Northeast New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood, which sits just above the city’s fabled French Quarter, had a scaled-back Mardi Gras of its own last February “” and at least cosmetically, the fête provided a much-needed shot in the arm. On Aug. 30, 2005, the mostly working-middle-class area was under five feet of water in the wake of hurricane Katrina, which led to the deaths of more than 1,800 over a 100-mile-wide swath off the Gulf of Mexico and caused $82 billion in damages, making it the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
Gentilly has a big civic improvements organization now, and Internet material on the neighborhood reveals the spirit of a major rebirth. But a group of students, staff and faculty from Point Loma Nazarene University’s (PLNU) School of Nursing may have other ideas. They’ve recently found that the neighborhood’s health care needs are perhaps at risk of a significant compromise “” and that the residents’ exasperation may stand at the center of that risk.
Fifty-three participants, including university President Bob Brower, traveled to the area Dec. 15 on a three-day assessment of the area’s state of health care. The 220-home survey was conducted on behalf of Heart to Heart International, a Kansas City-based emergency relief and development organization whose services to the neighborhood may cease in March amid lack of funding. The group also hosted a health fair and distributed care kits, school supplies and Bibles collected by the Student Nursing Association of Point Loma.
The assessment was funded through a $50,000 grant from Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of medical tech equipment and personal hygiene products.
“Our goal,” graduate nursing student and part-time faculty member Chris Sloan said, “was to tell [the residents] that Heart to Heart is leaving but to just sort of find out what the needs are so that we can do some follow-up in March and try to get people plugged into the right kinds of services.” Larry Rankin, PLNU nursing school associate dean, added that Heart to Heart may still remain in the area “if the numbers would allow them to get some other funding.”
Those survey data are yet to be processed; however, they may also ultimately prove less than reliable.
“A lot of these people are very wary now,” Sloan said. “Unless you have something for them, they really don’t want to talk to you. They’ve been studied; they’ve been surveyed; they’ve been asked a million questions, and it, in their minds, hasn’t really gotten them anywhere.”
The nurses, Sloan said, discovered an unremarkable set of health care problems in Gentilly, “the kind you’d find in any society “” diabetes, hypertension, some cancer “” but a lot of people told us they were clinically depressed, and very few people were being treated for it.” Sloan added that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency whose lack of preparedness for Katrina has landed it in the center of controversy, is a “four-letter word” to many of the residents.
By comparison, Heart to Heart may have performed the better turn overall. It was on the ground “within a week” of the disaster, Rankin said.
“They have been one of the primary outside clinical agencies to provide health care services there,” he added. “But many of the residents are still out of state, and Heart to Heart is finding it difficult to try to get data to back up whatever directions they need to go in. Many of the houses there are boarded up for blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks. It’s hard to get a handle on what disease states are prevalent now, and insurance is nil for many of the residents.”
Rankin said that nearby Slidell, La., has rebounded remarkably from Katrina’s effects. In Gentilly itself, he said, two hospitals have reopened. Sloan noted that the area shows new construction and home repair in some quarters.
But Katrina, she added, continues to exact its toll on Gentilly 19 months later amid wholesale tales of joblessness and uncertainty. The fatigue factor is an especially vicious element in this unending day-to-day equation of displacement, rendering Mardi Gras mostly ineffectual despite its palliative intent.
“They’re tired,” Sloan said. “That’s the other thing that I noticed taking to people. They’re just tired. They are worn out. They’ve hit the bottom, and they’ve gone even lower.”