I went over to the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue F in Marrero the other night, to a cramped flophouse where some kids from my old high school were bunked for the week, their dirty Eddie Bauer work boots stacked against a wall, new tool belts slung over the bedposts.
I used to spend a lot of time chasing trouble down Fourth Street, getting liquor-store-robbing drunk in the old honky-tonk highway's neon dance halls, but now it's mostly just a skeleton strip of auto parts and dollar drafts.
I can honestly tell you that the last place in Louisiana I would expect to find kids from my high school -- the very well-heeled and moneyed Georgetown Prep, an athletic and academic powerhouse in the tony suburbs of Washington, D.C. -- would be on this corner, hemmed in by pickup trucks, railroad tracks and migrant roofers, just a cigarette's pitch down the road from Ms. Bootie's tavern.
But no one was complaining. Not a word of it. This..(Continued Here)..is not summer vacation. It is quite something else altogether.
When the Prep boys arrived in New Orleans last Saturday morning, they were relieved of cell phones, iPods and PCs by their adult chaperones and left to old-fashioned devices such as reading, reflection and conversation.
But there's little time even for that. Because, mostly, the Prep boys hammer. They hammer and frame. They hammer and frame and saw.
I'm proud of my alma mater. It's just one of thousands of institutions in this country that have stepped up to help New Orleans since the storm, and they make a difference, a big difference, a city-saving difference, even if just one house at a time.
In the days and weeks after the collapse of the levees, Georgetown Prep took in 16 kids from Jesuit High School in Mid-City. Then, last summer, Prep sent 14 kids to hammer nails in the 9th Ward with Habitat for Humanity.
This summer, 45 students signed on for the job and Georgetown Prep has promised Habitat that they will keep coming back for five years, and no doubt the number of students will grow each year as word of the exotic nature of the mission spreads through the school corridors.
It's a big deal, a big investment, a lot of logistics and -- no doubt -- a world of worry for well-to-do parents back in Maryland who have cut their kids loose not only on the weird-but-not-deadly flophouse scene of Fourth Street, but also on the infamously lethal streets of Central City.Spending a week on Washington Avenue near the corner of Claiborne, Prep senior Mike Curto told me: "There are all these signs that say: Thou Shalt Not Kill. If they're putting up signs like that around the city, it makes you wonder: What has happened here? I will always remember that."
They will remember much from their trip and, as Curto's story observes, not all of the memories we export here are good ones. But many are also stories of hope, triumph and simple acts of hospitality and unity.
"When people drive by the site where we're working, they honk their horns and clap their hands and they yell 'Thank you!' " Curto said. "And that charges you up, gives you a boost of energy to keep going in the heat."
And in the heat of Wednesday afternoon, they paused from their labor and turned down the CD of The Blind Boys of Alabama -- a little cultural lagniappe -- while officials from Habitat and First Baptist Church showed up to dedicate the house they were working on.
Also present was Jacqueline Smith, a room attendant at Ochsner Medical Center and the owner-to-be of the house in progress. Even if you don't know her, you know her story: A New Orleans mother, her home and belongings swept away in a flash, a long exile, a slow return.
Now, Jacqueline Smith doesn't know Georgetown Prep from Texas Tech, but she cried when she stood next to the Maryland boys and she uttered simple words of thanks to them, to Habitat, to First Baptist and to God.
For Jacqueline Smith, a new beginning, new hope, courtesy of the kindness of strangers.
She wiped away tears, and she and the boys signed the wooden frame they raised Wednesday afternoon, the frame that will be the front wall of her home; their names and hers will be sealed in that wall for as long as this house stands.
That night, back on Fourth Street, the Prep boys talked about it.
"That was amazing," Tyler Matuella said. "She's standing there looking at it and at us and you can see she is thinking: This is my house. MY HOUSE. You can see it in her face. And that felt good."
David Farah spoke of how this trip to New Orleans has been the culmination of a buildup of imagery and awareness.
"You know, since the hurricane, we've seen so many pictures of New Orleans, over and over," he said. "You get tired of seeing the pictures and the images. You want to experience it firsthand. And not long ago I saw a picture of a junked car in front of a junked house and someone had written a note with their finger in the scum on the car window: 'Jesus, I did nothing wrong.'
"You could feel the power when you saw that picture but it also made me finally feel like I had to get down here and help whoever it was that wrote that."
If you live here, sometimes you get to wondering if anyone Out There cares anymore, is still paying attention. In the words and acts of the Prep boys, I learned that they do and they are and this alone is cause for hope.
Farah told me a story of their first day in town, before they started their work, a day that included a trip to Mother's restaurant on Poydras Street and then a trip to the Lower 9th Ward.
"We got to this school down there," he said. "There was nothing in the neighborhood. Nobody there. So we made our way, deeper and deeper into this school. The walls were all torn away and one minute you were inside and one minute you were outside . . ."
His classmate, Jonah Pontzer, finished his thought.
"So we're imagining our own school and how we see it every day and how nice it is and you try and imagine it looking like this -- and not having anything."
As best as I can tell, the school was Alfred Lawless High School. They took a photograph of a bulletin board on the second floor, where the teacher had hung a message made of paper cutouts, back when the school year had just begun in the summer of 2005.
It said: "Accentuate the Positive."
"You go to some places around here and it doesn't even feel like America," Curto said. "It feels like some other country."
That applies, no doubt, not only to the wreckage of the city but also to the exotic environs of their flophouse in Marrero.
Shortly after they arrived in town, the Prep boys saw a taco van owner on the corner catch some guy stealing motor oil from his engine and beat him with a garden hoe. That story will probably get told back in Maryland this summer more than, say, the story of Jacqueline Smith and the thousands like her, because that's the kind of story that teenage boys tell each other.
Because it's weird and funny. Sort of.
The rest of our story is not. For lack of a better term, the rest of the story is just real. And it will stick with them and maybe change them in some small way, a good way, make them better and stronger, in the same way that they change us, making us better and stronger every day.
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