New Orleans True Video

Click Image to Download the IPOD Friendly VIDEO 28 mgs 6 minutes
Here’s a Regular QuickTime 22 megs &
Here’s a Big Phat Version 46 mgs

One day I was hanging around taking it easy in my sandals when I was abruptly taken on a moldy house tour with a couple of Volunteer Animal Rescue Workers. That was the last day I wore sandals in New Orleans.

This is my first attempt to satisfy the IPOD. I don’t have one and all I get with that format is digital gibberish. So somebody, please tell me if the ipod encoding is working.

Common Ground Volunteers Gut Newest Free Clinic in the 9th Ward
Click Image to Download the VIDEO 24 mgs 13 minutes

Please Support Free Health Clinics in New Orleans
& the development of a Women’s Health Center

With the closing of New Orleans famous public Charity Hospital and numerous small neighborhood clinics and public health care facilities, and with the displacement of thousands of workers who made city health services run on a day to day, bedpan to bedpan basis, many of the residents who found their way back to post-Hurricane New Orleans also found themselves without access to any health care whatsoever; in particular, services for women, like battered women’s shelters, birthcontrol, abortion access and prenatal care are inaccessible to many. However, Common Ground Free Clinics are growing in a local and national combined effort of volunteerism to serve the under and unserved residents whose health needs have increased while services have disappeared.

“After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the humanitarian disaster followed exacerbated by existing poverty, racism and the scandalous emergency response and relief operations. Malik Rahima and Sharon Johnson - community activists in Algiers put a call out for a progressive response and for emergency medics to run a first aid station and help develop a permanent health clinic.” (commongroundrelief.org) And so began Common Ground’s Free Health Clinic in the space of a donated mosque in the Algiers neighborhood of Orleans Parish, just across the river from downtown New Orleans.

This week (and ongoing), teams of volunteers from around the country converge to gut a donated house in the flood-devastated 9th Ward area of New Orleans and build another free clinic while simultaneously, the city of New Orleans responds to the devastion by claiming eminent domain over thousands of homes in the Lower 9th Ward and prepares to bulldoze these homes without proper notification or participation from residents. Hundreds of volunteers from around the country and from within the local community have come together in New Orleans to spend time gutting and building clinics from the ground up, serving patients and organizing to make these clinics happen.

Here is an update on the common ground free clinics with Ellen Catalinotto, volunteer nurse mid-wife at the Algiers Health Clinic. A special needs request to build the Women’s Health Centers is included. For extensive information regarding donating resources, volunteering and credentialling, and for more about the context and history of the clinic and common ground relief, please go to: http://www.commongroundrelief.org/2005/10/info_for_volunteers_at_common.html

Women’s Center Needs Request:
-gynocological exam tables
-autoclaves
-teaching and educational aids for breast exams, gyn, pregnancy, abortion etc.
-medication samples
-bcps, iuds, cervical caps, diaphragms
-lights
-basic examining room equipment
-safe place for battered and at risk women
-monetary donations
-microscope & lab equipment for testing
-pregnancy tests, pap tests, std tests
-speculums and other gyn instruments
-volunteer staff

www.commongroundrelief.org
contact: healthalgiers@yahoo.com
(504)717-6561
P.O. Box 741801
New Orleans, LA 70174-1801

Related Links ::: Common Ground Collective

Kalamu ya Salaam announces Listen to the People Project & blows the roof off NYC Bowery Poetry Club w/ superdome poem
Click Image to Download - please be patient, the VIDEO is 37 mgs and 25 minutes

Announcing a Call to Action! Listening to the People + Superdome Systems of Thought
Kalamu ya Salaam on listening with compassion & the power of the spoken word to make history.

Help reclaim history in the making: anyone can participate in the databased oral history project called Listen to the People, directed by New Orleans own radical historian-dj-educator-activist “neo-griot” truth-teller poet, Kalamu ya Salaam.

“I don’t want Bush and Cheney and secretary of defense Rumsfeld and that guy Brown to write the official record,” Kalamu explains, announcing the Listen to the People oral histories project for the Gulf South diaspora. This project will be data-based in a demographic grid representative of the diversity of New Orleans, in particular, to be made accessible to the public for non-commercial purposes so that histories, lives, understanding and relief can be better understood and served.

Many thousands of people face cold, isolation and uncertainty in the coming year; much FEMA and Red Cross housing support expires, and in addition, a lack of rebuilding progress, the strange scarcity of trailers, and a cut-throat housing market compound the shock of disaster. Not only does the “Listen to the People” project serve history, but the process of story-collecting itself is a valuable tool with which people in other places can reach out to the peoples displaced by hurricanes Katrina & Rita. “Anyone can participate,” Kalamu encourages - even if you don’t have a cheap tape recorder, “just reach out and talk to someone”. We can embrace the humanity of others whose humanity was so denied in the Days of the Superdome.

Tape it, film it, write it down or just be human and talk with folk; this project needs good people in the rest of the states to help reach out to the displaced and connect their stories into history in the making. For more information contact Kalamu ya Salaam & the “Listen to the People” project at kalamu.com

Kalamu ya Salaam himself explains this epic project & its meaning in the first 2/3’s of the accompanying video - please help put the Word Out! The last part of the video is a “poem”… it is untitled and indescribable -just prepare for the roof to blown off your hearts and minds.

“Death to the System!”

& may this New Year be filled with friends & family, old and new. In the spirits of Aung San Suu Kyi and Martin Luther King Jr, may the courage to speak, listen and care replace weapons, fear and apathy. Love, Health & Peace on Earth - Salut!

(This video was recorded live at the Bowery Poetry Club for a poetry Katrina relief benefit on September 30, 2005 in New York City. To use this material or to contribute to Listen to the People, please contact Kalamu ya Salaam at http://www.kalamu.com)

Related Links ::: Kalamu ya Salaam & the Listen to the People Project