NPACH: The National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness

New Orleans City Business has coverage of the NPACH sponsored Tsunami - Hurricane exchange visit:

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, said Viola Washington.
One year after Hurricane Katrina, her community was not supposed to be a ghost town. Yet when she walks out the front door of her Gentilly home, she is surrounded by abandoned houses and barren sidewalks.

. . . With recovery moving so slowly here, Washington and a delegation of community leaders traveled to Thailand three weeks ago to study how Third World fishermen along the coast of the Indian Ocean rebuilt their villages in the wake of the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 350,000 people and destroyed 2.5 million homes.

The level of recovery from the tsunami has far outpaced what has taken place in New Orleans. When a delegation of Indonesian residents visited the Crescent City in June, they were stunned that 10 months after the storm parts of New Orleans still looked as if they were hit by a bomb, said Brad Paul, executive director of the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness in the Lower Garden District.

“They were amazed at the lack of progress in these neighborhoods a year out,” Paul said. “They looked around and said, ‘How is this possible that in a country so wealthy you could have this type of devastation and lack of progress?’

Hurricane Katrina Survivor Activists Visit Tsunami-affected Villages in Asia
to Learn Community Rebuilding Methods [pdf]

A delegation of hurricane Katrina and Rita survivors from Mississippi and Louisiana is traveling to visit villages devastated by the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and Indonesia from October 26 – November 9, 2006. The group will also attend a regional conference on people-centered disaster recovery.

The trip is part of an on-going exchange between activists in Asia and the United States, who are promoting models for rebuilding based on human rights, community participation and recognition of government responsibility to hurricane survivors as Internally Displaced persons (IDPs). IDPs have special protections under international human rights standards and the post-disaster policy guidelines recommended by a number of countries, including the U.S.

“In the affected villages, it has been very important to have the full participation of the community in rebuilding. Community took the initiative to organize and build houses with their own hands, in order to make sure that the survivors were the driving force in tsunami recovery, and not only at the mercy of outside speculators,” says Somsook Boonyabancha of Community Organizations Development Institute and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR). ACHR is based in Thailand and is helping to coordinate the visit.

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