Resurrecting the Church after Katrina
October 28, 2005
NEW ORLEANS –– Thirty years ago, they were scattered across the American landscape, taken in a family or two at a time by helpful strangers or Catholic parishes.
Vien Nguyen remembers that in rural southern Missouri in 1975, the nearest Vietnamese refugee family was 30 miles away. One day, they were visited by their priest who had also fled Vietnam. He told them that then-New Orleans Archbishop Phillip Hannan had invited Vietnamese priests and their flock to come to this city. Nguyen’s family soon followed.
“It was a time of turmoil. The Vietnamese gravitated to their community leaders,” said Nguyen, now 42, and a leader himself as pastor of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in northeastern New Orleans.
“Seventy percent of my people are from the same place in North Vietnam, Nam Dinh. We left North Vietnam for the south in 1954,” Pastor Nguyen explained. “Catholics stood no ground with the Communists.”
Their community is now scattered across the American South due to Hurricane Katrina. Those who have returned are laying a foundation for the rest to rejoin them. The church and the nonprofit Vietnamese American Community in Louisiana are calling on community members to join work crews to rehabilitate and reconstruct homes and businesses. And as they wait for essential city services to be restored and for temporary trailers from the federal government, community leaders are educating folks on the need to register with FEMA.
“We don’t need a lot of help from the government, we just need a little,” said Cyndi Nguyen, vice president of the Vietnamese American Community in Louisiana, who has been hired by FEMA as a community liaison. She and the other members are on a mission to bring people back to a tight weave of family, community and faith, not to mention New Orleans itself.
While the archbishop’s call was the chance to reconnect with friends and extended families in a region with deep Catholic and French roots, it also offered a familiar climate and an opportunity for many to ply their trade as fishermen. By 1980, Louisiana had one of the largest Vietnamese American communities –– well behind California and Texas, but still third in the country. Since then, its numbers have grown more slowly than in more economically vital places. There were just under 25,000 Vietnamese Americans counted in Louisiana in 2000, but what the community lacks in size may be made up for in determination.
“Thirty years ago we didn’t have nothing,” said Cyndi Nguyen. “Do you think that it will be hard for us now?”
In the subdivisions around the Mary Queen Church, populated mostly by black and Vietnamese Americans, few people have returned to begin the grueling recovery. Carpet, furniture and Sheetrock pile in front of just a few homes on each block, though most took on no more than a few feet of water.
FEMA is negotiating with the church to put 100 trailers on a 26-acre tract of land owned by the church, Pastor Nguyen said. But the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board and the local electric and gas company, Entergy Corp., are noncommittal on when services will start flowing to the eastern parts of the city.
“We are waiting on electricity. We are waiting on water,” said District Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who visited the church Sunday for its third Mass held since the storm struck Aug. 29. More than 800 people, some driving from as far as Houston and Austin, came for the service.
When utilities are restored, community leaders say they will be prepared. Pastor Nguyen drove to Fort Smith, Ark., two weeks ago to meet people who offered to locate wholesale homebuilding equipment. “Once the reconstruction begins, I believe it will be very difficult to get the lumber,” he said.
On Sunday, the church signed up parishioners whose homes need work. Pastor Nguyen said many people in the surrounding subdivisions did not have flood insurance since the area is not a FEMA flood zone. And while liability insurance is required by mortgage lenders, some people didn’t have even that, having paid off their homes early with loans from family. By pooling their resources now, Pastor Nguyen said everyone could be helped.
Workers in the recovery work crews will be paid, but how others in the Vietnamese American community will earn a living in the months ahead is less certain.
Many fishermen did not have expensive insurance for their boats, stretched thin in recent years by rising fuel costs and falling shrimp prices, while small businesses owners in the ruined central city neighborhoods of New Orleans lost everything.
Cyndi Nguyen has been working with both groups to translate and complete the application for low-interest SBA disaster loans, a process required for FEMA to provide disaster relief compensation.
“FEMA won’t make them whole again, but they will get something,” she said.
Inside the Mary Queen church, the promise of a new beginning is easier to imagine. Floodwater did not enter the church. Just about a third of the pews had been waterlogged from rain that poured through a ripped section of the roof.
“In all the changes, the one constancy has been the Mass,” said Pastor Nguyen. “It is only right and proper that the church is where we should begin the rebuilding.”
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