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Tuesday, September 6, 2005 5:00 pm
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Eight days have passed since Hurricane Katrina found its way to our front
door. Slowly, I am learning of the whereabouts of my faculty and staff, yet
I still have not heard from many of them. Our communications have been disrupted;
none of the cell phones with 504 area codes work and the Tulane email server
continues to be offline. All of our student records are inaccessible. Over
the past 20 years, our lives and work have adapted to the access to high speed
communications. This disaster underscores for me, how devastating it feels
to be isolated from those with whom we share our everyday lives.
I know that you are all painfully aware of what has transpired in our city
and neighborhoods from national news coverage. Although the coverage has been
quite comprehensive and attempts to convey the personal impact, when the stories
happen in your own backyard, the intensity and heartache is almost beyond comprehension.
Millions of lives have been impacted. Millions of stories are yet to be told.
Today, I learned of two of my students who stayed behind. After the winds calmed,
after the levee breached, after the city filled with water, they found a boat
and began to look for ways to help. They paddled around the fairgrounds, where
Jazz Fest is held, to Esplanade Avenue, a grand boulevard near the French Quarter.
They came upon a nursing home where none of the residents had been evacuated
and none had had food or water for three days. For the next two days, they
broke into homes to salvage water and food destined for spoilage and took it
to the starving residents. In the next nursing home they discovered all the
residents drowned.
Over the last week our Tulane School of Social Work community has demonstrated
its unbridled connection to our community and support of each other. Clusters
of students and faculty have made their way to Baton Rouge and Jackson to support
the evacuees now living there. Others are providing around the clock support
in the hardest hit areas in the Gulf Coast region, manning food banks and administering
trauma services. Our students and faculty have shown their resourcefulness
and their selfless commitment to the welfare of our community.
You probably all know that Tulane will not be able to offer a fall semester.
Although the campus is not severely damaged, the city infrastructure cannot
support anyone being there for some time. We are hopeful we will be able to
resume operation in January. I am presently in Houston and have only today
learned of the extraordinary outpouring of support from my friends and colleagues
in NADD. Thank you. As you can imagine, these last several days have been a
whirlwind, as I've been concentrating on trying to make contact with our faculty,
staff and students and provide support to our present day Diaspora. As of an
hour ago, I am now connected to the NADD list serve. I want you all to know
personally and on behalf of our School community, we are overwhelmed by your
heartfelt expressions of concern and grateful for your offers of assistance
to our students and faculty.
The lessons to be learned from this disaster are just beginning to surface,
and I'm sure there are many more to come. They are both personal and professional.
I hope this episode will go beyond the "tipping point," providing
a "bursting point" for national discussions on our "two Americas." The
disenfranchised are so often invisible to so many Americans. It is unfortunate
that it seems to take a disaster of this proportion to get the attention they
so rightly deserve.
Finally, you all should know that Tulane and the School of Social Work will
recover from this. I'm confident, that as our faculty, staff and students reconvene,
we will see an unbridled outpouring of commitment to rebuilding our School
and surrounding community. Social Work's roots are with the community and its
people, and if anything is to be learned from this horrific tragedy, it is
the vital role we have played and will play in addressing our community's human
needs. These needs are greater now than they have ever been.
Thank you again.
Ron Marks
Dean
Tulane University School of Social Work
New Orleans, Louisiana
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