At right:
Lower Ninth Ward firefighter receiving treatment, and young man at Common Ground Health Collective mobile clinic off St. Charles Street.
Early in my stay, a resident of the Algiers neighborhood told me that having your city devastated “is like your spouse having a stroke. You still love him, and he’ll never be the same. You really don’t know what will happen next. You’re kind of waiting for the next part of the sky to fall.” She said that “dealing with Katrina and its aftermath is like trying to get off crack. Your body is at battle every second, and cannot relax. You’re desperate for a little hope, a little good news.”
The comparison was not lost on me. In fact, I and the other acupuncturists with whom I worked used a protocol of ear points developed originally to treat persons “detoxing” from drug use. This battery of points helps relieve, among other things, insomnia, extreme muscle pain and joint stiffness, blood pressure fluctuation, high levels of anxiety or depression, headaches, and fatigue. When given the opportunity to describe what they wanted help with physically and emotionally, the people we were treating referred frequently to some or all of these symptoms. We’re talking about the kinds of things experienced by someone coping with intense or violent change.
It is true that I’ve done some previous work with the style
of acupuncture we were using in Louisiana. However, nothing could prepare me for how consistently profound these treatment
experiences proved to be for those involved. It was incredible to watch people
people’s bodies relax for the first time in three months; see raging migraines
and nagging backaches loosen their grip on tired, tired souls; have people
return to thank us for their first peaceful sleep in weeks. As a set of
patients settled into their chairs and into some deeper breathing 10 or 15
minutes after being needled, it was clear that some of their perspectives were shifting a little, allowing
some moments of hopefulness, joy.
Acupuncturists Without Borders was (and still is) using a
social style of acupuncture where patients are seated, fully clothed, and
usually in a circle with the others being treated. This makes sense in a
practical way, whereby we can set up treatments almost anywhere. It also
engenders a trust in the process and in the practitioners, and each individual
treatment benefits from the positive energetic and emotional connections of all
those treating and being treated.
The idea of treating everyone with the same point
combination made me uncomfortable at first. This wasn’t Chinese pattern
diagnosis, the art to which I’m committed as a practitioner. But, as soon as I
had done a few auricular (ear) treatments, where I used the detox points almost
exclusively, I got over my theoretical difficulties. Here was a special kind of
immediate and then rippling response to treatment that showed the best
acupuncture as well as an unconfused picture of the real tendencies of human
connection.
Chinese medical theory is based on the idea that the cure is
in a recovered whole. The doctor and her medicine should help repair
relationships: between organ systems, between qi and blood, within the matrix
of the meridian system. This idea is rooted in early agrarian concepts of
facilitating irrigation to smooth the beneficial flow of the water of life,
Taoist principles of the fundamental dynamics between Yin and Yang, and
Confucian notions of balancing the influence of the emperor and the citizen.
Along with the relief of specific physiological symptoms
that the acupuncture yielded, the community style treatments meant that an
individual got a chance to feel some tangible results of physical recovery
while also witnessing it in the face and posture of others. Any individual’s exhales or sighs of
relief got to further infuse the treatment space, and to release stuck qi on a
much wider level. In the best moments what ran between participants was a pulse
of benign creative nurturance, in the face of numbness, grief or rage.
Through this softened space and between the softened gazes
of those being treated, other people, with curiosity, would enter, on their way
to get a tetanus shot, have a prescription filled, or find bottled water.
Liking what they sensed, the passerby would frequently be the next to sit down
for a treatment. I’ll describe a specific instance along the sidewalk outside
the Common Ground free health clinic.
A woman from the neighborhood is walking by and sees several
of her neighbors sitting in an oddly meditative manner. Mr. Ali, who has had
three unsuccessful surgeries on his cervical spine in the last 15 years is
looking at me with heavy eyelids and asking me how the acupuncture can so
quickly make his neck looser. I am trying to answer as simply and quietly as
possible, and I’m being helped by another man being treated, a 60 something
year old cab driver. Mr. Clarke studied Mao and Chinese culture when actively a
Black Panther in the 70s. He’s identifying a point I used on Mr. Ali’s arm as
lying along the Triple Burner channel. Lamar is a middle-aged painter and
contractor who’s been working 12 and 14 hour days since the flood. His forearm
and fingers are numb and he cannot sleep. Francine is a 49 year old white woman
who is working 10 hour days at the one welfare office which survived of seven. She is here for the third day in a row
to get help quitting smoking, a decision made in the throes of the emphysema
like coughing that has racked her since the mold set in. She knows of these men
but has never spent any time talking to them. She and Lamar are almost whispering
to one another, both crying
periodically, which gets the attention of a small orphan dog which has made its
way to their feet. The clinic’s only pharmacist, a woman from Detroit, has been
sleeping in her chair with one leg elevated since the needles went in a half hour ago. She had asked for help with
an acute migraine and a swollen ankle. The woman passing through catches eyes
with another man who’s getting a treatment, a man appears to know well. He’s
been orating irrepressibly since 5 or 10 minutes into the treatment. He’s
looking at her saying
“Lord have
mercy…. Wow…… Like I’m in high school…….. This is alright….. Aint this something…… Feel like a
bird…. Like a body ought to feel in this world…..
Aint this something…. Somebody discovered something…. Lord have mercy……. Makes my back straight and
takes my defenses right down……. Like a
bird I tell you….”
And the passing woman shoots back
“Well, go
on and fly…”
Her only question is if the needles will hurt.
“No,
sweetheart.”
And, several people close their eyes and reassuringly shake
their head.
“Like a
little bug bite,” Francine says.
She sits down with her neighbors.
WHERE WE DID
ACUPUNCTURE AND WHO WE TREATED
Here are some of the places we saw patients, and who some of
the patients were.
We treated New Orleans residents (those who never evacuated and those who were returning to their
neighborhoods) at The Common Ground
health clinic in the Algiers
neighborhood every day. We also would go with the Common Ground mobile clinic
to treat people in the hardest hit neighborhoods in the city and its suburbs.
I loved
working with Common Ground. The all-volunteer collective, dedicated to helping people reclaim their own
neighborhoods, had set up a free health clinic in a tiny mosque just after the hurricane, along with several
distribution centers to get people
basic supplies. They’d done a lot of work connecting with
New
Orleans communities. This meant that Acupuncturists Without Borders was able to treat people we probably otherwise would not
have reached. As an acupuncturist,
plugging into the wider work that Common Ground was doing was the most powerful and effective form
of activism of which I’ve ever been a part. It
was wonderful treating the clinicians and other volunteers at Common Ground; and it was great having those same people
refer patients to us for acupuncture.
My time at
Common Ground frequently moved in slow motion, the way you can really wake up inside a string of
interactions, the way that moment can illuminate inside you forever, because you can tell this is how the
world is supposed to be. People
from all over the country showing up in solidarity with their fellow U.S.ers, providing hands-on care and
vital resources, staying in close communication
towards assuring that all sorts of intelligence and creativity combine rather than conflict, trying
to stay aware of inherited patterns of oppression
that could interfere with trusting one another, two delicious meals available
every day for any comers, no money
changing hands, and a goal of EVERYONE
getting healed from EVERYONE’s effort. In short, because of Common Ground, I was able to feel like
part of the community, and build relationships,
as well as providing acupuncture.
At Common Ground’s permanent clinic, we did treatments on
the sidewalk at the front door, as it was usually 75 or so degrees in the
middle of the day. When too cool or windy, we moved in to a secondary house
behind the clinic. With the mobile clinic, we treated people near the Common
Ground tent which headquartered their operations. The ground everywhere was
dried and cracked as if to open a network of veins where the poison and death
could fall out of their eddies. In New Orleans now, you’re never far from the odor of swamp water, and also of decay, a
closely related smell which nevertheless settles on a different part of your
tongue.
Through Common Ground, we made a connection
with a huge Vietnamese community,
displaced from suburban “New Orleans East”. We treated a group of 20 – 50 people on Sundays after mass
at their Catholic church, which was one of the only buildings spared in the
neighborhood. We also treated another group about the same size once a week at
a sister church in Baton Rouge,
where many had been relocated. A large percentage of this group were elders, who
were no strangers to the trauma that accompanies forced displacement, and for
whom Chinese medicine was once their primary health care. They had no problem having
great expectations for the treatments.
No one in our group spoke Vietnamese, and none of the elders
spoke much English, so as I would approach the next patient, antibacterial soap
drying on my hands, he or she would point to a muscle or joint or an organ or
even along a specific meridian.
They made faces to articulate precise qualities of their main complaints. The
input was invaluable, and helped strengthen the treatments.
At the end of each session, there was a moment where the
whole group would throw both hands in the air and smile, startling us who
failed to understand that they’d been asked the question by one of the Fathers,
“Do you want the Acupuncturists to come back next week?”
Three nights a week, we treated mostly relief workers at the tent city where we were staying. We saw truck
drivers, catering crew, National Guard, Americorps teenagers, debris clearers,
police and firefighters.
We saw a group of about 30 staff members of the U.S. Health Service at a grade school
where they were staying in Baton Rouge.
.
We treated members of the National Guard at a facility where units were “out processed”
before returning home. Most of these men and women had been in
New
Orleans since the hurricane.
We treated people 4 or 5 times a week at the “Welcome Home Kitchen,” an outdoor
kitchen set up in
Washington Squareby the Rainbow Family to feed the people of New Orleans. This is the
same Rainbow Family that came only days after the storm to Waveland Mississippi, where the eye of Katrina passed, and
begin feeding two and three thousand
people a day, weeks before FEMA even made an appearance.
When we had a chance, we treated each other, that is, the
members of Acupuncturists Without Borders. It was so vital for us to receive a
little acupuncture or do a little Qi Qong, as our bodies were exposed to untold
levels of toxins, and our spirits to potentially overwhelming amounts of
feelings and information. Practitioners have been volunteering their time in Louisiana for a week or two. When I arrived, I was one of 6 practitioners. Then, for many
days, I was one of two, before 4 other acupuncturists came. We all worked very
hard, but were inspired and energized everyday by the work, and by the people
of New Orleans.
It was hard for me to leave. It’s the work I want to be
doing. It needs to be happening everywhere. Two themes emerged for me in New
Orleans. One was how completely the natural and
unnatural disasters had torn back the layers of our social fantasy to make even
more glaring the injustices of our everyday
lives. Secondly, I was reminded that when economic bureaucracy dissolves enough
that peoples’ natural collective initiative is less stifled, just how much
creative cooperation flourishes, how quickly people choose courage and contact.
I want to know, when the layers get put back, when a normal bureaucracy
returns to
Louisiana, when the
Good Samaritan Laws expire, how do we continue the kind of work Common Ground
is doing? How do we find ways to make free group acupuncture a norm, not only
something for victims of storms and those suffering from drug addiction? How do
I do this in Philadelphia? How do
we continue to find ways to move from charity to solidarity? Can we go ahead
and notice how essential these kinds of interactions and this kind of medicine
is for our real security?
Please read this amazing article from the Nation about Ville Platt, La.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051107/davis
Please watch the video about commonground collective in New Orleans at the following link:
http://www.commongroundrelief.org/node/70
At right:
Lower Ninth Ward firefighter receiving treatment, and young man at Common Ground Health Collective mobile clinic off St. Charles Street.
