The New Waveland Café in Waveland MS, initiated by a group of Rainbows, was the first recognized relief kitchen in Hancock county after Hurricane Katrina. The Kitchen has become a community center for locals and volunteers in Waveland and the surrounding areas. People are drawn to this kitchen because the food is healthy, much of it is organic, and it is always cooked with style. The kitchen is run completely by volunteers who focus on empowering this community to continue helping one another even after the kitchen is gone. Anyone who expresses interest is welcome to facilitate a meal. When people stroll up in the pre-coffee dawn of 5:30 a.m. looking groggy, they are pointed in the direction of the coffee pot and invited to get the ball rolling. Local children have meandered by asking questions about the kitchen. Now we have 9 and 10 year-olds chopping vegetables for dinner, and spooning out soup in the serving line. Most nights during the week different local bands come to play on the stage at dinner time. Often, when dinner is finished, tables are pushed back and a spontaneous community dance party ensues. Afterwards, locals and volunteers work together to clean the dining room.
The New Waveland Café is closing down on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It is re-opening at a new location in St. Bernard's Parrish, just outside of New Orleans. The folks who are continuing on with this mission are in need of a larger volunteer force and many resources in order to carry out this project. Many of the people moving to St. Bernard's Parrish have been working for 1 to 2 months, seven days a week, with very few breaks. This move is going to take a lot of work, and some brand-spanking new creative vibrance will be enthusiastically welcome.
Please keep in mind that no amount of carrying signs, marching, meditation, prayer, signing petitions, or voting will ever carry as much power as helping one person gut out her ruined house, or feeding a single mother at the end of another stressful day of red-taping it to a Fema trailor. This is a chance to extract yourself from our traditionally divided and materialistic American culture, shake off the stagnant mundane, and participate in true community building during a time of suffering and hardship.
If you would like to participate you will find info on volunteering at:
www.emergencycommunities.org or email  volunteer@emergencycommunityies.org
|
earth
Rainbow Family volunteers join hurricane relief effort
By Bill Bishop
The Register-Guard
Published: Monday, December 5, 2005
The Rainbow Family - a worldwide, loosely knit group practicing the
hippie values of peace and love - has moved from the backwoods to the
front lines among a coalition of private organizations providing
hurricane relief in the Gulf region.
It's a natural mission for the family, whose members annually carry
portable kitchens and clinics in psychedelic buses to their fabled
weeks-long summer gatherings on mountains and national forests, says
Eugene lawyer Brian Michaels.
"It's second nature for us to do it together. It's relatively easy for
us to drop into an area and feed people - without any politics, without
any proselytizing, without any exclusions. And it turns out to be fun,"
says Michaels, who returned last week from 10 days as a Rainbow Family
volunteer in Waveland, Miss.
The Rainbow Family, operating as the Rainbow Emergency Management
Assembly, set up its portable kitchen and a medical clinic in
cooperation with an evangelical Christian group from Texas on a parking
lot across the street from Waveland's devastated police department days
after the hurricane.
According to Internet accounts posted by REMA volunteers, the kitchen -
dubbed the New Waveland Cafe - cooked between 3,000 and 5,000 meals a
day at the height of the relief effort. Truckloads of donated food and
goods arrived at the cafe site along with government relief supplies.
"The kitchen crew is so together. It's that attitude of we can do it
and
we can do it well. They did it with grace, dignity, softness and no
attitude," says Michaels, who has attended 20 Rainbow gatherings and
does legal work for the Family.
Responding to phone calls and e-mails, Rainbow volunteers, totaling 30
to 40 at a time, went to Waveland from across the country to work for a
few days or weeks. REMA also operates a similar relief effort in New
Orleans, dubbed the Welcome Home Cafe.
So widespread is the devastation in coastal Mississippi that until
recently the New Waveland Cafe was essential to survival for some and
to
the local relief effort in general. It served residents who nearly
perished in the disaster alongside workers from the American Red Cross,
Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government groups,
Michaels says.
"The environment of a hurricane is a humbling experience," he says.
"Until you drive for miles and miles and see the same devastation in
these communities - 90 days later - you don't really get it."
With the Waveland area gradually stabilizing, REMA has joined an
umbrella group called Emergency Communities with a plan to relocate its
relief effort to a park in St. Bernard Parish near the devastated Ninth
Ward in New Orleans beginning today, according to Michaels and to
Internet accounts.
REMA marked its last day in Waveland with a Thanksgiving Day feast,
followed by a day of rest and a "Thanks-for-Giving Parade" that
Michaels
helped organize and promote.
In that role, Michaels attended a Waveland City Council meeting during
which local residents took FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to
task over their relief effort.
For all the public criticism of FEMA, the REMA volunteers found the
agency cooperative and helpful - in the same spirit as the Bastrop
(Texas) Ministerial Alliance that REMA teamed with in Waveland.
"Once they (FEMA) saw us succeed, they were very helpful. Ultimately,
they were allies," Michaels says.
REMA volunteers also saw Waveland's overwhelmingly conservative
citizens
give up their instinctive misgivings about the hippie volunteers -
their
colorful clothing, rampant hugging and bouts of bizarre humor. Michaels
says he often saw local residents drop their looks of disdain at a
group
of hippies and thank them after learning they were REMA volunteers.
"These are white, right-wing Christians. These are people who are not
used to taking handouts. You can tell," he says.
Their need is still great, he adds.
"Where the New Waveland Cafe is, the people were told it would be safe
because it was 15 feet above sea level. Seventeen people died. The
stores are gutted. The bank is half-collapsed. The police and fire
departments are reduced to tents. The entire coastal community is flat.
No gutted houses ... flattened. Where there are homes, they are empty.
The new business is, literally, house gutting."
RAINBOW RELIEF:
The Rainbow Family is increasing its relief work in New Orleans by
joining Emergency Communities. The loosely knit group's efforts and
plans are informally reported on the Internet.
• About Rainbow Emergency Management Assembly, www.remarelief.net/
• About REMA in New Orleans, www.welcomehome.org/REMA//?q=node/27
• About REMA in Waveland, www.welcomehome.org/REMA//?q=node/26
• Photos and blogs about REMA effort,
ashevillecommunity.org/hawker/katrina/
• About Rainbow Family, welcomehome.org/rainbow/index.html
• To donate to the Welcome Home Cafe or the Barefoot Doctors' Academy:
Barefoot Doctors' Academy; 897 S. Eugene St., Baton Rouge, LA 70806,
www.barefootdoctorsacademy .com
• To donate to REMA, tinyurl.com/cqdky
• To donate to Emergency Communities, www.emergency
communities.org/index.php?location=donate.htm
— Rainbow Family