By Ben Hirsch and Leah Ayer, West St. Recovery Volunteers
Disaster recovery is usually a fairly top-down process. Big relief organizations like FEMA, the Red Cross, United Way and others, dole out government and philanthropic dollars to families who can navigate complex bureaucratic processes and meet certain economic or demographic specifications. It is clear that the impact of Hurricane Harvey demands a massive response that is in line with the scale of these organizations, but it is also true that these aid groups often replicate the social dynamics that facilitate placing some neighborhoods and households in areas that have high flood risks and dangerous exposure to environmental hazards in the first place.
Over the last ten weeks, West Street Recovery has tried to help families recover with an alternative approach. We’re a horizontal relief organization, which means our members are all equal and our work is carried out in a way that resists traditional hierarchies within our group and between our group and the families we serve. To the best of our abilities, we have asked residents to identify needs as they see them, using our position as an interracial and interclass group to connect households to the right resources for them - supplies, information about other organizations, or money to meet their needs.
Nothing embodies this ethos as much as the relationship that West Street Recovery has built with Petra and Raul, a gregarious couple who has lived in Lakewood, a neighborhood in Northeast Houston, for over thirty years. We were lucky to meet Petra when we delivered food and bleach to her neighborhood a week after the storm hit. When we first arrived, we quickly realized that Petra was a key player on her street. While she appreciated what we had brought, she also knew five other households that needed food and tents just as urgently as she did, and made sure we got addresses and understood what they needed. With our encouragement, she identified even more neighbors and offered to distribute any supplies we brought herself.
Petra with West Street Recovery members and April Ward receiving mold resistant drywall from non-profit Living Paradigm at the Houston Reuse Warehouse, a warehouse supplying donated construction materials free-of-charge to nonprofit organizations
(Photo Courtesy of West St. Recovery)
Petra took this on even when her own home had been flooded and subsequently gutted. Her family was living in a tent in her driveway, and she had not received adequate financial aid. Over the next few weeks, Petra worked tirelessly to navigate recovery case management organization BakerRipley, the Disaster Relief Centers, and FEMA’s processes for securing grants and resources. But she has yet to receive aid despite her family’s need and her low-income situation. Two months after the storm, she had spent the little savings her family had, and still didn’t have a warm room to sleep in. Eventually, during our weekly supply dropoffs, it became clear to all of us how unlikely it was she would be getting aid in time to make her house somewhat liveable before the temperatures dropped for the winter. We knew we had enough resources to buy enough supplies for a single room in her house, but we didn’t have any clue about how we would build it.
Raul, Petra’s husband, initially the quieter of the two, was the answer. Like so many people who live in Lakewood, he already knew how to hang, tape, and float sheetrock; he’d rebuilt their home himself after Tropical Storm Allison. He’d grown older and frailer since Allison, however, and the prospect of rebuilding after Harvey alone was daunting. We had the materials and hands and he had the know-how; everyone was ready to get to work as soon as we could get the materials delivered.
Raul teaches Ben and Andrew how to fit drywall around window fittings.
(Photo Courtesy of West St. Recovery)
Despite our complete lack of experience, Raul patiently taught us how to install insulation, hang the drywall, and tape, float, and sand the seams. He let us make numerous learning mistakes on the interior of his home. More than anything though, he taught us to be confident and patient and ask for help when we were confused. Throughout all this, he had three refrains:
“See, it’s easy.”
“Now you are practicing.”
and
“After this, you can help the others.”
The construction process stretched our interactions from brief ten-minute supply drops to marathon-long work days. While we had initially planned to build one room, an emerging partnership between WSR and Living Paradigm CDC gave us access to enough supplies to take on rebuilding walls in the entire home. In addition partnering with this previously existing organization allowed us to access tools from the Houston Tool Bank. After a few days of working, Petra began insisting we eat with her family. We tried to convince her it was not necessary, that she didn’t need to spend precious energy or money on feeding us when her home was destroyed. But Petra insisted, and we were glad she did.
Last week, most of the West Street Recovery crew found themselves sitting around a table under Petra and Raul’s overhang, eating and laughing in a circle of folding chairs, the tent they sleep in to one side and Petra’s make-do kitchen to the other. We were celebrating the progress we had all made on the house. At one point, Petra looked around at the eight of us and said, “I really didn’t know how we were going to do this, especially without FEMA’s help. But now you are my family.”
Dinner with Petra and Raul’s family and West Street Recovery
(Photo courtesy of West St. Recovery)
Those who criticize top-down relief efforts often argue for mutual aid in disaster relief. The idea of mutual aid - a voluntary, decentralized approach to offering time, energy and resources - is both romantic and aspirational. We know that the closeness we’ve built with Raul and Petra can’t be replicated with each family, and it would be misguided to assume that everyone experiencing such losses will want to make new friends or share meals together. But the spirit of our interactions with this remarkable family is something that any aid group could incorporate. That is, we have sought opportunity to learn from the residents we are working with, and we have found there is so much opportunity to learn. That is what makes this mutual aid and not charity.
Our work with this family has been guided by the acknowledgement that they better understood what their immediate community needed more than we ever could. It has been grounded in the understanding that listening to them and providing the material resources they need to assist others would be effective and efficient. The rebuilding process has shown us that instead of demanding that people demonstrate helplessness (as some charities do), it is most efficient and empowering to use all of the skills and experience that families want to contribute toward their own recovery. It has also demonstrated what should be obvious to anyone working in communities like Lakewood: the families who need help want badly to help themselves, they have skills we do not, and they have so much to teach us.
Raul rebuilding the windows in his home. He has taken on the most difficult tasks in the rebuilding process.
(Photo courtesy of West St. Recovery)
As Raul and Petra have both reminded us in different ways over the last few weeks, we did not just go through this process so that one family can get back indoors or that we as volunteers could be enriched and pat ourselves on the back for our altruism. We went through the process of bumbling through our first rebuild with a patient family of teachers so that we can now lend our hands to help more families that need to get back inside before the Texas winter, which has been mercifully late, arrives. As we continue our work, we will maintain humility knowing that each family has skills we do not, and we will be eager to learn from them (if they want to share them with us).
You can donate to West Street Recovery’s Youcaring here.