"Never a Dull Day"

Yesterday, the attorney that I’m working for here at New Orleans Legal Assistance told me that if I don’t learn anything else from this job, I had better learn how NOT to run an office.

Although his statement initially struck me as being comedic, sardonic, and more than a little sad, it really did have some profound implications. There are big problems with the way a lot of state agencies and public interest groups are run. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how it’s a shame that so many not-for-profits feel the need to employ competitive business measures. I must say that my experience this summer has led me to the exact opposite conclusion: I think there needs to be even more accountability on the part of not-for-profits and even more encouragement to run them more like businesses and less like gigantic funnels for taxpayer dollars. In a sense, why not create a “market” of not-for-profit groups in which different charitable organizations that provide legitimate services to the community at the bare minimum costs compete for government contracts? Privatization certainly has its drawbacks, but I think that a lot of federally-funded agencies could use improvement, and I do not mean to single out NOLAC in any way. I mean this as a more general sort of statement.

I get the impression that bureaucratic problems typically associated with government agencies are even worse in the South and particularly bad in Louisiana. There seems to be an interesting attitude prevailing in this city that everyone ought to do the vary bare minimum amount of work possible. I’m not sure what this can be attributed to, but I think one thing may be the lack of incentives to advance. It seems that peoples’ main priority here is to get out and have fun. It is NOT to move up the ranks within an organization, to attain more power and prestige, or even to earn a higher salary necessarily—motives that I am used to seeing in most places where I’ve been in America. This whole mentality and attitude translates into a workforce that often fails to get the job done. I think you have to live here for a little while to see what it’s truly like, but all that native New Orleanians that I have talked to have imparted this sentiment to me.

And yet the work that we do here at places like NOLAC is so incredibly important. I can see that when I talk to our clients. Just the other day, an 88-year-old man related to me his Katrina story of wading through water up to his shoulders, being carried on a boat to the Superdome, inhabiting a smelly stadium with overflowing toilets, and finally fleeing on a bus to Houston, Texas. Eventually they ended up in Atlanta. After this whole ordeal, when they were finally ready to move back to their home in New Orleans, the moving company took advantage of them by holding all of their property for almost a month before delivering it damaged to their house, which had also been nearly destroyed by Katrina.

These people really do need our help because they have nowhere left to turn. They cannot afford to hire an attorney so Legal Assistance is their last chance. We help these people rebuild their homes so that they can rebuild their lives, as one client told us. To me, the most satisfying part of the job (so far) has not been getting a judgment in our favor or hearing a judge badmouth the opposing lawyer but rather hearing the genuine thanks that our clients give us. They almost all express their gratitude, but many go beyond that to inquire about our lives. “How’s your boss’s back doing?” “How did your boss like his vacation?” The thing is: my boss is more than an attorney for these people. He is literally their last hope. We have had clients talk about committing suicide, and for many of them, New Orleans Legal Assistance is the main reason why they don’t do it.

If you’re about power, prestige, and money, then this job is not for you. For example, an attorney who has been there since 1984 would probably make about $65,000. So what is it that motivates these people? There must be something in them that drives them to want to do go. There must be something in them that makes them want to do their part to help repair a city and (more importantly) a people that needs all the help it can get. So whatever the problems are that exist in this office, there’s still a common thread in all of these lawyers’ stories.

My boss’s favorite thing to say is, “Never a dull moment!” He makes sure to slip this in at least 3-4 times during the typical workday. What he means is that there’s always something exciting going on no matter how bland our day’s work seems to be. The excitement may come from the inability to get important documents filed before deadlines or call clients to impart important information to them due to the breakdown of the office phone system or major copier malfunctions. Or it may come from one of our clients being stripped of their house in order to repay a corrupt contractor who has taken advantage of them. This is not the stuff that boredom is made of.

So while we sit there filling out forms, writing letters to other attorneys and the Louisiana Attorney General, and filing complex lawsuits in the Civil District Court, we are having a real impact on peoples’ lives. From the first day on the job, I got to personally interact with our clients. It’s easy to see the impact that you have when you’re there with the client talking face to face. It’s easy to see the impact when they’re about to break down and start crying right in front of you. But it’s a bit harder to notice when you’re bogged down in complex legal paperwork jumping through the hoops and hurdles that government agencies and the State of Louisiana have constructed. But it’s necessary. If the endless paperwork and filing and refilling of documents that the Court has lost will give someone a home. If the tedium will save someone’s life, then I wish I could have only “dull” moments.

Baton Rouge, Here I Come!

These last two days have probably been my best two since arriving in Louisiana. That is because Amol, a good friend of mine from Duke, came to visit me in New Orleans on Friday! I think that some of the best places in the world and some the best experiences can be made infinitely better if you have the pleasure of spending them with true friends. This was the case with Amol. We spent the night together in the Quarter, having a nice dinner with the other people in New Orleans and then basically just hanging out, talking, and laughing afterward for hours.

One really cool aspect of this weekend was that I realized that, now, I truly do LIVE in New Orleans. When Amol came, he was asking ME where I thought we should go to eat and to hang out. He was asking ME if I knew directions to get from one place to another. He was asking ME where and how the public transportation ran. And most of all, he told ME that I already know a lot more about New Orleans than he ever did. By the end of the summer, I will have been in New Orleans for more time than he has been his whole life, even though he doesn’t live that far away. It felt good to know that, in a strange sense, New Orleans had become my home. I even had a library card with the New Orleans logo on it that I got today to prove it!

This also made me realize that I probably don’t know my own city of Chicago as well as I should. I’ll surely be more familiar with New Orleans than with Chicago by July. I notice now that I have a tendency to like cities more that I am familiar with such as Boston as well. Why not get to know my own city a little better? Maybe that’s something I should keep in mind for later this summer.

On Saturday, we went to Café du Monde to grab some beignets and café au lait while watching street performers in front of Jackson Square. Then, I headed with him to his place in Baton Rouge. While I was there in Baton Rouge, I made some observations:

1. LSU is inextricably linked with the people and culture of Louisiana. Of course I always cheered for Illinois basketball and football, but I never felt personally invested in the team. The connection felt by the people here in Louisiana to LSU is so strong that Amol explained to me that he and most of his friends would rather see LSU do well than their own out-of-state colleges. I was surprised by this, but I sort of started to realize that being from Louisiana MEANS that you are a part of LSU even if you don’t ever go to school there. I think this is similar to the feeling of North Carolinians for UNC, although I can’t say for sure having not yet fully experienced that campus. I suppose that’s one big difference between Duke and a lot of public schools (particularly here in the South): many people in North Carolina detest Duke (beyond athletics, too) whereas most people feel that they are one with their state schools like LSU or UNC.
2. People from Louisiana tend to hate Louisiana. I know I talked about this in a previous post, but I can’t get over it. Amol once again confirmed this observation that I’ve been making over the last couple weeks. While you try to complement many Louisianans on their city and state, they have a tendency to try to denigrate the place where they live. Still, at the end of the day, you can see that there’s something in each of them that absolutely loves their home at the same time. There’s something that tells them they could never leave even if they wanted to. When you remind them of certain aspects of their city that an outsider notices at first glance but that a native may have become completely acclimated to, they seem to recall what makes this place so great and what keeps the flame burning inside each of them.
3. Tying into the above observation, it seems as though people from Louisiana who are NOT from New Orleans may have a tendency to see Hurricane Katrina and its effects differently. To some of them, New Orleans was always a decrepit city, and the storm merely brought its problems to the attention of the nation. To some of them, many of the houses in the city were already severely damaged and falling apart, the city’s roads and sidewalks were already in dire need of extensive maintenance, and NOLA public transportation was always just as terrible and unreliable as ever. The storm, then, only made the city marginally worse than it already was in their minds. It’s funny. I really don’t see it this way. I CAN’T see it this way after talking with some of the people that I’ve met and hearing of their plights.