Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun own a small contracting business well known in their community in New Orleans. They are a hardworking family that owns many properties and is known for their reliability in their work. Abdulrahman goes by Zeitoun and is a stubborn, yet incredibly driven man. Kathy shares faith with Zeitoun and is a caring mother, wife, and business partner. When the warnings for Hurricane Katrina began to make their way into New Orleans, Kathy packed up their four children and left to Baton Rouge to stay with her sisters. Zeitoun stayed behind, much to his wife’s disdain, in order to look after their properties.
The hurricane is soon classified a category five threat, yet Zeitoun is still reluctant to leave. When the storm hits, he rides it out. The next day, the water that flooded the streets dries, and Zeitoun believes Kathy can come home. However, after allowing himself to finally sleep, the levees are breached and Zeitoun is awoken by the sound of rushing water running through the city. Zeitoun uses his aluminum canoe to paddle throughout the city, checking his properties, helping people stuck in their homes, bringing abandoned dogs food and water, notifying officials of people in need, and delivering his services as best he can. He feels as though his god put him here to help and to live out his faith. All the while his wife watches the reports and worries endlessly.
Gangs, rapes, crime, and death are littering the city, with military and other contractors being funneled in, as if to control a war zone. When Zeitoun is out one day with his neighbor Frank, he encounters military personnel in their fan boats. They had called out for help, but “…repeatedly… these vessels, all staffed by soldiers or police officers, ignored their canoe and their calls for assistance” (Eggers, 101). Zeitoun recognizes that he has been able to hear and help people in their homes “because they were in a canoe. Had they been in a fan boat, the noise overwhelming, they would have heard nothing” (109). While Zeitoun is at one of his properties that still has a working phone, he receives a call from his brother Ahmad and is cut short when armed men burst into the house and take Zeitoun and his friends without reason.
Zeitoun is put into a makeshift prison at the Greyhound bus yard and is told neither his rights nor his charges, and when asking why they were detained, he is told: “You guys are al Qaeda,” (212) by a passing soldier. He is refused a phone call, stripped and searched without due cause, and is denied medical attention when needed. Zeitoun and Nasser are fed pork often and forced to go hungry. Abdulrahman was shocked; he relates the prison he was in to that of Guantanamo Bay (219). “[He] was in disbelief… arrested at gunpoint in a home he owned, brought to an impromptu military base built inside a bus station, accused of terrorism, and locked in an outdoor cage” (218). He is moved to a correctional facility a few days later, where conditions are not much better.
Kathy had lost contact with Zeitoun when he was forced into the prison encampment and was frantically filing missing persons reports trying to find him. Zeitoun was able to convince a missionary making his rounds in the correctional facility to call his wife and tell her he was okay. This is when Kathy was able to put things into action, however difficult it was working with negligent government workers refusing to give her information on Zeitoun’s location and court trial. When trying to communicate with the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, the woman told her that they “have no record of him” (270). When asking what court Zeitoun’s public hearing was being held, she was told that it was “private information” (280). Kathy recognized that the only thing keeping her from her husband were “these layers of bureaucracy and incompetence” (280).
After finally being able to bring him home and relaying the information to all of the Zeitoun family, they demanded compensation. Kathy now suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, as does Abdulrahman, but they have started up their business again in New Orleans, fixed their home, and continue to help others. After reading the story of Zeitoun by David Eggers, it is difficult to not be irked by the simple idea of government. All I can seem to see is ignorance and cleaving within societies that should be enmeshed with one another and helping one another. Vincanne Adams addresses many of the issues that are accounted for in Zeitoun in her work “The Making of Disaster.” In Zeitoun, it is briefly mentioned that the levees are breached after the storm hits.
Adams gives us the reason as to why this happened, and it is because of the government. She recounts the multiple components that comprise the event, explaining that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had refused to repair the deteriorating levees in favor of the oil industry. The locals understood the danger the poorly maintained levees posed in the case of a major storm, and “even though the Army Corps of Engineers had known about the problem for years… it did not repair them.” The U.S. Army Corps took on “waterway projects that had less to do with protecting the public… and more to do with augmenting the oil industries…” (Adams, 361). This is only a start to the support of Disaster Capitalism.
Additionally, the manmade canals and channels that were created both destroyed the natural land barrier that the wetlands provided and “created a funnel that would direct the storm surges right into the city” (361). With no natural land barriers to protect it, 80% of New Orleans was flooded, leaving homes and cars in irreparable conditions, drowning and stranding many civilians, and leaving an everlasting impact on the families that suffered the consequence of the government’s lack of educated effort.
The next problem Adams addresses is the fact that FEMA, absorbed by Homeland Security, contracted private-sector companies like Blackwater and Halliburton to deal with a humanitarian assistance operation. These subcontractors have more experience dealing with firing weapons than helping others, with “no experience or training” in dealing with what they were being contracted to do. It is no wonder they spent more time creating makeshift prisons in bus yards than they did rescuing stranded survivors and starving civilians. The manner in which FEMA involved themselves was nothing but negative, as they denied the services of local civilians and non-profits, turning local bus drivers, cruise ships, and others away even though the subcontractors were not even present during the beginning of the crisis.
Many testify “that humanitarian relief was actually slowed, if not undermined, by the government’s subcontracting, which gave for-profit companies the responsibility for carrying out FEMA’s tasks (364). The amount of money paid to these subcontractors is infuriating, as they did little more than point guns at folks and demand they be quiet. As recollected by Abdulrahman when searching for help from officials: It looked like a heavily fortified military base. When he got close enough to see the faces of the soldiers, two of them raised their guns. ‘Don’t come any closer!’ they ordered. … ‘We can’t help you,’ he said. ‘Go to St. Charles.’ (Eggers, 134). The aid that these government authorities did provide was limited. They began to see themselves as gunmen, as Vincanne says, on the defense against an unknown enemy. You can only wonder why they were pointing guns at people who have just lost their homes and family members, in search of medical aid, food, and shelter.
Additionally, discrimination and incarceration became major political factors in this race to help the Greater New Orleans. Zeitoun recounts his time in the prison, allegations that he and Nasser were part of al Qaeda and the Taliban during their wrongful detainment were persistent. Adams says that most of the people going without food, water, and assistance are African American and the poor. Jonathan M. Katz in his article “Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable” writes that “a lot of the rescues being done in neighborhoods [in Houston] … are medium income or high income” when talking about another hurricane relief effort.
Zeitoun is put in a prison cell with a few African Americans who tell them their accounts of how they were also wrongfully imprisoned, with the government authorities claiming they were looting or somehow posing a greater threat. In “The Making of Disaster,” Vincanne tells of the account that there were all black buses and all white buses, the authorities refusing the intermingle the two races for some untold purpose. During lecture, it was discussed that minority communities were institutionally discriminated against and held at disadvantages, as the poverty bracket and financial and other resources were all working against them.
Zeitoun and many others were incarcerated unjustly due to the poor planning, poor training, ignorance, and hunger for money on the part of the FEMA and its subcontractors. Zeitoun signifies the many things that went wrong during the recovery process following Hurricane Katrina. This ranges between, and is surely not limited to, disaster capitalism, racism, and wrongful incarceration. All ultimately representing poor government action. It is without a doubt that FEMA was the downfall of the recovery process, sending in armed men to deal with a humanitarian effort.
More of what FEMA aimed to do was directed towards counterterrorism than it was to natural disaster response efforts. Because of the directions of FEMA’s subcontractors’ efforts, more people were helped by their neighbors and fellow New Orleanians than they were by the authorities. “Stranded survivors recall being more harassed than helped by law enforcement…” (Eggers, 364). Now, how does all of this reflect modernity? In short, it does not. What I believe to be modernity is something along the lines of an interconnected community that responds democratically, or helpfully. Modernity often refers to development and aiding “undeveloped” countries by pushing certain movements and forms of capitalism in order to help a country and its people.
Usually one of the main movements in modern development entails democracy. Democracy in the case of Hurricane Katrina is enacted by people like Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who took it upon themselves to help others because that is what the people wanted and needed. A democracy is comprised of listening to the peoples’ needs. That is not what the government did in New Orleans.
The government, rather, paid subcontractors to create a war zone during a state of emergency, denying people their most basic human rights. Schultz and Lavenda in “A Perspective on the Human Condition” discuss in length the idea of subsistence. It may be a long shot, but I believe subsistence to be directly connected to the idea of democracy and how a democratic government should react and aid in the perseverance of humankind. If subsistence means “the satisfaction of the most basic material survival needs” such as food, clothing, and shelter, then the government should aim to fulfill those needs.
