over-worked staff at the New Orleans Pro Bono Project. The Project usually has a staff of six, but is currently operating with only three people. This means that the Project is using half as many people as it would usually have to work on its existing caseload AND the enormous amount of work generated by Hurricane Katrina. If you think about it this way, it’s obvious that any little bit that law students can contribute definitely helps. Our minor contributions may give one of these staffers the chance to take on another case, or maybe eat out for lunch one day of the week, or spend a little more time with their families. We have to remember that these people who are dedicating their time and efforts to others have hurricane-related problems of their own. The hurricane didn’t discriminate between lawyers and non-lawyers or the pro bono staff and their clients. Don’t forget that while some of these attorneys and staff are at the office helping their clients, they have family living away from home because their own houses were destroyed. They are putting their recovery on hold to help their clients. If our week of work gives these staffers even one afternoon of free time to address some of their own problems, it is worth it.
Second, we have to remember that with many of these cases, we are working with people who have lost everything. While working on a file, I caught myself thinking that the few thousands of dollars one client would receive from our efforts really wasn’t much in the big picture. But then I realized that to someone who has lost it all, that much money may be the chance to feed the children, or start repairing a home, or get a head start to get back on her feet. The point is that you don’t have to help someone recover a small fortune to make a difference in a life. To someone who has little or nothing, any amount can be a small fortune.
Finally, we have to realize that you don’t have to roll through 100 cases to make a difference. Even getting through one case helps the client immensely. Getting through one case means that there is one less person who needs our help with their succession problem. And it means that the load on one person’s shoulders may just be a little bit lighter. All of us who have contacted clients have encountered people who were completely appreciate of our work on their case. To these clients, everything we have done makes a world of difference.
But working on one case doesn’t just help that particular client, it also helps the community as a whole. The New Orleans community is probably used to having thousands or tens of thousands of students descend on their city during Mardi Gras and spring break. Think of the impact it makes when they realize that this year, the majority of those students came not only to drink and party all day and night, but also to try to help a struggling city get back on its feet. On our first day in New Orleans, we attended a reception at a local law firm for all the law students who came down for this week of spring break. It was amazing to see what had to be about 200 law students crammed into a reception hall eager to start work on their projects. They came from dozens of different schools and were from every class year. And these 200 students were less than half of all the law students that came down this week alone. Yesterday we spoke to some volunteers with a group called Common Ground in the Lower Ninth Ward who had been working in New Orleans for months. When the residents of this area see that so many people are still coming down here to help months after the storm, it has to at least let them know that not everyone has forgotten about them.
The point of all this is that if you can get involved with helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina both here and throughout the gulf area in any way, you should do it. Send money, volunteer some time, come down to the area to witness the impact and bolster the economy. But at the least, keep talking about it. Keep the victims and devastation in your minds and keep them as a subject of your conversations. If you see a news article about it, read the article. Awareness of what happened here is the first step in helping the area recover. Anything you can do for this area will certainly go a long way.

“Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good”

The Consummate Tourist

This week has been a strange and wonderful and surreal experience so far. This is my first trip to New Orleans, so even though I came down here to serve others, for the most part I can’t help being a total tourist. We are staying in the French Quarter, which pretty much epitomizes everything I had ever dreamed about the Big Easy. Everyone that knew I was coming down here had something to recommend, some place I simply had to eat, a street I simply had to walk down. The architecture here is stunning, and the city, particularly the French Quarter, has a sense of history and tradition that is almost palpable. There are still beads in the trees from Mardi Gras, and there is going to be a huge St. Patrick’s Day parade on Friday. Bourbon Street is not very populated, but it is definitely bumping. Sometimes I get the feeling that I am in a place that has been laughing to keep from crying. As for me, the consummate tourist, I’m trying to experience New Orleans as fully as possible in our free time. Every meal has been some sort of Cajun or Creole dish, every cup of coffee has to have chicory in it. I’ve eaten frog legs. I’ve taken hundreds of pictures. It really feels like a vacation.

On another level, I feel selfish to be enjoying myself as much as I am. Although it isn’t as apparent downtown and in the French Quarter, which were above the worst flooding, even these areas are still working through the aftermath of the hurricane. There is construction and repair going on everywhere in the downtown sector, but it just looks like the same sort of construction that is happening in downtown Raleigh between the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court. It didn’t really feel like I was in a Katrina-stricken area until I got out of the city. The farther out you get from downtown, the greater the amount of debris left uncleared and structures left unrepaired.

The Ninth Ward

We went on a tour of the Ninth Ward yesterday, which brought another mix of emotions. The houses are in shambles. It is as bad as you can imagine. Some houses and debris piles were obviously the result of the actual flooding, while other piles are evidence of the recovery and rebuild. From what a contractor told me on the flight in, people have had no choice but to completely gut their houses, tearing out everything but the frame and the roof, treating what’s left for mold, and starting almost from scratch. There are piles in front yards that represent what used to be the insides of those houses. There are FEMA trailers set up just outside of some of the houses, which people are using as homes while they work to make their own houses habitable. There are still X’s on the doors indicating when houses were searched and what was found in them. I learned that TFW spray painted on the front of a house means that Toxic Flood Waters had seeped into it.

I felt a lot of empathy for the people who were affected by Katrina, some of whom were members of my family. Even though I came down New Orleans to offer my time and energy to help the Pro Bono Clinic serve the community with sincerity and solidarity, I totally felt like I had no business being there in the Ninth Ward, driving up and down the streets while people sat on their porches, staring at us as we crept by in our white minivan. I felt almost as if I should let them grieve and regroup in peace, without making them a spectacle for my own educational edification. I honestly didn’t take the tour because I wanted to be a disaster tourist. At the same time, if I was a resident of the Ninth Ward sitting on the porch of my gutted house, looking at our van creep by, that is exactly what I would have thought. I wouldn’t be thinking, “Gosh, I sure hope those kids in khakis and polo shirts have learned something valuable, and I hope they take what they have learned and tell others of my suffering spreading the word of the devastation of Katrina to college campuses throughout the country.” I wouldn’t care about any of that. I’d care even less if I knew those same kids were about to go eat probably $1000 worth of great food at a fancy downtown New Orleans restaurant, courtesy of a big law firm, as soon as they got done touring the garbage dump that used to be my neighborhood (the dinner was fantastic, by the way).

I took a lot of pictures. I tried not to take pictures when anyone who lived there was looking because I didn’t want to cheapen their suffering or trivialize their experience, and I certainly didn’t want to further legitimate our appearance as disaster tourists. Still, I felt like I was being disrespectful even though I don’t think there was fundamentally anything insensitive or uncouth about documenting the devastation. By the end of the tour, I was so dazed from what I had seen that I wasn’t even looking in the camera, I was just pointing and shooting if I saw something interesting. I ended up with a lot of blurry and poorly framed pictures, which somehow seems fitting.

In the midst of all this devastation, there was something that made me feel hopeful. We saw an older gentleman in his front yard, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, mowing his lawn. Across the street was a pile of garbage, there were boats stranded on the side of the road, and there were blue tarps on the roofs. But this one man was taking pride in the appearance of his yard. His grass was getting too tall. It was both melancholy and uplifting at the same time, and really symbolized the experience and resilience of the people in the Ninth Ward for me. Things look terrible, people have been driven from their homes, the ground and walls have soaked for days in a toxic soup, but life goes on. It has to, and those people are surprisingly well adjusted considering the hardships they have suffered over the past six months.

Kelly Podger told us as we were leaving the Ward that she spent a couple of years down here doing Teach for America, and she made a comment that I thought was simultaneously really disturbing and insightful. She said something to the effect that, while it was obvious the area had been affected by the hurricane, it looked very poor and rundown before Katrina hit it. The hurricane made things worse, but they weren’t all that great to begin with. After she said that, as I looked at the houses and buildings we passed, I could see that Katrina wasn’t entirely to blame for this squalor. It made me feel a little ashamed that it took something like this hurricane to draw the national eye to their situation, and even more sad at how our government still seemed to be failing them. All the good intentions and empty rhetoric in Washington won’t rebuild a house.

The Divorce Workshop

We saw a large group of students walking down the street in the Ninth Ward wearing what appeared to be Tyvek suits, pushing wheelbarrows and carrying tools. They were working hands-on at the epicenter of the devastation. I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have just come down to do construction work instead of legal work, maybe I would have had more of a direct impact. It turns out that New Orleans, particularly the poor of New Orleans, need all kinds of help, and I’m proud to have some skills to contribute. Not everyone can provide legal services, and the need for legal services is high in the post-Katrina environment.

I am a member of the group who is dealing with uncontested divorces. On Monday, a gentleman by the name of S. Guy deLaup came in and gave us an overview of divorce law in Louisiana. He also went through the pleadings we were going to use when we prepared documents for our particular clients. Mr. deLaup was an extremely nice person, very knowledgeable, eager to answer our questions, and very personable. He was completely unassuming. We found out later that he is the president-elect of the Louisiana State Bar Association. If S. Guy deLaup is representative of Louisiana leadership style, I like it a lot.

Before I came down here, I couldn’t figure out why I was traveling to New Orleans to do divorces. My Uncle Roy, who sponsored my ticket down here, asked me the same question. Actually, pretty much everyone asked me why I didn’t just stay in Durham and do divorces, and I didn’t have a good answer. It seems like law students in New Orleans should be doing something more relevant, like helping displaced residents get money from FEMA or their homeowner’s insurance or suing crooked landlords or something.

At our training, Mr. deLaup explained how even divorce is a Katrina issue. Apparently, FEMA money and trailers are only paid out to each household. If two people are married, they only get one dose of FEMA help, even if they don’t have anything to do with each other anymore. People who have been separated for years without getting divorced are finding themselves ineligible for full disaster relief as a result of their marital status. Also, there have been issues where one spouse collected money for their house or other property from FEMA or an insurance company without the knowledge of the other spouse. When the second spouse made their claim, they discovered everything had already been paid out. There are actually very good reasons for law students to come down to New Orleans and help people get divorced.

On Tuesday we spent most of the day preparing petitions for divorce and the accompanying affidavits. We also contacted many other clients of the Pro Bono Clinic to try to find out where they were and if they still wanted to proceed. There were a lot of disconnected phones, and a lot of people who had evacuated to other states. We set up the intake schedule for the next two weeks with people we were able to get in touch with. We also worked on updating and standardizing the template used by the clinic to draft pleadings in the different parishes that it services.

Yesterday (Wednesday) I truly understood why we were here. We held a divorce clinic at the Pro Bono Clinic’s offices. We were supervised by Jasa Gitomer, an attorney from Kilpatrick Stockton. She is fantastic and awesome. We got to meet the clients and put faces to the files we had worked on for the past couple of days so we could verify their information and get their signatures on the affidavits. The clients I met with were so grateful to us for the work we had done. It was obvious that everyone was struggling to get back on their feet after the hurricane, and this was one more piece of their lives that was getting put in order. I know that everyone had a very positive experience with the people they helped.

I learned today that while it may be more “sexy” to dispense justice in large doses, like fighting to keep FEMA from evicting residents from area hotels this week, it is equally important to dole out justice in smaller portions, one person at a time. I helped some people this week. I really helped them. I didn’t change the world, and New Orleans is still going to be reeling from Katrina at the end of the week when I go back to Carolina. But I know that I came down here for a good reason. I feel like the little boy in the story who was throwing starfish back into the ocean after the tide had gone out. He knew he wouldn’t be able to save them all, but he sure did make a difference to the ones he tossed back into the water.

Not Quite Normal...But Getting There

Impressions of a Recovering Metropolis

From the window of the airplane, except for the smattering of blue tarps covering rooftops, New Orleans looked the same as I remembered from my last trip here three and a half years ago. Clean swimming pools gleamed in the late afternoon sun; traffic on the streets seemed to flow; streetlights lined the streets. However, as I deplaned and walked into the almost-deserted airport terminal, something definitely seemed off. For 5:30 on a Sunday evening, the airport was--well--empty. Travellers waiting for departing flights were noticeably absent, leaving empty the rows of chairs in the waiting areas; several of the airport stores were dark. I could not help but think that six months before, the airport had been full of desperate, sick people waiting to evacuate the area for places unknown. See http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/katrina.evacuees/index.html

As Diane drove us from the airport to the hotel (www.hotelprovincial.com), we all commented that the neighborhoods we could see from the freeway looked similar to neighborhoods everywhere/anywhere. In the early evening light, it was hard to tell whether the occasional boarded-up windows we saw indicated hurricaine-related damage or simply urban blight. Except for the pockets of houses without any lights on at all in some of the areas we drove through, we could have been anywhere in post-industrial urban America.

The French Quarter too, our home for the week, didn't seem that different than I remember, except that there were, perhaps, fewer people around. Bourbon Street still has the same, slightly-pukey smell that I remember disliking the other two times I've been to New Orleans. The rest of the Quarter seems pretty much its same charming, if somewhat kitschy self.

The first real sign that things aren't quite right here came as we started to interact with the locals. On Sunday night, the Student Hurricane Network, http://www.studenthurricanenetwork.org/, hosted a welcome reception at the Jones-Walker law firm in the Central Business District for the two hundred-plus law students in town this week. Much like people in New York and Washington after September 11th, everyone who was here for Katrina has a story to tell and the cathartic effect of the re-telling and sharing is clear. We arrived in time to hear a skit performed by Tulane Law School students who had been displaced by the storm. As an outsider, the stories were moving to me in a human interest sort of way, but other listeners were visibly affected by the students' stories--more than a few nodded vigorously, cried, hugged their neighbors, and verbalized their agreement with the student performers to express outrage with the government's response to Katrina. Later, a local lawyer told the crowd about how he had been evacuated by a friend with a helicopter and saw axes, hands and, ultimately, people coming out of rooftops as he left New Orleans; he told us that, as much as he wanted to save the people who had camped out on their roofs waiting for evacuation, he could not help. The guilt he lives with now was obvious and incredibly sad.

At the same time, though, there was something inspriational about the gathering -- people from all over the country have been drawn here to help. As Tracie Washington, a local civil rights lawyer reminded the crowd, each generation has its own civil rights battles to fight and this is ours. The challenges related to housing, the economy, government benefits and services, and political/voting rights here will keep progressive-minded civil rights workers busy for the foreseeable future. The ironic thing is that many of these problems were here before. Its just that now we're focused on them. Which is good.

Taking Care of Business
We reported for work at 9:30 a.m. on Monday morning, all sugared- and caffeined-up after a stop at Cafe DuMonde, http://www.cafedumonde.com/, where several members of our group ate A LOT of beignets (Mike Petrusic even ate the powdered sugar left on his plate with a spoon!) and drank delicious coffee. The sixteen of us from UNC (joined by two students from Case Western Reserve law school and three University of Iowa law students) are working this week out of space generously donated by the law firm of Phelps Dunbar, http://www.phelpsdunbar.com/home_flash.html. They've given us a couple of conference rooms, access to the phone for local calls, and other assorted office-y things. The conference room we were in yesterday looked out on the lake and part of the city. From here we could see an (un)healthy sprinkling of blue tarps covering rooftops and a not-insignificant number of boarded-up windows as a reminder of Katrina's damage. Letters on the nearby Mariott hotel are being replaced this week, as are windows at other neighboring office buildings.

Rachel Piercey, the Executive Director of the New Orleans Pro Bono Project, our host organization for the week, met with us first thing to explain the role that the the Pro Bono Project plays in the greater New Orleans community. Rachel prefaced her discussion of the work we are doing this week by talking about the ways in which Katrina has personally affected the staff members at the Pro Bono Project and the organization itself. The Project has shrunk from six and a half staff members to three and a half as a result of the hurricane while, at the same time, facing an increasing workload. Of the three and a half staff members that are left, three are still living in temporary housing and waiting for repairs to be made to their homes. They are dealing with traumatized pets, sick relatives, long commutes into the city, difficult contractors, and other personal issues, all the while trying to serve the low-income population of New Orleans.

Rachel told us about the Pro Bono Project's major goal for the coming months: continuing to serve their target populations by providing the services the Project has always provided, while assessing the new services that are needed in post-Katrina New Orleans. We're helping the Project with both the old and the new dimensions of its work this week.

Boz, Dan, and Cory are out and about developing a Community Education model, determining how best to utilize law students and lawyers in meeting community needs over the coming months. Rachel mentioned assessing the needs of the Hispanic and Vietnamese communities as being of particular interest, along with identifying the most pressing legal issues in the greater New Orleans area generally. The fearless trio are also identifying the new services the Project could offer, and determining whether other organizations are filling community needs.

Eleven of us (seven UNC folks--Elliot, Emily, Jocelyn, Mike, Rachel, Diane, and I -- the three Iowa students--Deanna, Molly, and Emily -- and Dan Fishbein, a lawyer from Kilpatrick Stockton in Atlanta) are working on succession files. Basically, this means trying to transfer ownership of property from a deceased person to his or her heirs or legatees. The clients (all low-income, i.e., with incomes at 200% of the federal poverty level or less) have come to the Pro Bono Project through outreach efforts. Each of us has real, live clients to help this week; many of us have spoken with these people on the telephone and drafted pleadings and other paperwork that the Project is preparing to file with the local court. Some of the cases involve property that belongs to a person who died long ago, but whose relatives never had reason to file succession papers until the hurricane wiped out or damaged the property; now, these relatives need to gain possession in order to access FEMA or insurance funds to help with rebuilding costs. Other pieces of property belong to a person who died in the storm. For example, my first case involves a man who died in his home in Katrina-related flooding; his children are now trying to take possession of their father's estate. When I realized the circumstances of the father's death, the tragedies suffered by people here became all the more real. And, yet, the client (one of the daughters) could not have sounded more together, calm, and self-assured -- and grateful for the assistance the Project is providing. Hopefully, we'll each be able to move along several files this week to help the clients get their possessory rights clarified soon and assist the Project in clearing its massive docket.

Eight of us (four UNC students -- Aaron, Fang, Jessica, and Vanessa -- one UNC staff member -- Kelly -- the two Case Western students -- Amy and Kathleen -- and Jasa Gitomer from Kilpatrick Stockton in Atlanta) are working on divorce cases. They are preparing pleadings for client seeking an unconstested divorce and preparing for a workshop tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon; each of the volunteers working on this project is meeting with an individual client tomorrow, as well, to help finalize the paperwork. I know less about this project, so hopefully one of my colleagues will post more about this soon!

* * *
As we end our second day of work, it is clear one week is only enough to make an incredibly small dent in the work that needs to be done. But, as we all sit here in a small, windowless conference room working through the details of the lives of generations of New Orleaneans and their property, its good to know that, at least, we're trying to do some good.

Back in N'Awlins

For those of you checking the blog, this is just to let you know we've all arrived safely. Today is the first day we've had internet access. Most of us are working on divorce and succession cases, and have been working out of the law offices of Phelps Dunbar. (Yes, divorce cases are an important post-Katrina issue, both in the sense of helping folks receive access to the full amount of the FEMA assistance and the unexpected increases in divorces in light of the stress of post-Katrina life.) Boz, Cory, and Dan are hitting the streets to find out what efforts are occuring to provide the community with information about their legal rights and available legal resources.

It's nice to be building on the work the first group did over December. We'll write more shortly, but just wanted to send a note that all is well.

Diane

Photos from the 17th Street Canal Breach

On our last day in New Orleans, we visited the Lakeview neighborhood, just on the other side of this breach in the 17th Street Canal. The utter destruction was just incomprehensible. This photo was taken not long after the storm, long before our visit.








The following are photos of the Lakeview neighborhood (the homes just on the other side of the breach) as we saw it when we visited on Dec. 22, 2005, almost four months after the storm.






















It's difficult to see, but the orange spraypaint on the front of this house (which sits directly in front of the breached levee) says "Danger" with a skull and crossbones symbol, and "RIP." In the upper windows, we could see a lamp and some bookcases, signs of a normal home before this disaster struck.








The entire front of this home, located just across the street from the breach, was ripped off by the rushing water. Just inside, we could see glasses and trays lined up on the counters in the kitchen.

Rebuilding

I think many of us went to New Orleans with thoughts of working face-to-face with clients affected by the storm. We imagined ourselves (at least I did) helping displaced citizens fill out FEMA claim forms or file complaints against their landlords for wrongful eviction. We wanted to "make a difference."

When we got there, the New Orleans Pro Bono Project was in its own process of rebuilding. What it needed from us was help putting itself back together again so that it could serve the needs of the city's poorest residents as they began to return home. The role of the New Orleans Pro Bono Project is to match volunteer attorneys with poor clients who need assistance with a wide variety of legal matters. After Katrina, the project staff had little idea where their attorneys and clients were and whether clients were still being served. The succession cases were the most pressing, because unless clients had proven title to their homes, they couldn't get a check from FEMA. Many longtime New Orleans residents have lived in the same homes their families have occupied for decades-- "title" was something that was just understood. It never needed to be proven. Until Katrina. So we spent our days with the Pro Bono Project trying to track down all the displaced attorneys and clients, trying to determine if cases had been closed, and whether clients still needed services. It was an arduous and tedious process of calling attorneys and clients, getting disconnected numbers or new contact information, looking up displaced attorneys on the Louisiana State Bar website, waiting for return phone calls, and logging all the new information onto forms and in databases.

I didn't get to fill out any FEMA forms or file any complaints on behalf of wrongfully evicted persons. But what I did do was help rebuild one of the major infrastructures used to provide legal services to the poor in New Orleans. What I did do was help take some pressure off of the Pro Bono Project staff, who are withered and weary from their own dislocation yet determined to do everything they can to continue to assist their clients. What I did do was learn what rebuilding really means-- that everyone checks their ego at the door, rolls up their sleeves, and digs in to do whatever needs doing as best they can.

My deepest thanks go out to the staff of the Pro Bono Project for feeding us both physically and spiritually, to Judges Tainey and Landrieu for showing us the critical role of attorneys in service to those living in poverty, particularly in moments of historical crises, to the Hoffmans for their warm hospitality and wonderful food, and to the Goodsons for opening their own flooded homes to a bunch of rowdy law students who crowded their floors, sofas, and lives for five days. My gratitude is beyond words.

For the Good of the Gulf: UNC Law Winter Break Pro Bono Project

For the Good of the Gulf: UNC Law Winter Break Pro Bono Project
Upon reflecting over my experience in New Orleans, I find it hard to articulate that which we witnessed and I am immediately assailed by a number of clichés (to which I will attempt not to succumb) when I try to accurately describe what we saw and learned. The destruction and loss was saddening in a way my prose could never do justice. However, I was equally touched by the spirit and tenacity of the people of New Orleans. Imagine, if you will, the final scene in The Grinch when the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day—that’s how I felt listening to the stories recounted by the families, lawyers, and judges who, in addition to everything else they’re doing, gave of their time to us. Therefore, I wanted to share a few of my favorite things from New Orleans.

Favorite Things

10. Café du Monde (it’s still up and running. There’s no better way to start your day than with a plate full of fried dough and powdered sugar.)
9. Fresh French bread at Dorignac’s
8. New Orleans hospitality (The parents of a UNC 3L invited us all over to their house and fed 16 hungry students an amazing meal!)
7. Desire Café (I asked if they had refills on coke. The waiter said before Katrina they charged for refills, but now he didn’t care and filled us all up.)
6. Pat O’s. The restaurant is still closed, but the bar is up and running with piano shows a few nights a week.
5. Drive thru daiquiri shops (according to Ellen it’s not an open container if the straw is in the bag.
4. Seafood galore!
3. Did I mention New Orleans hospitality? We stayed with the most gracious family imaginable—they were repairing the ground floor of their home (which had six of water) and yet were kind enough to take in our motley crew.
2. po-boys (these speak for themselves)
1. Laissez les bon temps roulez encore (banner in downtown New Orleans)

The Epic of N'Awlins

As best I can, I'd like to try to document our trip to New Orleans. The long-and-short of it is that I'm extremely glad we went. I hope that, somewhere down the road when Tracy has finished her own law degree (she's taking the LSAT in June), we'll be able to practice together permanently. I also hope that shortly after we begin practicing together we can turn things over to some interns, drop the kids off in a well-lit parking lot, and hop a plane to Jakarta.

We rode down to New Orleans with Lindsay and Carrie and didn't get lost this time. They both live in or around Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 4 in the car for an all-nighter drive proved infinitely better, if not infinitely more cramped, than my last trip through the deep South. We rolled into Lindsay's place at about 9 in the morning Sunday, December 17th and went straight to sleep. Waking up we looked for the Panthers game, only to realize they were playing the Saints just down the road at LSU's stadium. The empty shots of the stands gave the NFL game a real "pig with lipstick" appearance. Lindsay's parents then took us out to The Chimes, a local Cajun sports pub, which was my first introduction to Lindsay's parents and to Cajun hospitality. They paid for everything, happy to see me order whisky on the rocks on a Sunday (this is the South?), ecstatic to share two rounds of boudin balls with us, and absolutely insistent that we try the duck and sausage gumbo. Lindsay said at some point how happy she was to be back in Louisiana just because of the food. North Carolina just didn't cut it. And I had to agree. Here we were sitting at a sports bar, and the whole menu has a distinct local flair (crawfish etoufee, gumbo whatever, . We both agreed that North Carolina had pretty good barbeque, but we also agreed that meat + ketchup + liquid smoke is not the stuff that cultures are built on. Maybe it's unfair to compare NC's cuisine to New Orleans since some people insist that Louisiana has the best food in the country.

Even after the gumbo meal at the Chimes, Linday's parents were great. We sat outside around an old iron fireplace in their garden and listened to Mr. Wilkes tell us about how the loss of New Orleans affected him. He told us about how much he and his wife enjoyed going down and walking around Magazine Street (home of your art boutiques and "Make Levees Not War" t-shirts) at least once a month. He rushed inside to grab a special edition National Geographic that had nice aerial fold-out shot of all the flood damage (80% of the city) and proceeded to describe the ins and outs of the levee systems, the politics of the levee boards between Metairie and New Orleans, and the areas hit hardest by Katrina. It really hadn't hit me until then, because of exams and geographic distance, how bad the physical and emotional trauma was for people there.

Most memorable were the stories of his father, a retired military guy, who Mr. Wilkes and his brother had to force to evacuate. They brought him up to Baton Rouge with his wife just before the storm. Immediately after, his father was extremely restless to get back to the house and see the damage. He tried to get in the car and drive down to New Orleans three days in a row but was either turned arounds by his sons or the National Guard. Finally, his sons drove him down when things had cleared, and he walked around his devastated neighborhood in complete shocked disbelief. This was a guy who had a place for everything in his house: the silverware, the family pictures, the bedside slippers, etc. - and all of it had been sent through a class 4 spin cycle.

I tried to hold on to this image as Lindsay's mom began to relate how she and Lindsay's dad were huge hippies in the 60s, how she used to listen to an AM station out of Chicago all through high school, how she first heard Dylan and could not stop until she heard everything, and how she laughingly guessed exactly what my dad had listened to (John Denver, The Kingston Trio, Seals & Croft). (Lindsay told me at the end of our trip that her mom had called to report excitedly that she had found the link for WXYC on the web and was listening in.)

Towards the end of the night, after a few bottles of Cavit Pinot Noir, I had a good discussion with Lindsay's dad about whether music or film was the lowest art. Oh man, he was so passionate about music! When talking about it he would bend backwards at the hips and squint his eyes, trying to squeeze every ounce of emotion in his body into the words. I think we were both content to say that film was the lowest art.

The next day we headed down to New Orleans. We volunteered, about 2o of us, with the Pro Bono Project in New Orleans. They essentially operate as a clearinghouse for poor folks on basic legal matters - divorce, Social Security, successions, child custody, bankruptcy, etc. When people contact them they either choose to handle the matter in-house with one of their three (?) attorneys, or they farm the cases out to one of the attorneys in and around New Orleans who has registered to take such cases. These might be attorneys with big firms or just individual practitioners. Unfortunately, when the storm hit, attorneys and clients were scattered all over the place. And, as you can imagine, the storm didn't change the need for a divorce or custody of a child. What we tried to do was get in touch with the clients and attorneys who we held files for. For most, we couldn't get in touch with the attorney or the client. The numbers were disconnected or no one answered. Contacting a group of clients labeled "Homeless" became a ridiculous joke.

When we weren't working, the attorneys at the Pro Bono Project were pushing us to get out and see New Orleans. Our first impressions, working downtown, were that the city didn't seem all that bad. The Hilton had a giant poster that said "Laissez Les Bons Temps Roulez Encore" which covered many boarded up windows but most skyscrapers downtown showed no more damage than a few broken windows. I kept asking Lindsay, "So, did this area flood?" Usually the answer was, "No, it's always looked like this." (i.e., yes that garage has ALWAYS been half-caved-in, that pile of garbage is ALWAYS in the middle of the street, and that car is ALWAYS upside down.)I guess the first hint of destruction I got was when Brock (a Tulane law student that Tracy and I stayed with) drove us home for the evening through her crack-infested neighborhood only blocks from the fashionable mansions of St. Charles. Three men armed with machine guns were searching an abandoned blue sedan pulled aimlessly to the curve, some number of colored beads and a stuffed animal hanging from the rearview. I figured they were probably National Guardsmen - camo outifts, humvee, and guns being key hints. This was my first ride down a street loosely governed by martial law. Brock continued to point out the known crack houses. Later that night, Tracy and I slept beside a shotgun and case of Remington shells. Also a first.

Right now I'm thinking about Kate Boo. She's a writer for the New Yorker and spoke at a press summit that the Poverty Center put together earlier this semester. She said the F word in my car. She was talking about the way that the media covers poverty - either they paint the poor as monsters, ready to kill/rape/shoot-up whenever/wherever or as saints without sin who would no doubt discover the cure for cancer if only given a chance. I am probably going to be too sensationalist with this bit on New Orleans because sensationalism is cooler than objective truth.

It wasn't until the final day in New Orleans that we got to tour the real damage. We went down to a neighborhood right beside the levee breach on 17th Street. Houses were ripped in half. Houses were inside other houses. Cars were in trees (apparently not occurring before the hurricane). The scene was exaggerated in my mind a bit because the first three cars I came across were a circa-1959 Chevrolet sans wheels and two 1960s VW Beetles, all standing in water surrounded by flotsam and jetsam. These cars, to me, are like icons of Americana. They are sort of eternal to me, the stars of black-and-white photographs. I guess seeing them in the destruction made the devastation that much more epic - like somehow the full weight of the historical nature of this destruction was brought to bear. A group of older folks were walking down the street looking at the houses, and I heard one of them jokingly say, "I always enjoy a bit of disaster tourism."

What are some other things I don't want to forget? I liked sitting in a federal judge's chambers later that day. A judge was telling us that Pat Roberson, shortly after the flood, had declared that God had judged New Orleans for being such a sinful city. The judge quipped that, had God intended to judge the city, He would not have been so inaccurate as to leave the French Quarter (home to all the bars and bordelos) relatively unscathed. Pick your prophet.We did go out in the Quarter one night. I am happy to report that the smell of vomit will still help orient you. The only odd thing was there was no one there. We went to the (in)famous Pat O'Brien's, an infinite number of different sized beer steins hanging from the ceiling, to find ourselves the only patrons. The poor bartender was reduced to striking up a conversation with us, I guess hoping to keep us there a bit longer or encourage a bonus "friendship" tip.

What would Gilgamesh and Noah have to say about New Orleans? Would they understand the gutted houses, lake bottom with shells in the once manicured front yards, Winnie The Pooh tangled amongst broken tree limbs, VHS tape to Scott Schorr from Aunt Patty and Uncle Larry, and broken Led Zeppelin cd sticking out of the ground just obscuring the words "When the Levee Breaks"? I do not.

- Donald

From Ellen, Staff Attorney, New Orleans Pro Bono Project

Our supervising attorney, Ellen, asked us to post this in order to provide a glimpse of life outside of the office. It is a letter Ellen wrote on December 1 to friends who provided support to Ellen and her family immediately after the hurricane:

"To all of you who thought to contribute,

First and foremost, Thank you! There are NOT words to thank you all properly. I also wanted explain the delay in sending this heartfelt thanks. Gayle sent everything as soon as was possible. Mail did not reach me even at my substtitute address (my parent's house some 32 miles from my home) for about 45 days. So even when I was at the reunion, I was not certain who had sent what, nor where anyone was living. Gayle did her best, but I didn't track the emails. Then there's the real reason. I could not bring myself to say thank you because that would mean I needed the help. Please do not misunderstand me, it is not a matter of pride...rather, it is accepting the ENORMITY of the personal and community loss. I will not go to my home in Jefferson, unless I have a specific purpose. To better explain, it is so emotional to pack up in the middle of the kitchen it takes about 4 hours to pack TWO moving boxes. And, then the feelings overwhelm and you cannot do more. By the way, this is apparently normal. Everyone here at the office describes strikingly similar feelings and experiences. So, I hope you will accept my delayed thanks. You have all given me so much more than money. The hope and strength I gained from each of you brings tears to my eyes. I feel so lucky and blessed to have such generous people in my life. Thank you one and all."

We're Back

I'm a little embarrassed by the amount of media attention we got while we were in New Orleans. That's especially true after Rachel talked about a mutual friend who literally moved to the city after the disaster to work to rebuild it. And you think of the thousands of National Guard and other military and the hundreds of Red Cross Volunteers who stay for months at a time and regular residents of the city who are all chipping in. They're the ones who deserve any attention.

There was some sentiment in the group that when we come back we should come and build a house or something rather than do pro bono work per se. Its certainly something I've thought about as well. But through the work we did do, we were able to touch a lot of people. Not every client's problem was solved, but at the very least we let them know there was still an infrastructure in place that cared about them. And the same was true of the attorneys. Hopefully we reminded a few of them of their indigent clients, as well.

The amount of work that still needs to be done is massive. More tellingly, Katrina is the word of the day (well, everyday) in the city, from T-Shirts in the French Quarter to radio broadcasts to people having lunch to the newspaper (the Times-Picayune headline on Thursday was mind-blowing: "Katrina Weaker than Expected." Apparently windspeed at landfall has been shown to be slower than was originally thought).

New Orleans requires a massive influx of aid, both from the government and from charities. Staying with the Goodsons, I wasn't aware of the extent of the problem until we toured along the breach of the 17th Street Levy, but its bad, and its probably tempting to just give up. But New Orleans is a major American city full of American citizens, and it would be unconscionable for the rest of the country to not do everything in its power to help. This is why people form governments and societies in the first place- if we're not doing everything we can in a situation like this, what's the point of banding together at all? Might as well go live in the woods.

It was heartening yesterday to see Congressional approval for aid, even if one cynically wonders if it would have been as much if it wasn't tied into the bill to renew the PATRIOT Act. I'm obviously completely speculating, which is ok because this is a blog, and would love to hear if anyone had more information on the politics behind that.

To complete my personal part of this trip, we got back into Chapel Hill around 10:30 last night. Christy followed me to drop off the van. At Thrifty Rental Car the following exchange took place:

Thrifty Car Rental Check in Specialist: (Surveys trash and glasses and bottles, minor stains, and mileage meter. Sniffs and catches a scent. Looks at me shivering and wigged out) Where did you all drive this thing?
Me: New Orleans.
Thrifty Man: That explains it.

I think that's a pretty good sign for the Big Easy.

United We Stand?

Wednesday morning before delving back into cases, we took a driving tour down Canal Street. The emotions it invoked are hard to convey in words and are enormously conflicting. Anger. Sadness. Shock. Grief. Just to name a few. The houses were still in essentially the same condition that they were when the flood waters receded four months ago. Basic services have still not been restored to the area. Trees remain smashed through rooftops. Houses all bear water lines of varying heights – a vivid reminder that, when the levees breached, people in the hardest hit areas faced not a few inches of water but six or seven feet (and, in some neighborhoods, even more). Furniture, clothes, and even children’s toys litter front lawns and spill into the streets. All of the things that once made up people’s lives and memories are now reduced to debris waiting to be hauled away. But, perhaps the most shocking part of all was seeing the spray painted codes on walls and doorways letting rescuers know when each house was searched, who was recovered, whether pets (often left behind) were rescued by the SPCA, and, occasionally, whether a body was found. Some houses weren’t searched until weeks after the storm as rescue workers were forced to wait until the flood waters receded. Some doors hauntingly even bear the date 9/11. Crude, bright orange writing conveys the simplest of information and serves as a stark reminder of just how precarious the days following the floods were for the people of New Orleans.

Taking in the scene around me, I found myself thinking back to the news coverage in the days following the storm. As I surveyed the devastation, those memories made me angry. Very, very angry. This country routinely characterizes itself as the greatest nation in the world. But, looking at the destruction of New Orleans made me realize that, in the wake of the storm, our nation fell far, far short of our ideals. This is the United States of America. We stand and fall together, regardless of class, economics, race, or politics. Yet, when our citizens, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters were living on rooftops and praying for rescues that took far too long to arrive, many individuals went into spin mode rather than rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. This is not to say that there haven’t been extraordinary displays of leadership in the wake of the storm – both from elected leaders and from ordinary citizens that were determined to ensure that their city and their neighbors survived. Katrina produced innumerable unsung heroes. But, even amidst such heroism, much of the coverage focused instead on finger pointing. Was it the Mayor’s fault, the Governor’s, the President’s, FEMA’s? The blame game was everywhere and any assumption of responsibility seemed elusive at best.

At this time, the people of New Orleans don’t need rhetoric, and they don’t need spin. And they certainly don’t need finger pointing. Over the last week, I have met some of the strongest, most resilient people I have ever known. They love their city, and are looking forward to the day that all of its citizens can come home and live and thrive there once more. They are selfless – many of them made homeless themselves due to flooding and yet always willing to make sure that their neighbors receive the help that they need. But they need our support. They need us to remember. Rebuilding New Orleans will take years, will demand sacrifice, and will require the support of us all. As that process progresses, ultimately, the people of New Orleans need all Americans to stand up and say that this is still one country and that wherever any of our citizens struggle, there are we all.

Two Drives and More Than Two Sides of the Story

We took a detour through some of the devastation on the way to work this morning. So far our normal route to work and random jaunts around the city had not exposed us to damage this great or this widespread. You have seen it on TV, but until you are there you cannot get the true sense of how thoroughly decimated and strangely unpopulated some of these areas happen to be. There is a scummy waterline that bonds all of the shells of houses, which allowed me to try and visualize what dire straights it must have been to be trapped in those man-made islands for a week. I know that some of those houses were delapadated beforehand, so I tried to picture what damage Katrina had done herself. The spooky parts are the spray painted markings that indicate what rescue workers found when they systematically searched the houses. We tried to decipher them; gleaning that red was the color the SPCA used when looking for pets, and that over the 'X' was the date searched. But other than observations like these, and the occassional "look at that," the car was rather silent as we trolled the rubble - dodging the occassional utility worker, gas line, and sink hole. But it was the conclusion that much of that part of the city would have to be rebuilt from the beginning that reenergized my focus on our work. The truth is that if you are not focused, the work of locating attorneys and clients could get monotonous. However after our morning drive, I realized that just as those neighborhoods had to start over from sqaure 1 so did the Pro Bono Project.

Ellen ordered us off the job early today to experience some of the city in the light, so we drove down Magazine St. into the Garden District. Just like the folks down Canal St. had been poor before Katrina, the area we were in had been well off before the storm and continued to be so afterward. These beautiful plantation homes had some damage, but unlike the morning's drive this one was teeming with life. This area was being repaired by residents and workers alike. Much has been made about the correlation between income and injury with Katrina, but whether that is true i do not know. Could it be that if you were rich you lived on higher ground and were therefore less likely to flood, maybe, but it also could have been the fickled happenstance of mother nature. There was disparity before Katrina, and there certainly is after - but many will just say that is just New Orleans. But personally the stark contrast between our morning and evening drives still gives me a feeling more than sorrow, which does not sit quite right.

Before the trip I heard a relief worker on NPR talking about how she was leaving New Orleans a month early because she felt like some of the neighborhoods were not being touched, and that she thought she was underutilized and underappreciated. From my experience there is some truth in the first half of that statement, but the second a complete falsity.

We have been to a local hole in the wall for lunch the last two days, Mena's Palace. It is a great place much like Sutton's in Chapel Hill or Cooper's Barbeque in Raleigh. I have had a shrimp po-boy and a breaded veal cutlet po-boy, but you really could close your eyes and point to the menu and be sure you would get something good. The place is filled with worn relief workers, hurried professionals, and haggard but friendly waitresses. Today our's immediately said "ya'll aren't from around here are ya?" But then she proceeded to tell us about how where she lived across the river was getting back to normal, but that the city of New Orleans has been much slower to get things cleaned up. It was a very real account from a very real person.

On that same token everyone has a point of view on the hurricane. As we look for physical damage we fast forget that this disaster affected many more people than it did buildings. A city of 800,000 now has 50,000 - and 19 of those are law students who are going home on friday. But more than anything i saw on either drive the effects of the storm are seen in the faces, in the stories and in the actions of the people of New Orleans.

Rachel and Ellen up front told us that you could see that the storm had frazzelled them. As we call attorneys you get a range of people from ticked off to happy to help to holding on by a string. Ellen brought us together and gave us gutwrenching stories in order to dispell some of the myths about the Superdome, the levees, and Katrina. At the Hoffmans' house later saw a slideshow of pictures from a Carolina Alum who weathered the storm inside the city. No matter who you talk to about the storm, the opinions about the causes and happenings change. But the common thread that binds these people to the land they love so much, is that no matter who you talk to the watermarks are showing and the need for them to somehow start over from sqaure 1 shows. Which is why I am so happy that the hardworking ladies of the New Orleans Pro Bono Project are taking a deserved break next week.

But my second issue with the lady from NPR concerns the amount to which the city is actually alive and thankful for any and all who are around. Mother's is open. Burbon Street is open. Pat O'Brien's is open, though with few people and only one bar - which I am told is weird. Handgrenades and muffaletta sandwiches are being consumed, and the people of this area are greatful. They are too greatful; wonderful people like the Goodsons and the Hoffmans and the all the attorneys thank us mightily at every turn, when really we should be thanking them for their generosity. It is hard to feel like you make a dent a problem so big, but the attorneys, the clients, the families, EVERYONE is happy that we are here and we are willing to help. And even more importantly they are hopeful that we will take their stories beyond the bounds of the Bayou.

Proud To Call It Home

Saturday August 27th 2005 8:00am: I wake up to learn Katrina didn't make the turn north to the Florida panhandle. One second later, I realize my life will never be the same again. I spend that morning frantically searching for a hotel room for my grandparents to evacuate to and praying that they will indeed leave.

Monday August 29th: I atttend the first day of class numb thinking of only the life I had left behind.

Tuesday August 30th, 7:00am: I wake to learn the levees have broken, the city is flooding, and the worst fear of everyone who has lived in New Orleans is coming true.

The following days and weeks are a blur now. I know there were many hours spent trying to get through to my family's cell phones, watching the news, and wondering when I would be able to get back home.

For those of us who call to New Orleans home, life can now be characterized as pre and post Katrina. I have struggled to find my role in the post Katrina New Orleans. The New Orleans I left in the Fall of 2000 for undergraduate at Florida and now law school at UNC has changed. Familiar places are gone forever and friends and family have moved away. The permanence of it all has either not been determined or settled in yet.

What I am confident about is that the Spirit of Louisiana and City of New Orleans remains alive within its residents. We will rebuild and we will return to the place that is burned into our heart and soul. I always knew New Orleans was the best city in the world, and when my friends from UNC return to their lives in North Carolina, I feel they too will be proud to say if only for a few days New Orleans was home.

You can't go home again

For me, the most striking thing about seeing this city for the first time and seeing it in this condition is not just the shock of the destruction, but knowing that to so many people, this city is home. The work that we have been doing at the Pro Bono Project has focused on finding people that have been out of touch since the storm, and it has shown us that the real destructive power of Hurricane Katrina was in sending people away from New Orleans to places that aren’t their home.

I don’t think that anything could gut your soul like watching the place where you have your roots wash away as you have to turn your back on it and flee for your life. It isn’t just the flooded, wind-beaten houses, but the fact that communities built by the daily interactions of the people and the city over two hundred years are simply gone.

I was listening to a story on the radio about the hurricane awhile back and heard a displaced New Orleans woman recounting her old neighborhood – the characters who haunted their respective corners and the mailman who called her “baby.” During the past couple of days, I’ve found myself projecting that woman’s story onto the empty, devastated streets and imagining the unique group of people that was forced out of New Orleans and dispersed all over the Southeast. The displaced woman that I heard has no way of knowing where the neighborhood characters have gone and no expectation of seeing that mailman again. She and all the others lost their houses but even more sadly, their neighborhoods and their roots. Their city.

Even I can tell you after three days here on my first visit that there is no place like New Orleans. And it is still here, but so deep in mourning that it is hard to imagine a full recovery. Before I arrived, I heard people say that the French Quarter was not badly damaged. And it’s true that the buildings are still there. In fact, we had a wonderful night in the Quarter complete with amazing food, good wine, music and dancing. All of that is still possible. But the Quarter is damaged just like the rest of the city – the streets and bars are relatively empty (many are closed) and the people are tired and sad. But not all are completely defeated – the saxophone player in a bar we wandered into stopped the music to tell us wearily that we should come back when the city was back on its feet, in ten years. We promised that we would, and he promised that he’d still be there playing music, this time to a room full of happy people.

For the Good of the Gulf: UNC Law Winter Break Pro Bono Project

Rule 6.1 of the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility provide that lawyers should annually perform 50 hours of pro bono service for individuals unable to afford them. The rule seems simple enough. The problem arises, however, as it often does, in applying the rule to a certain set of facts. Here, what does a lawyer's professional responsibility mean for a group of law students on winter break in the wake of tragic natural disaster?

Here's another question related to a lawyer's professional responsibility. Someone recently asked me what I thought the role of lawyers should be in redevelopment effort. It was a difficult question because it was hard to separate it from the question of what is the role of law students and from the question of what is the role of any of us who do not live in the Gulf Coast?

The problems facing New Orleans reconstruction are urgent and cannot be left until tomorrow. As such, this winter break is a good place to start answering these types of questions. As we begin to tackle one small tiny piece of restoring the legal system through simply helping the New Orleans Pro Bono Project identify their existing case load, we are exposed to the multitude of legal issues that exist and the personal stories of individuals effected by the storm. For example, the reason we must determine the status of every file is because the courts no longer have access to the information. Some attorneys have not yet returned since the storm and others are slowly making their way back with answering machines saying, "we've returned and are ready for business."

Many thanks to UNC staff, faculty, students, the Pro Bono Board, and the Donald and Elizabeth Cooke Foundation for creating opportunities to encourage law students to apply Rule 6.1 to their own lives, whether in assisting hurricane victims or the on-going pro bono needs in their communities.

Diane Standaert

Tryin' to be the Shepherd: Part 2

December 19th:

9PM- The Pro Bono Program of the University of North Carolina School of Law is pleased to report that the French Quarter is operational.

December 20th:

9 AM: Arrive at the Pro Bono Project. We spend a good part of the morning organizing files and getting into groups to head out to various downtown law firms that have donated space for us to work. Yesterday, the office of the Pro Bono Project, with around 20 people working, got a little claustrophobic as the day wore on.
9:45: Learn how to construct the boxes we purchased at Staples before the trip. Buell and I construct 10 such boxes.
10:15: Arrive at Barasso and Usdin to start work. Most of the work we do is much the same as yesterday- calling clients and the attorneys that volunteered to help them to check on the status of the cases. The range of cases today is much wider than yesterday, though. Lots of bankruptcies and disputes with the VA. We talk to a few more attorneys who have lost most of the physical infrastructure of their business, but press on from their homes or the homes of relatives.
12:30 PM- Lunch downtown. We ate in yesterday, so we didn't see downtown around lunchtime. We're relatively heartened to have to wait about 20 minutes for a table at a lunch place- there are lots of people still out and about.
1:30- Back at Barasso, Neil, who is a New Orleans local, advises us that tomorrow when we leave to go West on I-10 for dinner, we should plan on about an hour and a half for the trip. The reason is that no one lives downtown anymore, and not many people live in the city proper. So, the traffic, which was fairly bad before, is even worse because there are so many more people heading to the suburbs each night.
3:30- Head back to the Pro Bono Project, just a short walk from Barasso. As we walk we talked a little about last night. While we were driving around looking for the French Quarter (no we won't stop for directions, yes we will turn the wrong way down a one-way street, no I wasn't driving at the time), we passed the Convention Center on the waterfront. Along with the Superdome it was used as a shelter during Katrina. Its interesting, as well as a little eerie, to get a real contextual map of where all these places are in relation to each other. Also last night, a singer at the bar asked the people in it to raise their hands if they were there "rebuilding the city," and nearly everyone in the room was. Apparently, the locals are still not going out downtown very much at all.

From Beirut to New Orleans

We drove in from the east on I-10 at 11 PM, through the still deserted neighborhoods hit hardest by Katrina. There is no electricity, but the moon and halogen headlamps from passing cars cast enough light to expose what Katrina took and what she left behind. Blocks of apartment buildings raked open, walls demolished, every window broken. Cars covered with silt still parked in unnatural ways and places. Trash, trees and boats scattered about. Roofs partially or completely missing. But it was what wasn’t there was the most evocative - energy, life, people, movement. When you are looking at emptiness, you can’t help but feel empty yourself.

As we drove further on, we found life and energy. In the places where the flood water took and left a little less, people have returned. Ruined sheetrock, flooring and appliances are piled on the street next to the cardboard boxes that once contained their replacements. Lights are on inside houses and houses that are dark have lit FEMA trailers. All sorts of signs grow in the medians and sidewalks advertising home repair, home purchasing and gymnastics.

This comparison can only go so far, but New Orleans reminds me of Beirut. I traveled there in 1998 shortly after the travel ban had been lifted. The city, which had been the financial center of the middle east, was still recovering from its near utter destruction during the civil war of the preceding decade. Skeletons of once proud buildings stood shaking naked, crumbling and exposed. The Braille of bullet holes painted everything. Beyond the sheer numbers of rounds that must have been fired, the most stunning thing was that they have left their mark on every level of the city. From the top of a six story building on down to the cornerstone- not a square foot without one bullet hole or twenty. It’s what hate looks like. You could not help but look at the building and feel empty and scared.

But in the midst of this skeleton graveyard was progress and hope. Wrecking balls crushed pock marked walls and surveyors peered through their instruments at their visions: new buildings, unblemished polished glass, offices, stores and people. Bustling happy people filling the street, swinging their bags, looking forward. You could not help but look and feel hopeful.

Katrina was not willed by ethnic and religious animosity and she never fired a bullet. There is no civil war in New Orleans. But there is emptiness and there is hope. And perhaps more importantly, she exposed the little silent unintentional wars that we wage and the chasms that we pretend are not there, or at least, not as large as they really are.

New Orleans... The Beginning

We arrived late last night before the rest of the group. After we found the house we sat in front of the house working up enough courage to go up and knock on a stranger's door. After we finally did, we were greeted by our hosts and were immediatley welcomed. We settled in and hit the bed pretty early.

We got to the Pro Bono Project office this morning around 9. After we were treated to Cafe au Lait and french doughnuts we got down to business. At times it was frustrating work and sometimes seemed monotanous (at one time in the day I was counting files in a large cabinent). However, it feels good to get out of Chapel Hill after a long semester and actually see how the law works and affects people. ~ wtb

Tryin' to be the Shepherd: Part 1

I've always enjoyed writing about actual events in a kind of diary/travelogue format, so I'll give it a shot here too.

December 18th, 2005.

6 AM- Alarm. Need to finish packing. This is a recipe for disaster as it increases the possibility of forgetting something important by about 200%.
6:45- Groggy and cold, I step out of the house and look for Diane, Mandy, and Ed. I don't see them. Diane has to get out of the car and lead me to it.
7:10- Arrive at Thrifty. Ed and I are thrilled to discover the twin minivans we've reserved have satellite radio. We are less pleased to remember they are still minivans.
8:00- Arrive at law school in Town and Country. Distribute biscuits, load supplies into back.
8:45- Depart law school, bound for New Orleans. Liles and I in one Town and Country; Diane in her own car (we'll drop that car off in South Carolina), rest of crew in the remaining Town and Country. We're only 45 minutes behind. Perfect.
3 PM- We're getting close to Atlanta. Lunch included food at the slowest Wendy's in the southeast and Diane's pronouncement by fiat that we wouldn't stop to eat in the restaurant. In other news, I'm getting sick of driving, so Diane takes over shortly thereafter.
3:18- Ongoing discussion of Arnold Schwartzenaeger's most seminal performances evolves into debate between relative merits of "Commando" and "Kindgergarten Cop."
7:30, Central Time- While buying gas, purchase a sticker that lets everyone know that our Town and Country is "Bad to the Bone."
10:30- Arrive New Orleans.
FEMA trailors have become a veritable city unto themselves in Sam's Club and Wal-Mart parking lots. Part of the interstate runs along an elevated bridge, allowing us to see that neighborhoods alternate between being lit and being completely dark. Along the road we can see debris strewn about. Not normal debris like pieces of blown out tires or smashed glass, but actual household items. We assume this marks the trail refugees took out of the city on foot as they tried to walk to safety.
10:45- Arrive at Tim's house. We meet his gracious family, take some supplies over to Tim's brother's house where some of the group will stay, and go to bed.

December 19th

8:15-8:45- Travel to Pro Bono Project in Downtown New Orleans. We pass the Superdome, and someone mentions that a lot of people just want to blow it up because its structurally insecure and, perhaps more importantly, brings about such bad memories. We switch the radio from satellite to a local station and are reminded by a charity commercial that "For some, Hurricane Katrina will last all their lives." We also see a hospital, which makes me wonder if it was the one where, in one of the most inexplicable events of the entire tragedy, patients and doctors came under sniper fire as they attempted to flee.
8:45-8:55- Walk from parking lot to Pro Bono project. We pass by a great view of the badly-damaged Downtown Hyatt with a banner hanging off it; "Laissez les bon temps roulez." I hate people who try to show off wild places they've traveled so forgive me, but it reminds me of nothing more than a Holiday Inn in downtown Sarajevo that was bombed and used by journalists in the seige of that city. The streets are fairly quiet but it may be because of the relatively early hour, or this may not be a very busy part of downtown.
9:30- Begin orientation at the Pro Bono Project. After the session, we begin calling clients and attorneys who the Project had previously linked up to try to see if they've been able to remain in touch and what the dispositions of their cases are. However, today I've not been able to actually get in touch with a client. I have been able to talk to some attorneys. One contact was especially touching- I called a contact number and was automatically forwarded to an assitant's cell phone. The assistant was in her car driving and told me their office had been destroyed and they're working from home. I ask if I can call back later but she insists on pulling over and helping me right then. I'm struck by her dedication to an indigent in the middle of her own personal crisis.
1 PM- We seem to be getting close to the end of making contact on the succession cases and some of the folks beign to work on homeless files. Liles, looking at one homeless client's files, asks "They couldn't find him before the hurricane, how are they supposed to find him afterwards?" I think its a pretty good question. It looks like we'll be doing this for the rest of the work day today.

Beignets make a great start to the day...

Since we drove into New Orleans at night, I didn't get to see much of the city. Instead, my New Orleans experience started with a heaping plate of beignets and powdered sugar from the famous Cafe Du Monde. I believe I have found my new love. Fried dough, covered in sugar, made a great start to my day.

We are working in the Pro Bono Office of New Orleans, and I spent the day looking to update contact information for attorneys and the clients they represent. I'm sure others have explained the process, so I won't bore readers by repeating it. Needless to say, those who work here at this office pursue every possible option to best represent the people of New Orleans and find those who were displaced by Katrina.

After lunch, five us (there are 15 on the trip) began working specifically on homeless cases. This looks like it will be my project for the rest of the week. Basically, we are searching the records and homeless shelters to find those homeless clients who were on-file in the past. We need to get in touch with these folks so we can make sure they know to register with FEMA for priority housing. The homeless will be bumped to the top of FEMA's and HUD's list for housing assistance as long as they register by Jan. 11th. It's a good opportunity for them, especially considering that they will be eligible for housing anywhere in the U.S. (not just New Orleans). Therefore, it's imperative that we do our part in contacting them and giving them the proper information so that they can gain a little relief.

I hope to see some of the city this evening. From the little I have seen, there is still much work to be done. But it's encouraging to see the hard work and determination from the few locals with whom we have spoken so far. Although some offices are still closed and some homes still vacant, there seems to be a strong sense of pride and earnestness in rebuilding. I just hope that we can contribute our small part.

Ghost city

Driving into New Orleans last night, I had the eerie feeling that we were entering a ghost town. I-10 east of New Orleans is bordered by some of the areas hardest hit by the hurricane, and we drove for several miles of interstate in almost total darkness-- none of the street lights were lit, and all the buildings lining either side of the highway were black, no sign of life anywhere. There were uprooted trees here and there on the side of the highway, but other than that, the darkness concealed most of what I imagined was great devastation beyond. The only sign of any kind of activity were large car dealerships rising out of the pitch black, with glaring flourescent lights and screenprinted signs screaming "YES, WE'RE OPEN!" hung makeshift across the former lighted signs damaged by the storm. We finally came to an area where the streetlights were lit and saw large buildings with walls and roofs ripped off, whole apartment complexes with collapsed or collapsing buildings. Neighborhoods lining the interstate were darkened, no cars anywhere, blue tarps covering a roof here and there.

We crested a hill and a few miles ahead, we could see the lights of downtown, no doubt a shell of its former self, and yet, to me, a sign that there was a future for this great city. As we headed to Metairie, our home for the week, we could tell we were heading into areas where the storm had wreaked less havoc. Christmas lights hung here and there in the neighborhoods. I'm a big sucker for Christmas and all its trimmings, so these were another important sign of hope for me.

Our hosts, the Goodsons, are the family of a 3L student at UNC. Their home in Metairie was flooded with foot and a half of water. They were so kind to let us invade their family space, especially since they are in the midst of rebuilding it. Their whole kitchen has been ripped out, ready to be remade and their walls are bare drywall. And yet their walls were still lined with jovial family photos, a sign that this house is their home, and they have no intention of leaving. Their neighborhood streets are lined with travel trailers, as folks live outside their homes while they rebuild the insides. I was struck by the incredible level of disruption these folks suffered with only a foot to a foot and a half of water in their homes, and for the most part, the means to repair them. My heart ached for them, and I was humbled by their determination to rebuild, to be defiant in the face of an unknown and unknowable future.

But I was even more struck by what and who I had yet to see. What of those whose homes were flooded to their roofs, those who have no money to repair or rebuild anything, those whose family photos are lost forever, those may never return? It is for these people we are here, and I am so grateful to UNC, to my classmates and to the Goodsons for making this trip possible.

Somewhere in Alabama...

I am writing my pre-post at 70 mph on Interstate 65. I can think of nowhere else better to share my expectations for this trip than barrelling down the road with New Orleans only 4 or 5 hours away. I have never been to New Orleans, so my outlook for the coming week is driven by complete uncertainty.

I am uncertain what New Orleans has in store for us. What state is the physical recovery effort? Do stoplights work? Is there an ATM? Will my cell phone work? Also will this be a complete disaster area? I went through hurricanes Floyd and Fran, but in those cases the destruction was small enough that you could drive to someplace normal. The Katrina devastation seems much bigger than that.

Then I wonder about what I am going to face in the New Orleans Pro Bono Project. What will be the state of the people we both work with and work for? Will they be physically and mentally haggard? What do I do if someone breaks down, gets mad, or asks for my advice when I cannot give it to them?

This will be my first chance to deal with real clients after a semester of law school, so I have all the apprehension that comes along with that. I assume that you always are wary of screwing up, but in this case - where it might affect a person’s ability to get back on their feet – I am doubly conscious of the need to do the best job possible in the next week.

But most of all, I worry about actually achieving something worthwhile in a week’s time. With a problem as large as this the common reaction is to be flustered about where to start. The thing is on Friday I will be home, on Friday I will be in the Christmas spirit, but New Orleans will still be there. So for this week I think I owe it to New Orleans be completely in the mind of doing everything I can to help in any way possible. I really hope we can help.

Pictures

Day One: We are helping the Pro Bono Project track down attorneys and clients who may have been displaced by the hurricane. In particular, we are hoping to find out the status of estate succession cases, for these clients are the ones most likely to be immediately affected by the storm. If a person has inherited property, then she can't get FEMA assistance to help repair or rebuild the property until there has been a judgment or an executor appointed. We worked on dozens of open succession cases today, calling attorneys and clients, in many cases getting disconnected phone numbers, and googling anyone we couldn't find by phone. It's startling the number of clients who may be unable to get FEMA assistance because their succession cases haven't been closed yet.

Hurricanes

So from Andrew to Ivan to Frances to Charlie when we thought Katrina was going to hit home we thought it was going to be just another storm - in Florida you just kind of get used to them - then when Katrina hit New Orleans I realized that just b/c of it's location - of how the town was situated -things would be different. And what I realized after that was that - unlike most other places - how much money you made determined how far above sea level you and if you would have a house to come home to.

Last time I was in NO was for New Year's last year - and the whole aura here is different, but the residents seem to really have their heart behind the reconstruction of this city [both literally & metaphorically].

We haven't seen any of the destruction yet so it hasn't hit me by any means - I think we'll all leave here feeling extrememly blessed [I'll take pictures]

back home

I am so tired... we (me and the roommate and 2 other classmmates) decided to drive all night instead. wild and crazy kids. i took the last shift - sort of. i had the momentum to drive us through kentwood, la, home of britney spears, but by 630, i had to give up the wheel to another person to do the last hour...
Well I grew up in Baton Rouge, so New Orleans is definitely a large part of my memories and family culture. I was here last about 2 weeks before Katrina and after hearing the stories from home, I wasn't sure what to expect. Wasn't sure I wanted to come see this at all. Seeing New Orleans for the first time - it looked better than I expected. At least so far... Feel optimistic that it can recover fully, in a physical and economic sense. Culturally, I suppose it can't help but change. You can't replace all those people the same way. The Superdome did make me uneasy and there are still buildings with broken windows all the way up. But the spirit seems to be here...

Reasons...

I'm not from New Orleans. In fact, I grew up in a landlocked midwestern state. Yet, my family is from eastern North Carolina and, like many residents of the Gulf Coast, they are no strangers to the fear and the devastation of hurricanes. I grew up hearing stories of Hazel and have since had a chance to drive through the debris of Floyd. It was one of the most shocking scenes I've ever witnessed firsthand - streets caved in, beaches gone, houses demolished. Yet, the residents were still there, determined not to let Mother Nature destroy their dreams and ruin their lives. I think that's what draws me to New Orleans - a chance to help people who have suffered loss and have that indomitable human spirit to recover, rebuild, and persevere. I hope that our short time in the Gulf will make a difference in their lives and that this record will, in some small way, remind us that, despite it all, the victims of Katrina struggle on.