Too much today to fit in one entry. My illness is gone and things went well. I fulfilled the tasks needed for the information system by 3:00 and went off to do other volunteering. After sitting in the volunteer waiting area for a while, I ended up working for Aramark for the fourth time, but as a result scored a map of the big move that I’d been trying to find all day.
See, starting tomorrow, they are clearing out the Astrodome. The plan is to consolidate everyone from the two big buildings we’re currently using into a third smaller building. Look at the google map. The Astrodome (center) and Reliant Center (huge top building, able to fit about three Domes) are mostly full of people, with some breathing room. All those people will be racked like sardines (cots touching in long rows) into the building labelled “Astroarena”– specifically, just under the two dark gills on the building (one has a corner just to the left of ‘A’ in ‘Astroarena’).
I’m dreading it, and I find it difficult to imagine what economics could be used to justify such treatment of the evacuees. The computer center crew went out for dinner and drinks tonight, and we had a fantastic conversation which suggested an answer. The 3000 evacuees who will be left by Friday are truly the most underprivileged of our society, and are being treated it. Whether by habit or chance circumstance, they have been mostly unable to help themselves get a better life out what happened, and so they are being funneled back into lives just like the ones they left. These are the forgotten, as they were forgotten back in New Orleans, and mostly doomed to remain that way. They will be forcibly shipped out on buses to inner cities only marginally different from the ones they’ve lived in their whole lives.