What kinds of fights are you going to be picking up over the next six months?

In the wake of Katrina’s devastation, ColorLines interviewed Xochitl Bervera, director of Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, who organized statewide for progressive change in the juvenile justice system; Barbara Major, the founder and director of the St. Thomas Health Services, that served 14,000 uninsured patients in the city’s most affected areas; and Wade Rathke, the founder and chief organizer of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and president of Service Employees International Union Local 100, who has most recently worked to raise living wages and protect voting rights for New Orleans residents.

What was the effect on your members and organization? 

Xochitl Bervera: Orleans Parish was one of our strongest chapters. We’ve been trying really hard to find our members, our leaders, and the awful part is that we haven’t found many at all. There’s a good chance folks are safe, but one of the huge problems of the evacuation is simply the sending of people so far away. They’re in Massachusetts, Oregon, Maine. Having any capacity to bring people back closer in when the city is habitable again, that’s going to be a huge challenge.

Our focus is on reuniting young people and their families. Prisoners were not evacuated before the storm. They were not evacuated when the storm hit, they were not evacuated when the levees broke, they were evacuated some other time after that. People had to break out of the prison cells themselves after having been abandoned by all the staff. The water was hitting chest level and they had to hack their way out and escape, then turn themselves in because that was the only way to get to an evacuation bus. They set up makeshift jails and held hearings in the middle of all this mess. There was no food, no water, but you could still be arrested and jailed.

If juvenile representatives and organizers don’t dig around, there are going to be families who just never find their loved ones. I talked to one grandmother who was getting on an evacuation bus with her grandson. They got separated and he pushed against someone to get closer to her. Cops pulled him out, cuffed him, took him away and that’s the last time she’s seen him. We can’t find him either. No one is going to speak about that ever.

Barbara Major: People have lost family members. They’re separated from their family. My staff is scattered all over. My community is African American and Vietnamese. A large Vietnamese population. And they’re wiped out as well. I know my folks will have a lot of mental health issues now. Even if they had nothing, it still hurts to lose it.

What can people around the country do on the organizing?

I’ve got to get my clinic up and running. Most of the clinics are underwater. Mine might be the only one that’s not. I need to find out where my patients are. I need to locate them, get them meds and prescriptions.

I don’t have a house to go back to. I owned my house but didn’t have insurance. I may be in a house in the country. FEMA said that if you’re willing to relocate to a rural area, they’ll build a house on two percent interest regardless of bad credit.

Wade Rathke: Approximately a quarter of Local 100 members lived in between New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward. Almost a third of the ACORN membership lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, and that’s the area that looks like it’s going to be wiped out.

Some of the union members worked for the bus company, or as janitors or other kinds of city workers. Many of them are still working 24/7 as long as they still have a place to stay. Some are living on ships in the river.

The ACORN members are split up all over the country. We’ve got people in Houston, Florida, Alabama…. It’s really a tough situation. People want to go back to see what kind of shape their houses are in, but exposure to some of those houses could be a life or death health situation.