!First aid station --- agk's diary 9 September 2025 @ 05:04 UTC --- written on GPD MicroPC with vi over ssh late at night, crickets and humidity --- The sound of Katrina, as I remember it: - Fuck Katrina by 5th Ward Weebie - Get Ya Hustle On by Juvenile - Georgia Bush by Lil Wayne A documentary recorded in our neighborhood, same time as the interview below: - Welcome to New Orleans by Rasmus Holm --- This is the end of my commemoration of twenty years of hurricane Katrina. After this I can forget again. In August '05 an arsonist burnt my squat and all my stuff. Spoonie shot and killed my dog. My boyfriend was in jail. So when Mo and Bork told me to get to New Orleans now, my cousin and I said fuck it, hustled medical and construction supplies, and took a bus to Philly where we smuggled ourselves there in a truck of relief supplies. My trusted comrade Roger was relieved when we got to the first-aid station he started with neighbors and friends. His parents were dying. With Mo and I there (we arrived the same day) he could go. When Michael posted the below interview with Roger to New Orleans Indymedia, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff Dept wouldn't let black people leave the city yet. Our neighborhood's 30-strong "cracker squad" militia had shot at least eleven black people, including Donnell Herrington, and bragged. A man they killed still lay under a blanket in our street. 46,838 federal troops were deployed in Louisiana by the day of the interview, many rotated directly from Afghanistan and Iraq occupation. At least 10,000 had served in the 2004 battles for Falluja, where in three weeks they followed orders and rules of engagement to force 300,000 Iraqis to flee, kill 2,000, ... ("dead family members were buried in their gardens because people could not leave their homes," "civilians carrying white flags gunned down by American soldiers," "corpses tied to US tanks and paraded around like trophies," -*This is our Guernica," The Guardian, 5/27/2005) ...destroy 36,000 homes, 8,400 shops, 60 nurseries and schools, and 65 mosques and religious sanctuar- ies, then impose a strict identity card system that turned Falluja's ruins into a prison. Within days of deployment to N.O., each soldier had the first of many sickening realizations: "This is not Iraq, or Haiti. It's my own country." Many scores of local law enforcement from across the country were deputized by Louisiana and self- deployed with surplus military equipment. I didn't see any of them have the sickening realization. I'm sure in part because they were an all-volunteer force. "The guys who went wanted to play zombie apocalypse or have a license to kill black people," a Georgia State Trooper told me a year later. On Sept. 9, storyteller Queen Mother Suma Diarra's 12 year old daughter Rfuaw said to Chuck Munson, "I've been lucky as a person who is somewhere between poor and middle class.... People need med- ication. The curfew makes it hard to move around... There are around 500 people still left here in Algiers, including families, kids and elderly. We have running water but no electricity. There are still dead bodies lying in the street." --- Community efforts to save Algiers continue by Michael Steinberg New Orleans, Sept. 10, 2005 -- Efforts are contin- uing by grassroots organizers to preserve the still inhabited community of Algiers in New Orleans. Algiers is located on the West Bank of the Mississ- ippi across from downtown New Orleans. It was not flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and remains dry. The neighborhood has running water and electricity, and utility workers are working to get the gas on. [From Sept. 9 article by Steinberg: Longtime community activist Malik Rahim, Algiers resident, has been rallying his neighbors to remain in their homes and organize to save their community. Roger Benham of Willimantic, CT came south with Food Not Bombs members from Hartford, CT a few days ago. "We went to Covington first," Benham said in a phone interview with this reporter.... On the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, "Veterans For Peace has a camp there and has been feeding people.... Veterans for Peace came into Algiers yesterday," Benham reported. "We took the causeway across Ponchartrain into the city today. We had to go through a checkpoint but got through OK.... We set up a medical station in the Masjid Bilal mosque on Teche Street," Benham said.... The area is under martial law and is being patrolled by the US Army's 5th Cavalry.] "It's our first full day of operating our first aid station," Roger said. "We're trying to help people help themselves." Benham and four other health care volunteers, including three other licensed EMTs, arrived midday Friday with a van full of medical supplies.... Benham reported that a number of visitors to the first aid station today were looking for prescript- ion drugs they'd run out of. "Several of them were vets who depend on the VA for their blood pressure medications," he said.... "We also went to visit elders in their homes nearby today. On one house- call I met a 101 year old woman. She's doing fine." Militarization Benham had abruptly ended our phone interview Friday night. He explained that was because of the raid approach of a military unit. "That was Civil Affairs," he explained. "They're going door to door doing a census. There's also paramedics with them, and FEMA paramedics as well. They don't quite know what to make of us. They're trying to treat us as community liaisons." The Civil Affairs personnel are Army Special Forces from Fort Bragg, NC. "The FEMA medics were upset that we're here, that we beat them to the scene," Benham reported. "They're fire department paramedics, one from San Diego and two from Idaho." FEMA's supposed to be setting up a medical aid station as well," he said. "So far they've just set up razor wire. It's next to a private charity that's been distributing water and food from a warehouse there [but only to people in vehicles]." Utilities Benham said the electricity had gone on the day before. "Utility workers are trying to get the gas on now," he said. "Some people already have gas. The city water never went off. So some people can boil it already, but the authorities are saying to use bottled water." Forward military assets Benham said the neighborhood is now being patrolled by the Army's First Cavalry. "The general vibe of the military is OK. Most of the soldiers I talked to are just back from Iraq. They wanted to know how we got [invited] in the mosque. We're using the masulluh (sanctuary), and they committed a no-no by coming in with their weapons. They realized they made a mistake though." Benham reported that a US Navy amphibious assault ship anchored in the Mississippi River near down- town New Orleans was visible from Algiers. At this point Benham informed me that FEMA was likely listening in on our call. "They called another of the EMTs I'm with," he said. "They asked him specific questions about a phone conversation he'd had here. Benham then said he had to pause because a loud Sea Stallion military helicopter was flying over. Medication refill routine When our interview resumed, Benham told me that he'd asked a soldier about how people who needed meds but don't have money to buy them could get help. "People who have money and can get a ride can go to drugstores that are operating now in nearby towns [if the Sheriff's office will let them cross the parish line]," Benham explained. "But if you don't have money, the soldier said you'd be taken to the airport and issued the needed meds. Then, though, you'll be put on a plane and evacuated from the city. If you have family in a major city they'll take you there. If you don't they fly you wherever the plane is going." "What we need now is an MD who can write prescrip- tions so people can get their meds." Rasmus Holm and Malik Benham said he'd seen some Danish journalists in Algiers today, but other than that no media presence since his arrival Friday. "The Danish journalists had been around New Orleans before they came here," he reported. But this was the only part they'd seen that was still inhabited." Benham also said that Malik Rahim has organized more people to come to Algiers to provide relief supplies and other support.