Derrick Evans' FEMA trailer visited the 2008 UUA General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Derrick Evans, founder of the Turkey Creek Initiative.
UUA-UUSC Gulf Coast Relief Fund planners and grantees gathered in 2007 in New Orleans.
Gulf Coast Relief Fund Grantee Reflects on Katrina Anniversary: “It’s Not Over Yet”
August 19, 2008
Nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States, Derrick Evans has a simple message that he's trying to deliver to all who will listen: “It’s not over yet.”
Evans, a native of Turkey Creek, Mississippi, lost his home in the storm; his mother’s house was also destroyed. They lived in a FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Association) trailer for “about 18 months.” Evans said he realized, as the second anniversary of Katrina was approaching in 2007, that it was “not only the slow pace of the recovery and all its pieces” that bothered him. “What was in my craw was [that] these powerful and truthful stories about that recovery [were not] getting out to the world. The national media wasn’t telling the stories, or telling them well. And no one had pieced together a master narrative about the economic housing cultural crisis that hit four states.”
Evans is the founder of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives (TCCI), an innovative non-profit community development corporation engaged in the comprehensive revitalization of coastal Mississippi’s impoverished, historic, and ecologically important Turkey Creek community and watershed. The Turkey Creek estuary was settled following the Civil War by African-American freed-men whose twenty-first century descendants now find themselves besieged near the geographic and commercial epicenter of Mississippi's second largest and fastest growing city (Gulfport). TCCI is one of many community groups that received support from the Unitarian Universalist Association/ Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUA-UUSC) Gulf Coast Relief Fund.
Evans explained, “The only people in America [who might begin to understand this problem] were those who came down as volunteers. And even then, a one-week stint can't begin to offer the kind of immersion that it takes to understand what kind of disastrous experience this has been.” So Evans began to forge relationships with a large number of grassroots citizen survivor activists from Texas to coastal Alabama, as well as individuals from the Gulf Coast who are displaced around the country.
According to Evans, the activists realized that if they brought a FEMA trailer to many parts of the country—to try to visually present not only the living conditions of Katrina survivors but the reality that the struggle for Gulf Coast recovery is far from over—the trailer—cramped, foul-smelling, oppressively hot—might help to raise the level of education and engagement in ordinary American citizens.
Evans said that he and other activists “wanted to create a platform outside of the Gulf Coast region, to make sure that residents of the Gulf Coast aren’t forgotten, and to make sure that residents of the Gulf region know there are people who care.”
Evans observed that the misplaced priorities of the U.S. government have only fed the slowness of recovery—with terrible results. “What’s going on and not going on [in the Gulf region] is instructive of the horribly imbalanced values that got us stuck in Iraq, got us addicted to carbon-based fuels, are helping to pollute our waterways, and are holding back toxic water with insufficient levees.
The Gulf Coast is the crucible,” he said, “the intersection of all these horrible values and priorities and the overwhelming disregard for people and the environment and affordable housing—and that is not new on the Gulf Coast or anywhere else in this country.”
Evans plans to make sure that delegates—and the media—who travel to Denver for the Democratic National Convention, and those who go to St. Paul for the Republican National Convention, will know how much has been lost in the Katrina disaster. Evans’ FEMA trailer will be at both conventions, and will also travel in the coming weeks to Baton Rouge, to Montgomery, to Martha’s Vineyard, and other locations. “The Gulf Coast has to be more than a cash cow for casinos and oil, a way of producing revenue for states that don’t return money” to help the residents of the area return and recover, he said.
“We need to make visible this continuing and ongoing crisis. We don’t shirk from the challenge of getting folks to recognize that this is not a singular issue recovery…and it’s not over yet.”
For more information contact la_racialjustice @ uua.org.
Last updated on Wednesday, August 27, 2008.
