On Monday afternoon after her biology class at Montbello High School, Raven Lang sits in the office of Darlene Sampson, the school counselor who’s working closely with four students displaced by Hurricane Katrina, helping them with the stages of grief.
“So how did you feel when you heard people were moving back into your neighborhood today?” Sampson asks Raven.
That day, thousands of residents were heading back home to Raven’s neighborhood of Algiers, across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter.
Many of the 1 million citizens displaced by Hurricane Katrina are dealing with radical cultural change as they start new lives in other cities – while still shouldering the heavy burdens of loss.
It’s a complex form of culture shock, a mix of geography, race and class. For people like Raven, differences manifest in everything from food and language to weather and education.
“Did you want to go home and to stay here too?” asks Sampson, continuing to gently quiz Raven, a good student who just started her sophomore year.
“That’s right,” Raven answers. “But I really want to stay here till the end of the school year, so I can get the credits.”
If Raven returns to Algiers now, she’ll miss lots of school and probably have to make it up in summer school.
Dressed in a white jersey top and jeans, her blue backpack slung over her shoulders, the teenager recounts her losses. Her beautiful home, which had just been painted and newly carpeted three weeks before the hurricane. Gumbo. The House of Blues. Her clothes.
“Like the jacket I got for Christmas,” she says. “It was gorgeous, and I could really have used it here.”
She misses how the breeze floated over the Mississippi River, fragrant with spices.
And she misses her friends. Back home she knew everyone at her high school, most since elementary school.
At Montbello, it’s a sea of new faces, although three girls have already asked to be Raven’s friend, making her quite happy.
But Raven’s social network is shattered. That Monday in Sampson’s office, Raven mentions that her birthday will be in two days. She will turn 15. Raven shrugs, smiling wistfully. She has no idea how she will celebrate.
Her mother’s here. But her friends are scattered: one best friend in Atlanta, the other in Houston, and no one seems to have cellphones, or be able to connect.
Displaced teenagers can be particularly re-traumatized by the transition, says Sampson.
“Kids experience their world with their full senses. Taste, smell, hearing – everything has been impacted by the change.
“It’s a huge cultural shift. New Orleans is a world unto itself. It has its own style, own time and space, its own movement,” Sampson says. “It has lots of class, character and sophistication.”
In the cafeteria of the dorms at the Lowry Relocation Center where hundreds of evacuees are being housed, Katrina survivor Lisa Arceneaux struggles with the Colorado weather and car culture.
“In New Orleans, I could walk to the corner grocery store and get whatever I needed,” she says.
Although Arceneaux just received a new loft apartment, rent-free for two months, she plans to return home as soon as possible.
“I want to find out who passed away,” she says. “A lot of them did. Two of my neighbors died floating in the water.”
The state of uprootedness doesn’t much bother Arthur Sanders, however.
Although he lived in New Orleans for 29 years, he grew up in Honduras, then was resettled, as an African-American, in the middle of a white community in Boston. He has learned to carry his roots in his pocket.
After being stranded on a New Orleans bridge for three days without food or water, he finally joined evacuees at the airport heading for San Antonio.
Or so he thought, until, midflight, someone said the plane was going to Denver.
“My immediate image was people in cowboy boots and straw hats, spitting chew and riding horses,” he says.
But less than a week after arriving in Colorado, he sports a brand-new pair of Tony Lama boots from Sheplers, famed for catering to cowboys.
Those caramel-colored pointy-toed boots, worn with a new outfit of black jeans and black sweat shirt, give Sanders, with his salt-and-pepper goatee, a Western hipster look.
“No culture shock,” says Sanders, who already landed a job in Denver. “It’s like I’ve been here all my life.”
As Katrina survivors adapt to the culture of Colorado at different speeds in different ways, some relief organizations grapple with managing another aspect of American culture.
Cultural competency is swiftly emerging as coveted currency.
On the national scene, DiversityInc News recently filed a Freedom of Information Act with FEMA and found that of the organization’s 19 senior staff members, only one is a person of color.
By filing the FOIA, it wanted to know “if any of these directors are required to take … cultural-competency training that is specific to the geographic areas and ethnicities and races of the people who live in the territories they oversee,” according to a DiversityInc newsletter.
At the local level, in Denver, cultural competency surfaced at a meeting earlier this month of the Katrina Interagency Task Force.
Many said that a wall of obstacles prevented African-American volunteers from helping those in need.
Alice Langley, a volunteer with the Urban League of Metropolitan Denver, said that about 50 to 75 people at Lowry asked her a variety of questions.
“They thought they could communicate with me,” she says.
“It makes a difference when they can talk to people who look like them. It gives them a sense of belonging.”
“If 80 percent of the people at Lowry are black, then 80 percent of those providing service should be African-American,” says Maggie Tidwell, a native New Orleanian who works as executive director of the Colfax Community Network Inc.
Del Phillips, pastor of Mount Gilead Baptist Church, heads the clergy coalition formed to speed the cultural transition of Katrina survivors. It’s helped recruit professionals such as Robert Atwell, national president of the Association of Black Psychologists, and Jackie Stanton, president of the Denver chapter of the Association of Black Social Workers.
“They’ll be available for training for relief workers who aren’t African-American, to help make them more culturally sensitive to things that we know weigh heavy on African-Americans,” he says.
A quick glance at the job board at Lowry reveals a range of talent: school teacher, nurse, emergency-room technician, chef, administrative assistant for law firms, advertising writer.
But to some culture-watchers, such skills have been under-emphasized.
“Overall, the assumption in (media) reporting is that everyone coming out of New Orleans is desperately poor and black, and possibly is going to loot you,” says Dori Maynard, president and chief executive officer of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
“We need to really make sure we get to know our new neighbors, and not make those assumptions.”
City council president Elbra Wedgeworth believes heartfelt welcome is critical, especially in Colorado.
“Remember that as a state and city that does not have a large African-American population to begin with, we should have interaction and understanding because our new residents are coming from a world where interaction is important.
“What’s really needed is a willing hand or kind word. That would go far to create a quality of life that they can be proud of.”
Despite all the devastation, Paul Burleson of the Greater Metropolitan Denver Ministerial Alliance sees a sign of hope.
“A cross-spectrum of cultures has come together in this,” he says. “It’s something I’ve not seen since the civil rights movement when people of all ethnicities were holding hands, singing songs, and marching.
“We were embarrassed in the eyes of the world, looking like we can’t take care of our own.
“We want to dispel that myth and come together to make those from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama know they are loved.
“We understand what Martin Luther King said, that one hungry man shames us all.”
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com.
