Day 20, Way 20Halfway there! Yee ha!
Today, as I finally hit the 50% mark, I would like to stop and reflect about what I've learned from the first half of this Lent project. But first, here at 40 Ways, let us celebrate one of the proud American traditions promoted by the Bush administration: Outsourcing!
On Monday when I was researching the Buddhist response to Katrina, and realizing that really I just knew fuck-all about Buddhism in America, I decided to call my sister, who is very into yoga and who has just added a Buddhist meditation class to her regimen. Alas, she had never heard of any of the organizations or people I asked her about, and so ultimately I had to rely on my own wits, and you have seen the results. However, my sister did mention the 40 Ways project to my mother. My family knows that I have a livejournal, but apparently none of them read it; they also know I used to write a column at DU, though none of them read that either until I sent my dad a copy of
Snake Bites because it was dedicated to him. Anyway, one of my mother's talents is that if you tell her something about a project you're doing she will immediately start coming up with ways to do it better, whether or not she knew anything about the subject 30 seconds ago. True to form, within minutes after learning about 40 Ways from my sister, my mother called me up to pass on two ideas for Katrina relief which she had picked up from a wedding she went to in New Orleans recently. (By strange coincidence, the only time in my life I ever went to New Orleans, it was also to attend a wedding.) One of them was the New Orleans botanical gardens, which may be the subject of a future Way/Day depending on how desperate I become as Holy Week approaches. The other was
Tipitina's FoundationNamed after a famous New Orleans club called
Tipitina's Uptown, the Tipitina Foundation has been in existence since at least 2002 (they don't have a "history" page on their website, which is a shame). Before Katrina, Tipitina's Foundation was dedicated to supporting New Orleans musicians through their
Music Co-Op, described as a "do-it-yourself business incubator" for musicians who may have plenty of talent, experience, and ambition, but need financial and moral support when it comes to the business side of things. Tipitina's Foundation also took up the cause of supporting music programs in New Orleans high schools, raising money for instruments with their annual
Instruments A-Comin' benefit concerts and creating an
internship program for talented high school musicians. As a band veteran myself (I don't mean a hip kind of band, I'm talking marching band/concert band/wind ensemble...you ex-band geeks know exactly what I'm talking about) I cannot stress how important that kind of work is. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you never have access to an instrument and someone who will teach you to play, you will never find out what you can do. Most kids who learn to play instruments in school will never become professional musicians; but the ability to make and appreciate music is something that changes the lives of people who discover it no matter what they do with it later; and I think it's just wrong that people take the attitude that music is a luxury which is nice for people who can afford it, but is always going to be the first thing to get cut from the school budget. Being poor doesn't transform you into a robot who neither needs nor wants anything more than food, shelter, clothing, and a minimum-wage job. There are intangibles that are essential to human health and happiness even though they cannot be eaten, and music is one of them.
Well. I seem to have wandered a bit.
No, I haven't, because that's the point: life is more than survival. If New Orleans is going to come back to life, music is one of the things that will have to be revived. Tipitina's Foundation obviously gets that, and since Katrina hit they have been using their resources to help musicians get on with their lives and their work in the New Orleans area. They are partnering with Hands On Network, which I wrote up in the first week of 40 Ways, to help rebuild musicians' homes, and they're looking for volunteers. They are also looking for
donations--offers of housing for displaced musicians and their families, volunteer medical care, "gigs"--that's "work" for us squares--and, of course, musical instruments. Few musical instruments can survive prolonged immersion in water. Anyone who had to leave behind a string bass, a clarinet, a piano, or a drum set is not getting it back. Musicians without instruments cannot work. So, donate a trumpet, and you are putting a trumpet player back to work--which means that your will have a greater positive effect on the American economy than Bush's entire administration has managed to produce since 2000.
But of course my mother isn't the only person out there offering me advice. Back when I first posted about this project on DU,
I asked the DU community for help. The thread generated a number of useful responses from various DUers including one mopinko, who was looking for a 501(c) through which he could donate musical instruments to help New Orleans musicians. mopinko's explanation for why this was his specific mission, as opposed to donating money for housing and food, is succinct and powerful and bears repeating:
"i know everyone needs money, but as an artist myself, i know that there are some things that money cannot buy. i would find it hard to choose between keeping my chops up and feeding my family. so, this way, somebody does not have to choose."If you want to save some of these Katrina survivors from having to make that choice, here's the organization that mopinko eventually found:
Katrina's Piano FundThis organization was founded by a group of veteran New Orleans musicians and some of their colleagues from other states, all of whom seem to have ties to the New Orleans Jazzfest. It's not just about pianos. Here's the explanation of the name, from the founders' mission statement:
"While encouraged by the flow of money into the Red Cross for basic needs, we decided that a specific effort was needed to help the city’s musicians. It’s a simple economic equation: once a musician has an instrument in his hands, he can get back to work. Little economies will spin up around each instrument, in all the relocation cities. Money for the long trip home can be earned, and the soul of New Orleans will be saved. Juan and I have chosen the piano as the namesake for our fund-raising effort; from Tuts Washington to Fats and Dr. John, it symbolizes the many genres 'born and raised' in New Orleans.
This fund will be administered by Juan, a soundman, producer, recordist and networker who knows the New Orleans music scene from the inside out. Thanks to our associates at JazzFest, we also know where many of the musicians are, right now. Very few have more than the clothes on their backs. With an instrument in their hands they can begin to rebuild their lives, and the culture of New Orleans."The fund is clearly
still active, and you can donate either
cash or
an actual musical instrument. Keep in mind that these are people who make a living playing music, so the instrument has to actually work well enough to make music that people will pay to listen to. If you have such an instrument, well, I would encourage you to drop them a line about it as soon as possible, because they have such a backlog of people waiting for instruments that they have had to
stop taking new requests. The more instruments they get, the faster the backlog clears and the sooner the pipeline reopens.
Anyway, props to mopinko and my mother. And now, to celebrate hitting the halfway point, some reflections on what this project has accomplished so far.
I'm doing this for a number of reasons. One of them is to find out whether it is possible not just to raise awareness of but to
sustain interest in this horrible calamity over the course of a 40-day period, despite all the other calamities that are constantly occurring as Bush brings the country ever closer to the Apocalypse. I have been interested to discover how difficult that really is. When I tell people about this project, they're often skeptical about my being able to find enough organizations to fill out the whole 40 days. That's actually not the problem. There are definitely hundreds, and probably thousands, of groups out there which are in some way involved in Katrina relief. The real challenge is to figure out how to go back to the same topic day after day in a way that deepens our understanding of it, instead of simply fatiguing or boring the crap out of not only myself but anyone who's reading this journal. For me, so far, it's working. I've learned much more about the Gulf Coast, about the wide range of philanthropic and activist organizations in this country, about religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the South and in the rest of America, and about the daily struggles still being faced by storm survivors than I did before I started this project. I'm also learning something about myself. There is such a vast glut of Katrina links out there that the only way to get anywhere is to start with a specific question or problem that you want to investigate. So, every day when I sit down to do this, I have to ask myself: what am I looking for? What's today's kind of help going to be? What else needs to be done? What else do I believe is so important that people cannot or should not be asked to live without it, after they have lost everything?
I have also been using this project to kick my own ass about charitable giving. I am not a financial planner; I am a hoarder. My accounting is so fragmentary and nonexistent that I never have a very good idea from day to day of how much money I actually have or what my expenses will be before my next paycheck comes in. I have a gut sense for how much I can spend without getting myself into trouble; but this makes me leery of spending "extra" money on things I've never budgeted for. This project is teaching me how to give, and that, I hope, will turn out to be valuable to me and to a few other people in the long run.
What I don't know is whether this project is having an effect on anyone else. I don't even know how many people are reading it, because there's usually not much of a response to the individual entries. There are the stalwarts who show up every day on DU to keep the thread kicked, and I truly appreciate the effort. What I would be really interested to know is what, if anything, any of you are getting out of reading these entries. So if you are reading the 40 Ways entries, and you are getting something out of it, it would cheer me up if you would add a comment about what that is. It would help me figure out where to take the project during the 20 days and ways remaining.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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