The Street Samaritans

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http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/03/common_ground_long.html

 

The Street Samaritans

News: Post-Katrina volunteer medics on bicycles created a new model of

community health care in New Orleans.

 

By Tim Shorrock

Photos: Kike Arnal

 

March/April 2006 Issue

 

NEW ORLEANS - In the days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New

Orleans, the city’s Algiers neighborhood was one of the few that stayed

dry. Although Katrina’s winds caused extensive damage to roofs and

toppled trees and power lines, there was no water in the streets or in

houses like there was in the rest of the city. Still, Algiers was left

without electric power or running water for many days, and the invasion

of the city by thousands of soldiers, federal police officers and

private paramilitary personnel created an atmosphere of tension and

trepidation. In Algiers, as in other neighborhoods, the National Guard

imposed a mandatory dawn-to-dusk curfew. In one area, white residents

frightened by rumors of car-jackings and looting camped out on their

roofs and organized patrols, guns at the ready. Late one night,

National Guardsmen and a SWAT team from the New Orleans Police

Department raided the Algiers Fischer Housing Development in search of

someone who had fired at a cell phone truck; black youths then took

guns from local pawn shops and vowed to fight the troops and what they

called white vigilantes. Algiers resident Ronald Ragens, 55, remembers

those days as lonely and frightening. “All you was seein’ was police,

military and all kinds of huge trucks running supplies here and there,

and helicopters flyin’ over like it was a war zone,” he recalls. “It

was rough.”

 

Then one morning four days into the storm, something happened that

melted the fear and eased the tension. Four young people on bicycles

showed up in Algiers, knocking on doors and asking if anyone needed

medical attention. Asked if they were from the Red Cross or the Federal

Emergency Management Agency, neither of which had yet made an

appearance in Algiers, the medics said no, they were just volunteers

who had come without authorization. They offered first aid, took blood

pressure, tested for diabetes, and inquired about symptoms of anxiety,

depression and disease. “It was just about the noblest thing I’ve ever

witnessed in my life,” recalls Malik Rahim, a lifelong Algiers

resident, local housing activist and former Black Panther Party member

who helped arrange space for the medical workers in a local mosque. ”It

was the street medics who really stopped this city from exploding into

a race war, because they were white and were serving the black

community at a time when blacks were fed up. Those are the real heroes

of this thing.”

 

As New Orleans moved from tension and fear to FEMA tents, the Common

Ground Clinic took over the task of providing local health care from

devastated hospitals.Rahim, a friendly, outgoing man whose graying

dreadlocks and soft voice belie his radical past, is now the symbolic

leader of the Common Ground Collective, an unlikely tribe of activists

and health care practitioners who have descended on New Orleans to

provide “solidarity, not charity” to the people of this devastated

community. The “street medics” on their bikes--part of a loose national

network of nurses and medical assistants who provide first aid to

protesters at antiwar demonstrations—were among the first to respond.

“The whole place smelled like death,” recalls Noah Morris, a wiry

anti-corporate activist from St. Louis who recalls seeing four gunshot

victims, their bodies crudely covered by sheets of corrugated tin. Most

of his initial patients, Noah says, suffered from high blood pressure,

which he treated with herbal remedies and nutritional supplements “to

help get the pressure down just a little bit.” The medics were followed

a few days later by a caravan of doctors, nurses and grief counselors

from San Francisco. Then, as word of the clinic spread, scores of

health practitioners and political activists from all over the country

began making their way to New Orleans.

 

Common Ground has drawn an eclectic crew. Michael Kozart, the first

doctor to spend substantial time at the clinic, belongs to a group

called the Bay Area Radical Health Collective. He decided to come after

hearing Rahim speak about Algiers on KPFA, the Pacifica affiliate in

Berkeley. “I thought, how can a society as rich as ours have folks

being neglected because our water and medical system and the government

itself is completely inefficient?” Liz Rantz, another doctor, has spent

two stints here on leave from her regular job in Missoula, Montana,

where’s she’s the medical director for the state’s Department of

Corrections. The California Nurses Association has sent a steady stream

of RNs. Acupuncturists Without Borders has organized several teams of

volunteers. Volunteers have come from Minnesota, Massachusetts, Iowa,

Texas, New Mexico and Canada; during the first week, there were two

French volunteers from Doctors Without Borders. From the triage station

to the makeshift pharmacy, there are plenty of nose rings, dreadlocks

and body jewelry on display – as well as the cleanly pressed uniforms

of nurses fresh from their hospital jobs.

 

“I was completely unaware they were a bunch of activists,” says Lynne

Crawford, a bubbly nurse from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who spends most

of her time working at the mobile clinics. Crawford, who wore her blue

scrubs while doing her rounds, found her way here after being laid off

from her last job ; after searching for ways to volunteer, she

discovered Common Ground on the Internet. Unlike many of her

colleagues, who sleep on the clinic’s floor or in camping tents set up

in the backyard, Crawford managed to find a room on a Coast Guard

cutter docked in New Orleans. When I ran into her one afternoon, she

confesses to having suffered “a very big cultural shock” in her first

days at Common Ground. She pointed to some of her new friends,

clustered outside on a smoke break: “Why don’t they shave their legs? I

just don’t get it,” she said, laughing. “But now I love the people

here. We all have a common purpose.”

 

For activists accustomed to being marginal, Common Ground has been a

revelation too. “How many political actions do you have when all of a

sudden the community kind of descends on you?” asks Scott Weinstein, a

tall, bearded RN from Washington, D.C., who was one of the first

arrivals and serves as a liaison with what’s left of the New Orleans

medical community. He says the clinic has reshaped the way he thinks

about politics. “Most people think of direct action as taking a street

during a demonstration,” he says, “but big deal, so you got a street.

This is not about taking the streets, it’s about taking health care.”

 

 

 

THE MAJID BILAL MOSQUE sits on a busy street corner three blocks down

from the levee. There, just past a warehouse storing colorful floats

from past Mardi Gras, you can see the city’s skyline, the Superdome and

the two Carnival Cruise ships - the Sensation and the Ecstasy - that

were leased by the federal government for nearly $200 million to house

emergency workers. Big tugs and ocean-going tankers and container ships

pass by in a steady stream. The clinic itself is surrounded by tiny,

one-story houses, most of their roofs patched with blue plastic tarps.

A sign on the building’s back door reads: “No Weapons Allowed. Please

Respect the Mosque” – a reference to the ubiquitous guns toted by the

National Guard and private security guards at every government facility

in the city. When the clinic opens for business one October morning at

8:30 a.m., the waiting room immediately fills up with patients.

 

Andrew Summer, a laid-off shipyard worker living in nearby Gretna with

his brother, is here to get his medications refilled – still, months

after the storm, the most common need among Common Ground’s patients.

Summer is tall, lanky, and visibly tired. He survived Katrina in the

Lower Ninth Ward, was brought by boat to the Convention Center, and

eventually flown to Houston. He can’t fill his prescriptions because

Charity Hospital, the famed hospital that once served most of New

Orleans’s poor, has been shut down. “It’s great how they’re handling

the people here,” he says.

 

Taking in the scene from his stoop a few doors down is Leroy Refuge,

53, a lifetime New Orleans resident who used to drive a school bus for

the local diocese. He and a companion he is caring for (“her name is

Miss Dorothy L. Brown, and she’s 78 years old”) have both visited the

clinic and got shots “to keep the germs and everything away.” Refuge,

too, was evacuated from Algiers; he ended up at Kelly Air Force Base in

Texas before being flown home three weeks later. “Now we’re back at 329

Socrates and just tryin’ to live,” he says. “My mind is still a little

fuzzy, but I’m comin’ around – slowly but surely, slowly but surely.”

For many of Common Ground’s patients, the clinic is a relief not just

from Katrina and the healthcare vacuum that followed—suddenly there

were no doctors or hospitals in New Orleans, and neither the Red Cross

nor FEMA seemed able to provide any—but from a quieter, long-term

emergency. According to Rahim, 85 percent of the men in Algiers are

uninsured, “and for many of them, the last time they saw a doctor was

in prison or in emergency at Charity.”

 

Common Ground has found itself serving some unexpected needs too.

During its first month, its medical teams gave immunizations to

hundreds of laborers employed by subcontractors for the likes of Shaw

Inc. and Halliburton—companies that left their workers, many of them

Latino immigrants, to figure out for themselves which shots they needed

and where to get them. When Rita flooded hundreds of square miles in

the bayou town around Houma, Louisiana, Common Ground fielded the only

relief team to visit the area; neither the Red Cross or FEMA ever made

it, according to Dr. Rantz and three other volunteers who went.

 

 

 

MOST OF COMMON GROUND'S medical work happens at three crude work

stations in what used to be the mosque’s worship hall. Station One is a

card table with makeshift shelves holding cotton swabs, rubber gloves

and other equipment; a stethoscope hangs over the one corner. Station

Two consists of a pair of stools standing next to a set of shelves that

looks like it came from a motel room. Stacked neatly are some of the

donated supplies the clinic is handing out: Tampax, witch hazel,

Enfamil formula, calcium supplement. Station Three is the only

“private” room in the clinic, partitioned from other stations with

bedsheets. After a brief intake from a triage volunteer, patients wait

their turn in the line of chairs that serves as a waiting room; when

their name is called, they head for one of the stations, where a nurse

practitioner takes their vitals and consults with one of the doctors

about what to do.

 

In the adjoining room, past the busy phone and fax machine, is a crude

pharmacy stocked with supplies that have been donated from

organizations like Vets for Peace and Food Not Bombs. At the back is a

bank of computers linked to the Internet through a sporadic wireless

connection provided by FEMA from the cruise ships across the river. On

one wall are lists of important projects and tasks that need

volunteers, including “critical incident debriefing” and “medical legal

support,” under which someone has scrawled “or covering our heinies.”

One task is more general: “Infusing all we do with anti-oppression

intentions.”

 

Although hierarchy is frowned on here, some people at Common Ground

clearly play leadership roles. One of them is Moe, an RN and herbalist

from Montana who has been here since early September. She is often one

of the first to greet newcomers and the person to find when there’s a

problem with no ready solution. Moe is short, with a moon-shaped face

that seems to be framed in a perpetual smile. Like Noah, she’s part of

the street medic network that descends on cities like Seattle or

Washington, D.C., whenever there’s a big demonstration. She is gentle,

low-key, and pragmatic. In late November, it was Moe who pushed hard to

get the clinic to close every Friday so volunteers could take a break.

“We couldn’t get anything done” for the stress, she tells me.

 

For the people working here, Common Ground is the polar opposite to the

time-crunched, profit-driven, top-down environment that’s become

standard in the health care industry. When the clinic crew learns that

a patient is bedridden and can’t get out of the house, someone drives

there to pick her up and then arranges for transportation back home.

The same doctor might make a diagnosis, write a prescription and go to

the back room to fill it. One day, Max Fischer, who’s in his fourth

year of medical school at Columbia University, sees 10 patients in 15

hours—a fraction of the load he’d handle at a hospital or regular

clinic. One is a 19-year old mother with an advanced bone infection in

her leg; with Charity closed, she had no idea where to find a doctor.

Max calls for an ambulance to take the woman to West Jefferson Hospital

in Gretna—and rides along with her when it comes. “I see myself as a

patient-advocate,” says Fischer.

 

Alternative styles of medicine are big at Common Ground. “In those

moments, in that half an hour I’m talking to someone, it’s just love

that I feel,” says Marenka Cerny, a trauma counselor and massage

therapist from Oakland who has set up a table just outside the clinic.

Every day I’m there she has a steady stream of customers, who approach

her shyly but get up from her table looking relieved. “We’re providing

human contact, the most basic thing you can do for people facing so

much devastation and loss,” she says. Next to her table, Korben Perry,

an acupuncturist from Philadelphia, has put out a couple of chairs and

a sign. One afternoon I find him working on Willy Kerr, who says he’s

been coming to the clinic ever since he got back to Algiers from

Houston, where he was evacuated after the storm. He’s never seen

Chinese medicine before, but Perry persuades him the needle treatment

will help relieve the pain in his back and gums. “I’m trying to stop

smoking,” Kerr confides. As Perry places needles in his earlobes and

neck, Kerr chuckles, and then settles down for a 20-minute wait. “These

people here are treating me real nice,” he says. “I’d hate to see them

go.” Like many others in this neighborhood, Kerr, who worked until

recently at a Murphy Oil refinery south of New Orleans, is convinced

that the Ninth Ward didn’t flood by chance. “They blew them levees,” he

tells me. “You make sure you write that down.”

 

Later that afternoon, two camouflaged US Army trucks pull up outside

the mosque. As their engines idle noisily, a young lieutenant jumps

out, identifies himself as Louisiana National Guard, and announces that

he has several boxes of supplies for the clinic. Moe, who spends much

of her time organizing donated supplies of dubious utility, smiles

widely when she sees the packets of cortisone and the children’s

antibiotic Zithromax. For the next 15 minutes, soldiers just back from

Iraq and a couple of anarchists who’ve been protesting the war unload

the truck together, swapping anecdotes about New Orleans and the French

Quarter.

 

 

 

UNLIKE SOME OF THE volunteers, who camp out in the mosque and

surrounding houses, during my stay in New Orleans I crash with other

medical workers at Tent City, a FEMA campsite in Algiers. In the mess

tent, you see everyone who has a piece of rebuilding and securing New

Orleans: National Guard troops, their rifles leaning on the tables;

exhausted workers from the water and sewer company; tough-looking New

Orleans cops; and the uniformed private guards from Blackwater. It’s a

disconcerting place, full of short fuses and weapons, much like

anyplace else in post-Katrina New Orleans--which is part of what makes

Common Ground such an oddity.

 

By late October, all of the city is dry and relief workers as well as

residents are beginning to venture into the Ninth Ward. Common Ground

has set up a distribution center in a former day car center there,

handing out donations from groups as varied as Pastors for Peace, which

sent several box loads of boots, and the Islamic Relief Fund, which has

provided 50 large buckets of “cleaning supplies”—each one marked with

the logo of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—containing

masks, sponges, spray bottles, gloves and hand cleaner. Several times a

week it sends a medical crew to the Disaster Recovery Center in the

Lower Ninth Ward, a parking lot where FEMA has set up an information

table for returning residents.

 

At the FEMA site, guns are everywhere; on the shoulders of the National

Guard troops guarding the site and in the holsters of New Orleans cops

and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from the

Department of Homeland Security. FEMA has hired four Blackwater guards

for its own table; they stand around wearing identical logo’ed black

shirts and identical wrap-around sunglasses.

 

Around them, the neighborhood is utterly destroyed. Electric and

telephone wires are down; vehicles lie at crazy angles, some of them

stuck in fences and walls and buried in living rooms. The streets and

sidewalks are caked with mud that has calcified where it flowed into

open doors. There’s a silence that feels all wrong in a city

neighborhood, broken only occasionally by the crunching sound of tires

on the dry mud.

 

By contrast, Common Ground, despite its chaos and occasional

dysfunction, feels almost light-hearted. By the time I visit again in

December a steady stream of people from the neighborhood, (including

Willy Kerr, the acupuncture patient), are signing up to volunteer. A

lifelong Algiers resident, Sandra, is now working as the clinic’s cook,

doling out helpings of gumbo and bread pudding. A community advisory

board is being set up, and the clinic is eyeing a larger site down the

street. “That clinic is gonna be a permanent clinic,” Malik Rahim tells

me, “served by the people its serving right now.”

 

 

 

Tim Shorrock is a journalist based in Memphis, Tennessee, where he

moved last year after living for 23 years in Washington D.C. He writes

about U.S. foreign policy, East Asia, and corporate misuse of power for

many publications at home and abroad. He is working on a book about

national security.

 

Kike Arnal is a Venezuelan photographer and documentary filmmaker based

in New York City. His photographs have been featured in the New York

Times, Life, and Newsweek, among others. His video, Yanomami Malaria,

produced for the Discovery Channel, covered the spread of disease among

populations of indigenous people in the northern Amazon.

 

 

" The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of

private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State

itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an

individual, by a group or by any controlling private power. " -Franklin Delano

Roosevelt