John's Observations on Chalmette's Community

Chalmette had an overwhelming sense of community before they were hit by Katrina.  When we talked to the firemen, they said that everybody knew everybody and there was a huge sense of community in the area before the storm.  However, since the storm the landscape of Chalmette has greatly changed.  The city of Chalmette still is a blue collar, lower class working community, but the landscape of the community has greatly changed since the storm.  One Firefighter estimated that only 50% of the the previous population returned home to Chalmette, and the other 50% of their population is now made up of workers from other areas that are now moving in.  Poverty seems to be a problem, and the social relationships here seem to be based on very old friendships and trust.  One relationship we observed was in a bar on a weeknight.  The bar only had 3 or 4 old men in it, and the bartender knew all of them very well.   At the other bars we went to later in the week, we noticed the same thing.  Lots of the people in the bars knew eachother and seemed to have a close bond with the people they were there with.  The relationships there all seemed to be between people who looked very similar.  The were almost all white, and some of them looked a little "raggedy" or dirty.  This could either be a sign of poor living conditions or a sign of them not caring about their appearance - since they are only around friends.  The community centers in Chalmette don't really exist - the closest thing they have to that is their bars.  Aside from Bars, the greatest concentration of people seem to hang out at nail salons, restaurants and coffee shops.  We didn't really see any Boys & Girls Clubs or areas like that for kids to hang out, but they are building a brand new Middle School which goes up to grade 9.  The school looks very nice and it plans on having lots of state of the art technology inside of it.  Hopefully that will prove to be a large center of local community.