The Street Samaritans

A diverse group of volunteers armed with bicycles, stethoscopes, and altruism established a medical miracle in the back wards of New Orleans.

Photo: Kike Arnal

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


[You can read an extended version of this story with extra photographs here.]

A FEW DAYS AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA slammed into New Orleans, a small group of strangers on bicycles showed up in the Algiers neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking if anyone needed medical attention. Algiers was, at that point, a place of eerie silence, confusion, and fear. Fear of the wind and the rain; fear, too, of the police, of criminals, and of one’s neighbors. The neighborhood’s streets had stayed above the floodwaters, but power was gone, along with any semblance of organized public life. Rumors of armed gangs and vigilantes ran rampant.

Residents asked cautiously if the strangers were from the Red Cross or the government, neither of which had yet made an appearance in Algiers. They were told that no, these were volunteers who had come without anyone’s authorization. They were, in fact, “street medics”—a loose network of activists who had organized to provide emergency treatment at street protests. The locals accepted the offers of first aid, allowing the visitors to take blood pressure, test for diabetes, and inquire about symptoms of anxiety, depression, and disease. “It was just about the noblest thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life,” recalls Malik Rahim, a lifelong Algiers resident, local housing activist, and former Black Panther who put out the call for assistance and helped arrange space for the medical workers in a local mosque. “It was the street medics who really stopped this city from exploding into a race war, because they were white and were serving the black community at a time when blacks were fed up. Those are the real heroes of this thing.”

From those first visits sprang the idea for a full-fledged medical facility known as the Common Ground Clinic, which served, from its headquarters in the Masjid Bilal mosque, up to 100 people a day in Algiers and dozens more at frequent “mobile clinics” set up in the Upper Ninth Ward and on the downtown parking lots where immigrant workers congregate.

If Common Ground was started by activists, it soon attracted more mainstream health care workers who discovered the project on the Internet. Lynne, a bubbly nurse from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, found her way there in the fall while searching for ways to volunteer after she was laid off from a job. The first few days were “a very big cultural shock,” she confesses, pointing to some of her new friends clustered outside on a smoke break. “Why don’t they shave their legs? I just don’t get it,” she says, laughing. “But now I love the people here. We all have a common purpose.” One afternoon, a camouflaged U.S. Army truck pulled up outside the mosque; a young National Guard lieutenant jumped out and announced that he had boxes of antibiotics and cortisone. Within minutes, soldiers just back from Iraq and anarchists who had been protesting the war were unloading the truck shoulder-to-shoulder, swapping anecdotes about the French Quarter.

For many of Common Ground’s patients, the clinic is a relief not just from Katrina and the health care vacuum that followed—Charity Hospital, which treated most of New Orleans’ poor, has still not reopened—but from a quieter, longer-term emergency. “For many of them, the last time they saw a doctor was in prison or in emergency at Charity,” says Rahim. Which is why, as normalcy slowly seeps back into New Orleans, Common Ground is beginning to shift from emergency response to something more complicated. By midwinter, the clinic had moved into a larger site across the street, where a steady stream of people from Algiers was signing up to volunteer. A community advisory board was being set up, and an umbrella organization, the Common Ground Collective, was becoming a homegrown effort at rebuilding hometown lives, offering “solidarity, not charity.” “That clinic is gonna be a permanent clinic,” says Rahim, who’s become the collective’s symbolic leader. “It’ll be served by the people it’s serving right now.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate