Fifty Dollars and a Dream

The young man who is about to show us around this cesspool introduces himself as Brandon, which (I hate to admit) is a name I still can't hear without thinking of "Beverly Hills, 90210." He speaks eloquently and could be every bit as dashing as a primetime soap star, except that he clearly hasn't showered in a very long time. Understandable, given that water is a rare and precious commodity here.

We are a long way from Beverly Hills. There are no mansions; the few people who call this place home live in tents. There is no Rodeo Drive; there is not really a store at all, but good Samaritans from around the world have sent regular donations of old clothes, canned goods and other nonperishable items to this desolate land. And there are no movie studios, although it does feel like I'm on the set of some chilling war epic.

Behind Brandon, I see mud-caked kids in makeshift hazmat suits "decontaminating" themselves, and I wish I had made time to get the immunization shots recommended before coming to this diseased area. Someone has dumped the contents of several random cans of food into a large aluminum pan, and the tent-dwellers start scooping out their dinner onto paper plates.

One looks up from his plate and asks if I have ever been here before. "I've never been anyplace like this," I answer. It's true -- in all my travels, I have never seen anything like what I witnessed here, and I was born and raised just 100 miles east. Until recently, most of my family made their homes within a few minutes of the barren spot I am standing on. I spent the weekends of my youth listening to the local music that once filled the streets here. But this isn't the city I knew. As I look around at the conditions these residents live in now, I can't wrap my brain around the fact that I am still within the borders of the richest nation on earth.

It has been six months since Katrina blew through New Orleans, but standing in the Ninth Ward, you feel like it all happened this morning.

Having grown up on the Gulf Coast, I understand how destructive hurricanes can be. After Hurricane Frederick, I saw grand oak trees that had been uprooted and tossed about like twigs, and we lived without electricity for weeks. Like the rest of the world, I watched as the water poured into the Ninth Ward, and I knew it would take more than a few weeks to rebuild it. What I didn't expect was to be walking through it 172 days later and still see total devastation -- and not one federal worker, not one state worker, not one paid construction worker.

For miles, the only people to be seen doing actual work are a bunch of kids, none of whom appear to have reached their 30s. They have traveled from all over the world and used their own money to get here. None of them are being paid for their efforts, unless you count the plates of mush they're fed at the end of the day, for which they are clearly very appreciative. They spend their days wading through diseased garbage, and their nights sleeping on the side of the road. They have no electricity and no running water. But don't call them heroes, or you'll quickly be told it's not heroic to just do the right thing.

As Brandon casually swats at flies buzzing around his face, talking about the goals they are trying to accomplish here, I wonder exactly how these kids ended up in this hellhole. While I have been shamed by the response of my government to this tragedy, this is a story that humbles me.

The day after New Orleans' levees broke and tens of thousands of people were frantically trying to get out of the sinking city, Brandon Darby and his buddy Scott Crow were desperately trying to get in. They hadn't heard from their friend Robert King Wilkerson, and they were worried that he hadn't been able to evacuate. So they came up with the idea of driving more than 500 miles and launching a 15-foot, flat-bottom skiff boat into the sea in hopes of eventually finding him. Neither had boating experience, but they understood that they were navigating the Gulf of Mexico in a vessel not created for the ocean.