From food to cleanup, neighbors pitching in
Hurricane-hardened New Orleans copes its way
“Take all you want. Leave what you can,” read a hand-scrawled sign taped to a box of potato chip and snack mix bags on a little folding table in front of a shotgun cottage near the Mississippi River.
NEW ORLEANS – Shrimp and grits served for breakfast on the sidewalk at El Pavo Real. “Super Secret” seasoned pork and braised greens handed out at the door of the Live Oak Café. Spicy jambalaya dished out under a canopy erected on the empty sun-scorched streetcar tracks by a couple who just wanted to help.
The hearty fare is being served up from neighbor to neighbor, free for the asking, and badly needed in a city where the lunchtime conversation topic is often the dinner menu and where camaraderie flourishes over Monday plates of rice and beans.
In New Orleans, food is just one of the many ways residents help each other during hard times. And it’s been no different in the days after Hurricane Ida, which flooded and destroyed homes, tore up trees and knocked out the entire city’s power grid.
While chefs and amateur cooks alike piled plates high with comfort food, residents with generators charged their neighbors’ cellphones and revved up chain saws to clear downed trees, while volunteers at a local church handed out bags of cleaning supplies and boxes of diapers.
“In times of crisis ... we all join together,” said City Council member Jay Banks, one of several people at the Israelites Baptist Church who distributed donated goods in the low-income neighborhood of Central City on Thursday.
New Orleans’ problems echo those of much of urban America: dismaying bursts of violent crime, ingrained poverty, a dearth of affordable housing for the poor. Throw in a decrepit drainage system in one of America’s rainiest cities, plus a dispiriting vulnerability to hurricanes as climate change contributes to more severe and frequent storms, and one could forgive anyone here who wants to give up and get out.
Some do. The population here has shrunk over the years. But many stay – and not just those who lack the means to relocate. They do so to nurture beloved neighborhood traditions: second-line parades, jazz funerals, century-old “social aid and pleasure clubs,” and good food.
In Treme, a cradle of Black culture and New Orleans brass band music, Backatown Coffee Parlor owners Jessica and Alonzo Knox couldn’t cook in their all-electric kitchen but gave away salad makings, pastries and rapidly thawing bags of frozen, precooked crawfish tails.
El Pavo Real restaurant owner Lindsey Mclellan used food preserved “with ice and prayer” to whip up a free steak taco meal Wednesday afternoon, using herbs and peppers salvaged from a hurricane-man
try as the Taliban marched on the capital. The fighters’ lightning blitz across the country took less than a week to overrun some 300,000 government troops, most of whom surrendered or fled.
Since the takeover, the Taliban have sought to recast their movement as different from the 1990s incarnation, when they last ruled the country and enforced strict controls across society. Women and girls were denied work and education, men were forced to grow beards, and television and music were banned.
Now, the world is waiting to see the face of the new government, and many Afghans remain skeptical. In the weeks since the group took power, signals have been mixed: Government employees including women have been asked to return to work, but some women were later ordered home by lower-ranking Taliban. Universities and schools have been ordered open, but fear has kept students and teachers alike away.
Women have demonstrated peacefully, some even having conversations about their rights with Taliban leaders. But some have been dispersed by Taliban special forces firing in the air.
Kabul’s streets are again clogged with traffic, as Taliban fighters patrol in pickup trucks and police vehicles, brandishing their automatic weapons and flying the Taliban’s white flag.
Still, some signs of normalcy have returned: Women are on the streets, schools have opened, and moneychangers work the street corners. Traffic police have returned to duty, and giant cement barriers sealing off upscale neighborhoods have been removed.
As Taliban leaders hold meetings and promise a government in the coming days, technical teams from Qatar and Turkey are working to get the civilian airport operational.
On Saturday, state-run Ariana Afghan Airlines made its first domestic flights, which continued Sunday.