NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, USA. 03 SEPT 2005.
You encounter a stench so fierce that you realise that you are not smelling it, you are ingesting it. Before you, bloated, obscene in its popped buttons, straining zippers and nudity, the body floats face down in its own front yard. It is female, which makes it much worse. It is penned in by a chain link fence that now rises only inches above the waters that have sunk an entire city, A small current, caused by an open gas main, spewing flame three metres high, runs small maelstroms around the body, making her spin softly and... bump... bump... bump... against the fence like a billiard ball kissing the cushions.
The sun, merciless, ferments everything. Ferments the stink, ferments the diseased blackened water, ferments your sweat, your very thoughts. You stand by. Seated on your idling jetski, hand on the throttle, suddenly weary, your bowels loose. You sweat, thankful that the water is going out and not in. You cannot look away from the body. The indignity of it. It becomes your own.
Two Blackhawk helicopters thunder overhead at roof level. The sky is filled with them, giant insects on a hot summer day. Feels like the whole world is finally here. Help is underway. The sound is deafening, but you don't cringe, don't even look up, don't even cover your ears or close your eyes. You can't. You are looking at a bloated dead body. Its once ebony skin now bleached a grotesque grey, floating in its own front yard. And you think... this is America.
You do not wonder what put you here, deep in the fabled ninth ward of New Orleans on the back of a donated jetski tear-assing around looking for people to rescue. You know that answer. It took a tsunami. December 26th, 2004, the day your life stepped on the third rail. You remember the moment when you tuned into the BBC as you woke up that day after Christmas. Tsunami on a massive scale right in the crossroads of the entire surfing world. As a surfer, this tsunami became a personal matter to you. Indonesia, the greatest surfing area in the world. A place you knew intimately. A vital part of your world. All of it somehow leading to this outrage floating face down before you.
The smell makes you think of another. A different soul on the other side of the world, months before. Another body, floating face down, off the forgotten Banyak Islands of Indonesia. He stunk too. And you think about how well you now know death. You actually have a nose for it. A smell usually reserved for firefighters and cops and soldiers and grave robbers.
Now it is in you, this familiarity, like a virus. In some ways, it has become who you are now.
So you breathe it in and think back on the first days of January, 2005 when you and a friend bumped into each other at LAX with slightly confused grins on your faces trying to explain to each other what you were doing there. That you were going to Sumatra to help any way you could, because you were a surfer, and Sumatra is a surfing place and that was about all you felt. But that time is not now. You are one hundred years older now.
You cannot remember the exact time you threw in together with your friend but you'd never been happier about anything in your life. You remember the defining moment. When you and your friend sat helpless in the air-conditioned lobby of the Bumiminang hotel in Padang, West Sumatra, frustrated and angry. Your new education about large non-profit organisations complete. How slow moving they are, how crooked, how clever, how very bureaucratic. They let you know right away that this just wasn't your party. But you knew they were wrong. And you sat there at the bar. Beached. Thinking about one shot of whiskey and then casting it all to the fates. That is when your friend turned to you and said, Fuck it, let's do it ourselves and then laid down his plastic, threatening to take a credit line out on his house back in Newport Beach. You remember thinking about how much his wife was going to dig that. But it was Money where his mouth was. Wow. And you could see that he meant it.
You remember that.
You remember those heady days that followed and how they led to that moment, $40,000 borrowed dollars later, when you pulled away from the pier at Bungus Harbour at midnight on a 25-metre wooden boat laden with thirty tons of food, water and medicine, a local team of Islamic female doctors who had volunteered from the local medical university, canoes, fishing gear, school supplies, soccer balls, toys, 20 pounds of lollipops and four goats and five chickens. You were setting sail for the northernmost point in the archipelago, Simeulue Island - 35 clicks from the epicentre of the quake, a place from where no word had been heard. A place no one had even considered. Mysterious waters where westerners had not been allowed for over 25 years as a civil war raged on the mainland. Distant waters, unheard of waters, rife with real, gun-toting pirates, tall tales and terrific storms, danger and that best teacher on earth: adventure.
And you remember that it was all true.
Six months later you were shaking your fist at the machine. And better yet because you had the right to. You and your friend were now the directors of your own non-profit surfer owned/operated, 501c legal eagle bonafide outfit. It even had a cool name:
SURFZONE RELIEF OPERATIONS
The direct force of remote coastal aid
Scrambling for funds, going into massive debt, you and your friend your team had reached those remote shores and found desperate people and you had helped them. After six months in those water over three separate hair-raising voyages, you and your friends had distributed over 75 tons of fresh food, water, building materials and medicine to some of the most remote villages on earth. You had replaced over 60 dugout canoes subsequent fishing gear, you had established over 42 schoolrooms complete with crayons and toys and books, you had delivered viable breeding livestock to replace those lost, you had dived the raised reefs lifted skyward by the great shifting of tectonic plates and reported your findings and the regions first images to the USGS, US and Cal Tech. You had been boarded by pirates and the Banda Aceh Navy and not lost one once of aid to the active black market that preys on all relief efforts. The jackals who smile on the large aid organisation for their great donated supply dumps, their hurried acquisition of often befuddled local volunteers and then the "assessing" representative's inevitable swift. Here is when the jackals ~ "confiscating" and selling it all to the highest bidder.
No. You hadn't lost an ounce of supplies. Not even with the rusty even with the rusty barrel of a gun to your chest. You and your friends delivered it all byhand. Taking it that last crucial mile. The longest mile of all, directly into the hands of those who needed it most. You had also established a grass-roots disaster preparedness program for the city of Padang holding the first test evacuation of Indonesia, 10,000 district, making their way up to higher ground at the sound of the siren that you had bought off a defunct fire truck.
Yes, and all the while you had sailed, and sailed reaching thousands of lives, holding over 35 emergency medical clinics in the tsunami-scoured villages aiding the fringes of life on the outermost islands, often working late into the night in blizzards of malaria-ridden mosqutoes. And yiy had done all this, in todays fucked-up global political climate no less, sailing shoulder-to-shoulder with Muslims, Jews, Christians, Palistinians, Catholics, Pagans, Fathers, Sons and Holy Ghosts.
You and your friend had put yourself on the front line and achieved the extraordinary. You had built teams and executed missions. You felt 10-feet tall, and why not? You were surfers, not choirboys. You had bent every rule in the book to do it. Why not feel great and yell to the heavens? After a life of surfing? Just about the most self-serving lifestyle on earth? Why not yell to the heavens that you'd done something for others, thousands of others, and it was wonderful? But you are not feeling that way now. Not as you stare at this swollen body before you in the ninth ward of New Orleans, sweating, and breathing it in, letting it move through you, become a part of you, never to go away. You think back about how you'd arrived home from Sumatra and how you and your team had been spending weeks rattling your cups for any contribution you could get. Rattling your cups with the vision of continuing the good work, anywhere in the world, at anytime. All it would take is money. And not even that much in the scheme of things. And you know in your heart that you and your team knew how to walk that last mile for every cent. Honour every donation. Personally translate every dollar into a bag of rice, like the ones you'd swam through six-foot surf on the deck of your surfboard to the beach time and again in Sumatra. Translate it into jetski fuel so that you could show up for Katrina in the ninth ward with your donated ]et-skis and help them take starving, frightened, confused people out of flooded churches and second storeys of schools and 200 degree attics. The secret, desperate places where the victims had sought their higher ground, hunkered down for days drinking the black biomass of Lake Pontchartrain that had erased any human sense in the ninth ward. Knowing that this is what you and your team of surfers had done, are doing and will do.
So you stare at this body whose soul has fled to the ultimate higher ground and you feel a familiar outrage coming on. You are no longer a wet behind the ears self made aid worker, but a newly educated one, literally afloat in the world of giant corporate aid organisations. You sit, breathing it in and regard them. They whom you are so jealous of. They who have all the money and all the power. You think of the Red Cross. Our shining monument of care. An organisation that has raked in 826 million dollars in private funds for Katrina efforts with its relentless money gathering. Seventy per cent of all the giving there is. The Red Cross, an organisation that has pre-existing contracts with FEMA and the affected states that will reimburse them for emergency shelters and many of their other disaster services. Reimburse them with your tax money. You sit on your idling jetski and think about that. And you realise that you are giving twice when you give to them. Once with a good heart, secondly, unknowingly, through your taxes. The Red Cross. An organisation that is everywhere, every website, every grocery store, give, give, give. An organisation that spent $111 million last year in fundraising alone. An organisation that urges our brothers and sisters and sons and daughters to give blood and then turns around and sells it to the tune of $1.5 billion a year, just part of their $3 billion income. Vampires, you think, that's my blood they are selling. And you think back on all your far-flung Sumatran adventures and now your work in New Orleans and how you had never once run across a single Red Cross representative.
So you stare at this body, not offering yourself any answers to the question as to why it exists. It just does. Life is tough, get used to it. Stop whining. Try to get it right. Follow the example of the firefighters around you. Mine the salt of the earth, not the gold. Find comfort in that
you are lucky to be here, again, helping. And will again. Find comfort in that. It is time to go. A friend beckons. He is using an oar to smash an attic window of a local cop's house. The cop is there, sick with grief. The poison water up to the top of his porch. His life drowned.
So you hit the throttle, pick your way through a murdered neighbourhood, the body behind you a late night photograph in your mind forever. You hit the throttle and you sweat and you ingest this poisoned place and you think. You think back on it all and how you got here and you ask yourself why you do it. Ego? Addiction to the thrill? A romantic hero complex? Maybe. You are a surfer after all. But you know there is more. Something primal.
And you know it is found in the eyes of those you help.
Why else have you sacrificed it all, abandoned a career, lost friends, gone broke, licked stamps, sent out fliers, emails, phone calls and spent so many of your days rattling your cup for donations?
Why?
Easy.
For a day like this one.
The one you are living right here and right now with the people of the ninth ward of New Orleans. Surrounded by the salt of the earth. Helping human beings. Carrying old men through the muck on your back. Railing against the madness of this world. Adding your light to the sum of light.
And you do it for the eyes. The look in the eyes of those you help. The look that convinces you that this is the way things
should be. The impulse is within us all. One need only act upon it.
Why?
For days like this one.
Absolutely goddamn right.
For days like this one.
- MATT GEORGE, SILVERLAKE, CA. 5:14PM, 100CT,2005.
Bill Sharp and Matt George, co-founders of SURFZONE RELIEF OPERATIONS, are now part of a growing movement of smaller, grass roots non-profits who adhere to the philosophy of direct aid. That is, to encourage those who donate to hand pick the smaller, more nimble charities that focus on ensuring that donations are put directly into the hands of those whom they were originally intended for. Please visit Bill and Matt and their team at Surfzonerelief.org
