New Orleans, 2 years and 1 day later

Posted by anjali on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 6:35 am

From Democracy Now, August 30th:

AMY GOODMAN: I’m here in the Lower Ninth Ward… Hurricane Katrina flooded about 80% of New Orleans and killed well over 1,600 people, displacing another one-and-a-half million people from the Gulf Coast. Only two-thirds of the region’s population has returned home.

Few areas in New Orleans were as hard hit by Hurricane Katrina as the Lower Ninth Ward, where we’re broadcasting from today. This predominantly African American working-class neighborhood remains largely in ruins two years later.

In a moment, we’ll be joined by Malik Rahim, cofounder of the Common Ground Collective, and Alice Craft-Kerney of the Lower Ninth Ward Health Clinic…

ALICE CLARK-KERNEY: …Charity was the safety-net provider for the medically indigent patients in the community, and with that being destroyed, with that infrastructure being destroyed, we knew that many people were going to be caught – the uninsured were going to be caught without any type of medical care. We saw people really just dying on both sides of the street, just because they didn’t have access to medical care. And we decided we weren’t going to wait. We saw people dying at Convention Center Boulevard, the Superdome, just waiting for the bus, and we decided we weren’t going to wait for the healthcare bus. So we determined we were going to open this clinic.

And the clinic was opened by people giving their time, their talent. And what happened was we had folks from all over the country who came to renovate the building, and we had supplies, medical supplies and equipment that was sent down to us, contributions from folks like yourself, as well as some foundations, that got us started. And so, that’s how the clinic actually started and opened.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you need now?

ALICE CLARK-KERNEY: Right now we need money for operating funds. We’re dealing with a scarcity of healthcare professionals, because, just like my family left the region, many of the healthcare providers left the region.

AMY GOODMAN: Did I see a figure, something like 90% of doctors gone?

ALICE CLARK-KERNEY: I’m not going to say 90%, but there was a large number that actually left, never to come back again. And we’re not just talking about doctors, we’re talking about nurses, nurse practitioners, physical therapists, pharmacists, anybody in the healthcare field. All of these folks are gone, and many of them are not going to return. So that leaves us here with a few healthcare professionals, and they can basically name their salary. So we’re competing against hospitals with wonderful fringe benefit packages, sign-on bonuses. And it’s very difficult at this point. So we need funds so that we can actually attract good people to the clinic.

Check out the rest of the interview, it’s powerful. Also, here’s the website of the Common Ground Collective. Support them as you can.

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