Ice Runs

His feet were sticking out from under a bent sheet of corrugated metal. Should I tell you more? He died where he lay, face-down on the asphalt about 50 feet from the door of the Arthur Monday Jr. health clinic. The clinic was closed when the storm began and it’s still closed more than two weeks later, although this neighborhood — Algiers, across the Mississippi from the French Quarter — never lost phone service, running water or gas, and the lights came back on this Monday. The corpse had been there for 10 days when I was in Algiers last week. “We called them Tuesday, when we found his body,” said Malik Rahim, who lives down the block. “Police came, looked at him, left. Every day they come look at him, like they trying to see how long it’ll take him to decompose.”

While we were talking, six soldiers pulled up in a Humvee. They were all hard stares, who are yous and why are you heres, but they eased up slightly at the sight of a press pass. I asked them what they could do about the corpse. “It’s been reported up,” one told me. “They’re supposed to come get it.” But he didn’t know who “they” were, only that “we’re not allowed to touch it.” With that, the soldiers drove off.

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Since I left New Orleans, Rahim and his neighbors have opened a health clinic in a local mosque and a food distribution center at a nearby church. They have received no help from the city, the state, or from FEMA or any of the federal agencies that flooded into New Orleans as the waters receded. But the word is out, and doctors have been coming in to volunteer. The clinic is treating between 40 and 60 people a day, and the church is feeding “at least a couple of hundred.” They’ve collected 60 bicycles for community members who couldn’t afford gas. Their next project is a school. As Rahim put it, “If you wait on the government, you won’t get nothing.”

The city-run clinic has not reopened. The last I heard, no one had come to pick up the remains of the man lying on the asphalt outside the clinic doors, which makes 15 days and counting.

Ben Ehrenreich, LA Weekly, September 16 - 22, 2005

tags: rescue  nola  ngo  katrina  algiers