OCTOBER 15, TUESDAY

NANOSTEAD PORTRAITS

It was my daughter Susie’s suggestion and a good one. I would photograph the workers at the Nanostead site where in normal times Jeremy produces tiny houses. Now it is the staging area for the relief efforts in Marshall. As we soon learned it is a highly organized effort. There is a place for volunteer workers to be suited up in white hazmat suits and later decontaminated after a day in contaminated Marshall mud. There are tables where donated basic necessities are given out to people who need them, other tables for keeping track of relief operations, other tables for food for workers, a coffee truck offering free coffee run by Joel who lost Zuma Cafe in the flooding and a checkpoint where people carefully monitor who is able to enter Marshall by vehicle.

But it is the spirit of the place which impressed us the most, the friendliness and helpfulness of everyone volunteering there. In one way the whole relief effort is a demonstration of community building connecting and energizing people in the community who didn’t know each other before. Everyone has stories to tell about Helene and everyone listens and supports each other.

Susie and I set up a grey paper backdrop, out of the way, on the edge of a building and began to make portraits of workers both to add to the record of who participated in the relief effort and to honor those who were working so hard. The photographs are available by email to the people who were willing to have their portraits made and will later be incorporated in some kind of record, still to be figured out. The first step is making the photographs. I am putting the first set of photographs on my daily report at billybaba.com and will do this every day in which I make portraits of volunteers as the first step in this project. On this first day I’ve tried to decipher email addresses and have sent copies to everyone who participated. I asked people for their name, email address, profession, relief work they are doing, and home town. I will revise the one line notes they gave me to make the description a little clearer. I would also like any participant that wants to to write a brief story of their hurricane experience and how it affected them to send it to me, Bill Mosher, at rehsom@mac.com. I will then add it to this page.