We flew in to New York last Wednesday. I took this picture as we came in over the city:
New York is incredible. It really is a beautiful city, even in the state it's in right now, with so much damage yet to be repaired.
In the week of work that my team has done here, we've spent time in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Coney Island. Our first day was with a church on Coney Island that has been turned in to a distribution center, where people can pick up food, diapers, medical supplies, bananas...
We unloaded pallets of bananas that first day and handed them out to people as that came through the line. There are close to two thousand pounds of bananas in that picture.
Day 2 was at a nearby distribution center on Coney. While some of my team worked the line, handing out food and hand warmers, I helped to organize donated food into bags to be handed out. A man there told me about how the storm pushed massive piles of sand up into the streets. It has to be swept out block by block. Parts of Coney look like there was never sand there, but the next street over still has a fine layer of it over everything.
Day 3 was with what now seems to be our permanent project, working with the Red Cross. We spent Saturday going house to house in Queens, giving out relief bags and asking people what they needed. Some of the areas we went through were hit pretty hard. Cars had been thrown around in the storm and filled with sand and water. Houses that looked fine on the outside were completely destroyed on the inside. One woman told us that her basement flooded seven feet in seven minutes during the storm. Some of it was hard to see and hard to hear about.
Days 4, 6, 7 and 8 of work were also spent with the Red Cross, though since that first day I haven't done any more door to door work with them. We've been loading supplies from semi trucks onto smaller trucks that then get sent out all over New York. We're loading things like water, coolers full of food, adult diapers, baby diapers, baby food, work gloves, face masks, and hand sanitizer. I would like to be interacting with the community more, but I really enjoy working with the Red Cross. They've been doing work like this for a long time, and they've found a system that works. Plus, they're always giving us food!
Day 5, which wasn't with the Red Cross, was spent on Coney Island again. Some of Blue 1 worked at the church, but Alyssa, Lindsey, Anne Louise, Lois, Joey and I had another project. We spent the day with a woman from an organization called People's Relief, going door to door in two predominantly Russian speaking apartment buildings. People's Relief is an organization that began specifically in response to Hurricane Sandy. They're still young organization trying to find their feet, so the process that day was hectic. The woman from People's Relief was fluent in Russian and thankfully Alyssa knows some, but the rest of us did not. I did learn how to say "food!" for the day, but I've already forgotten. We went from door to door asking if the residents needed food or blankets, and handing out medical information. The buildings still didn't have reliable electricity, so for a bit we were walking down dark hallways with flashlights.
Since Thanksgiving was yesterday, everyone wants to give us Thanksgiving meals. Four meals in the last three days have been thanksgiving meals, and I'm about to eat leftovers for dinner! A church in Brooklyn provided Thanksgiving dinner to all of the AmeriCorps teams in the area, including the Conservation Corps teams, another organization gave everyone living at the union building Thanksgiving dinner, the Red Cross gave us Thanksgiving lunch yesterday, and our housing point of contact provided dinner again for last night. So much turkey!
Since I'm a van driver I've had to share some of the responsibility of driving through New York. When we arrived in New York my team got a new blue 15 passenger van. We named him Chaos. (If we get a third van, her name will be Pandemonium. That was my idea. Credit where credit is due!)
Anyway, we've been sharing driving responsibility here, like always. Kevin drives the most though. He's also the most agressive. In fact, he's already been in an accident. We were trying to get out of our parking space after our first Thanksgiving lunch, and he backed into the car parked behind him. In his defense, we were parked on a hill, so either you barely push the gas and it doesn't move, or you push too much and it lurches back. It lurched. The van went silent. Kevin leans out of the window and calls back to Jake, who was backing him up: "Is there any damage?" Jake looks carefully, then yells back, "No!" So Kevin turns back to the wheel and says "Okay let's go!" Joey had to say, "Kevin, stop the car!" And then we sat in our parking spot while he filled out the form for an accident.
We've been working for eight days straight now, and we're starting to wear thin. But as tired as we are, I know it can't even compare to what so many people here are going through. Parts of the city look fine, but as we've traveled around to our work sites, we've seen some areas that still need a lot of work. For two weeks after Sandy hit, none of the trash system was running, and there are still piles of garbage on the street. There are downed trees everywhere. People are still having difficulty getting heat and electricity in some areas. Cars, houses, and businesses are destroyed, boats are upside down in rivers or thrown on to land. If you walk down a residential street you can see piles of people's water-damaged belongings out in their yards, or concrete and sheetrock from homeowners gutting their basements. Some of the stories I hear are truly heartbreaking. During our first day with the Red Cross a woman told Anne Louise and me a story about a family who got in their car to leave the area right before the storm surge hit. The whole family and their dog drowned when the water came rushing in.
Some more teams from the Pacific Region are now being sent to New Jersey. I'm so glad that our region decided to increase our support out here, it is badly needed. Our team is also hoping to shift to a more long-term project soon. Distributing food and supplies is very important in the short term, but it doesn't really solve the problem. We are also hoping for a day off soon. The rumor is that we'll get one on Sunday!
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