After the Flood

I flew to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans on July 1, 2006, one week after my eighteenth birthday, where, except for a few weeks of visits home, I would live for the next eight months. I thought I was going to build the revolution. I didn't know that the biggest change would be in me. My journey had begun six months earlier at the 2006 World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, where I attended a workshop about bottom-up organizing in post-Katrina New Orleans led by Curtis Muhammad, a prominent civil rights organizer who worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the sixties. Curtis had been living in New Orleans for many years and, with others, had founded the People's Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF), an organization designed to empower those New Orleans residents who had suffered the most from the effects of the storm but who had very little political clout of their own.