Day 6, Way 6As we've seen, there is still plenty of need out there for basic support--food, clothing, shelter, and so on--and many of the organizations I've written up have been focused on that. Today, as we near the end of Mississippi Week, I offer something a little different for you history buffs and friends of the environment:
Turkey Creek Community InitiativeIf you have no idea what Turkey Creek is, I urge you to read in full the
brief history of the area posted on the TCCI site. It's a fascinating story. In brief: the area was settled in 1866 by a group of emancipated African-Americans. Geographic isolation and relative economic and political autonomy protected it from some of the historical and economic developments that scarred other African-American communities. It went on thriving until about the 1980s, when development began to encroach. In 2001, Turkey Creek was listed by the Mississippi Heritage Trust as one of Mississippi's Ten Most Endangered Historic Places.
Turkey Creek Community Initiatives organized in 2003 with the stated goal of fighting to "conserve, restore and utilize for education and other socially beneficial purposes the unique cultural, historical and ecological assets of their irreplaceable community, creek and coastal stream basin" and to "model sustainable coastal and urban development by integrating the above with environmental justice for all - regardless of race or class." Practically speaking, this has meant trying to prevent Gulfport from, well, engulfing them, which has no doubt involved some antagonism between Turkey Creek and the state and municipal governments. So, when Katrina hit in 2005, Turkey Creek was apparently not at the top of anyone's list of places to help.
A CNN report from September 2005 cites TCCI's head, Derrick Evans, on the state and federal 'response' to Katrina in Turkey Creek:
According to Evans and other residents, the only "official" help these communities saw in the first days and weeks after the storm was the occasional water and food drop by the National Guard.
"It was neighbors, it wasn't the country, it wasn't the city, it wasn't the Red Cross," said Evans. "It was men who knew how to swim and inflate an air mattress, how to plug a jon boat and went down the road and pulled people out of attics."Well, the whole premise behind something like the TCCI is that if you want it done right you have to do it yourself...but the gigantic, what was it, "Failure of Initiative" at the federal level meant that most of the initial relief work was done by Evans with some help from students at
Boston College:
IN THE DAYS following the storm surge, Derrick Evans '90, MAT'94, a lecturer in the black studies program, led a convoy of three 26-foot trucks from Boston to his hometown of Turkey Creek in Gulfport, Mississippi. He had learned from a Mississippi neighbor's crackling cell phone call following the storm that many of the one-story bungalows in this historic African-American community, settled in 1866 by a group of emancipated slaves, were flooded up to the rafters. His 70-year-old mother phoned to tell him she had been rescued from her front porch by two neighbors with an air mattress. Five days after the disaster, no one in his hometown had seen any sign of FEMA or the Red Cross.
Evans, who had planned to teach at BC this fall, instead organized an emergency supply run to Mississippi. He gathered a small group of volunteers, including two BC students, Seye Akinbulumo '07 and Jose Lopez '05, M.Ed.'09, who helped drive and fill his small fleet of rental trucks with supplies. Two of the vehicles—a moving van and Evans's pickup truck—became their headquarters, jury-rigged with laptops, cell phones, and wires to maintain communication with the outside world.
After four days, they arrived in Turkey Creek with hundreds of gallons of water, a trailer carting barrels of gasoline, pallets of canned food, roofing materials, tarps, generators, and crates full of duct tape and other necessities—all supplied by Evans and his volunteers.
"The relief effort unfolded in phases," said Evans, who has remained in Turkey Creek since he arrived in early September. "Once we provisioned our community, we joined forces with other local organizations to shuttle supplies to neighboring areas." Eventually, Evans's own nonprofit, the Turkey Creek Community Initiative (TCCI), founded several years before Katrina, began to coordinate much of the work.And if you would like to help the TCCI do that work, you can head out there and help them
clean up and rebuild, or you can
donate. They do not seem to have set up a separate Katrina fund, so if you give dough bear in mind that there is no obvious way to specifically earmark it for Katrina recovery. However, you could try using their
comment form to send in whatever questions you have about what they're doing for Katrina relief and how you can help.
Tomorrow, Day 7! a full week! w00t!
The Plaid Adder
Day 5, Way 5: Hope Shall Bloom UCC Recovery Fund
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