Miss Thunderstood

During my first week in New Orleans I met a woman named Maria Cicci while volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans East. Maria ended up staying at my apartment for a week while she was in the city and when we weren’t working together in the Upper Ninth Ward with Habitat or sleeping after working in the Upper Ninth, we ate Cajun food, drank a whole bunch of Abita beer and talked nonstop about how much we liked New Orleans

As mid-Western girls (she’s from Springfield, IL, I grew up in Chicago) who’ve come to expect a chilly reception from strangers, we were blow away by the gracious warmth of both locals and transplants we met here.

But it wasn’t simply vacation, or even charitable intentions that brought Maria to New Orleans last September. She was here in part because of the 4th anniversary of the hurricane and her experiences on the beach in Thailand during the 2004 tsunami. She’s since said she plans to take a service trip once a year. I wanted to get a sense from her of the way living through a disaster influenced her ideas about service and volunteering and I’ve transcribed relevant bits of our conversation below.

Why were you in Thailand?

We were in Japan teaching, a couple of my friends wanted to go somewhere fun for Christmas break since none of us were going home for Christmas.

What happened on the day of the tsunami?

It was our last day in Phuket and we were going back to Bangkok that day to spend our last three or four days hanging out in Bangkok. We had some time before the train was going to leave, so we went down to the beach.

We get to the beach and my friends all disperse. One friend is swimming in the ocean, another friend is walking along the beach. I was sitting up reading my book because I was feeling tired and lazy. My friend came running up and is like, “Hey, Maria, give me my camera, the ocean looks really weird.”

I looked down and the tide had gone back a good amount, way more than it should have in a few minutes time. She starts taking pictures, everybody’s pointing and talking about it, but going about their business. I go back to reading my book and all of the sudden there’s this rush of water underneath me. We grabbed what stuff was around us and we ran toward the boardwalk. It was probably a good six feet up from the sand and water. The water stopped at the boardwalk.

Everybody else was standing up on the boardwalk. All the chairs and umbrellas had been lifted up and were floating around in the ocean at this point. I don’t know what was going through our minds other than, “I’ve never seen a tide like that.” As we’re talking about it, we start to see the water go back down to where it was before.

One of my friends took off because in the initial tide she got her camera wet and she was worried about it. So the three of us were trying to figure out if we were going to go back to the hostel and try to go or if we were going to get something to eat and another wave of water rushed underneath us. This time there was a lot more and it was moving a lot faster.

It went way above the boardwalk this time. Everybody started dispersing and running in all different directions. As far as I can remember, I ran across the street and toward some buildings. There was a hotel that had a big concrete wall behind it. I ran up to the wall and the water was rushing around my waist. I didn’t see a way around the wall. I saw other people climbing up on this wall to keep from drowning or getting pulled under and so I went to jump on the wall and the tide kind of pushed me up.

I don’t know how far the water came up—it was a good four feet off the ground, at least. At some point the water started receding. To this day I don’t remember the water receding, but at some point it did because I got off the wall. I heard my friend calling out my name. She came out from around a corner. All I saw was her limping and the back of one of her legs was cut open almost to the bone and blood was coming out pretty fast. I started to panic, ran around to get to her.

By the time I got to her, she’d passed out on the ground. She was still somewhat conscious but she kind of faded in and out. I didn’t see anyone else around us at this point because I assumed everyone was moving to higher ground. I started calling out for help and this older couple comes out of the hotel. They’d see all this happen. Nothing happened to them they were fine, but they wanted to help anybody who might have been hurt. They came running over, saw me and my friend, grabbed a t-shirt and wrapped it around her leg to stop the bleeding. Grabbed a bunch of Thai people that were running around. One of them had a truck and they took my friend, put her in the truck and told me they were driving off to the hospital.

Once you got to the hospital and then to the airport, who helped you, did you say earlier it was the Red Cross?

No, I didn’t know who anyone was affiliated with but all I remember is all the emergency supplies were from the Red Cross.

Was it clear there were people there to help you, or give aid?

There was a woman, a Thai national helping us in the airport, as we went from the Phuket hospital to the Bangkok airport and were waiting for the flight to take off. Before that it was chaos. Right after the tsunami everyone was running every which way, traffic was stopped there were no taxis.

That night we left in ambulances to the airport in Phuket, we stayed overnight in that airport. My friend stayed in the ambulance because she couldn’t be outside the support they had her on. There were a bunch of ambulances. I remember a German couple vividly. They couldn’t speak very good English. The husband was badly injured. The wife was fine, but she was terrified, and so she spoke basic English to me and somehow I translated that English to something the Thai medic could understand and back and forth. I didn’t speak any German, I think I threw in a Spanish word I was so confused.

So what was your sense of aid in the aftermath of the tsunami?

If you consider the scale, and after seeing it on the news and what happened in Indonesia and the sheer panic and chaos and destruction, and all those people who are injured—I was like, “how the hell did they get all that food and water to us in the airport?” I thought it was amazing.

What did you do after the tsunami?

I went back to Japan and was there for a week and decided that I need to go home for a while. I was there for about a month, thinking about what I was gonna do. This was my last year in Japan. I didn’t know what I needed to do, but I knew I needed to work for either disaster relief or humanitarian aid, or some kind of non-profit work that made a difference.

I knew I wanted to stay in the Chicago area and DePaul’s Masters in Public Service Management was the most relevant program. They have different concentrations, you didn’t have to choose a concentration, but you could—say you wanted to go into public health, or fundraising, and I think there was an international concentration. I choose to go with the most general one, because I still wasn’t sure what I wanted.

Did it become clearer as you went through the program?

I’m still completely undecided about what I want to do with the non-profit world. It solidified my interest in it.

How so?

DePaul taught it like an MBA program and said it was an MBA program for non-profits. But your focus wasn’t on making the most money possible, it was on making the most difference possible. The whole fact the school was named for St. Vincent DePaul who’s famous for his service, and giving, seemed fitting.

They offer a lot of international and national programs like the one that brought me to New Orleans after Katrina. They only had about seven main professors and each of them had a thing they were interested in. And they were about creating a new and exciting program.

People don’t realize how active non-profits are. My mom is a nurse and she just realized she works for a nonprofit, even private schools are technically nonprofits.

What did you do when you came to New Orleans with your school?

It was with a grant writing class. It was an elective and I was like, hey an elective that lasts a week and I get to go to New Orleans, that’s pretty damn cool.

Am I right that the organization you worked with, things didn’t really work out?

I was disappointed with the organization, I was hoping to work with a really cool grassroots organization that was really into helping the people, but it turns out the manager of the organization we worked with didn’t really live in New Orleans and he only came in here, some ridiculously small amount of time. He had an extremely small staff and these huge plans and goals that were ridiculous. It was a lot of inexperience. It was giving people a lot of false hope.

If anything good came out of it though, it made me realize you can’t just label your organization a non-profit and apply for a 501(c)3 and say you do good. You have to actually be a legitimate organization and run well to make a difference.

Well and this is sort of something I’m interested in too. Knowing the truth about organizations you’re spending your time and money with.

I remember after Katrina a lot of people were sending donations to the Red Cross and the Red Cross got in trouble because they started using the money for other programs. [Ed note: This definitely happened after September 11. Not sure about Katrina.]

How did you feel when the flooding happened here?

Oh yeah. I would say I still had PTSD, and when that hit, I was like, “What the fuck is this the apocalypse?” It struck me really badly just to see that happen here in America. As much as I hate to say it, you expect that kind of chaos from third world countries because their infrastructure’s not where ours is. But then you look at what happened here, and you’re like, oh my god doesn’t matter what country you’re in.

So how’s this trip been?

Excellent. Better than expected. I came down here wanting to do something positive for New Orleans and I don’t know, people have been so friendly and doing something where you see tangible results, like siding going up on a house, and having the bruises and pain that go with it, gives you a sense of accomplishment. That is what I want out of my life, I want to be able to see tangible results with whatever I do. Theory is always good, but it doesn’t work for me. I need to see the person benefit from my actions.