Neighbors Make Good-Faith Effort

NEW ORLEANS — De Nguyen ripped moldy plaster and pink insulation wool from the walls of the rectory of St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church in the east of this city, while Benedict Willard dumped debris into a wheelbarrow and carted it to a makeshift dump outside. Carl Schmidt tore out dangling light fixtures and helped to coordinate the cleanup.

The three -- relative strangers until Saturday -- worked together as longtime friends. Nguyen, who is Vietnamese; Willard, who is African American; and Schmidt, who is white, shared a common goal: Repair a church that used to be an anchor in this neighborhood.

It is a task that they and other volunteers will repeat in coming weeks at another half-dozen sites as they come together to rebuild battered Roman Catholic churches in New Orleans East and, they hope, give thousands who have fled the area an incentive to return.

"It takes a catastrophe of this magnitude to bring all races and cultures together to work for one cause," said Willard, 41, a criminal district court judge. "I think that's a beautiful thing."

"If we unite, I guess we can rebuild the community faster," added Nguyen, 39, an engineer.

"Every hour of help you get is welcome, no matter what [race] it is from," said Schmidt, 62, a New Orleans East resident for almost four decades.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed the physical structure and punctured the emotional soul of New Orleans on Aug. 29, but it has also helped foster solidarity between ethnic communities that may have had cordial relations before but didn't really mix.

"We were rather isolated," said Father Vien Nguyen, pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church in the predominantly Vietnamese neighborhood of Versailles in New Orleans East. "We would contact others whenever we had to. We did have some interchange, but limited mainly to business. Now, given the situation, we have to dig deep to our commonality."

"This whole tragic event has laid bare the weakness of a lot of structures: civil, military, national government, and the churches," said Terrel Broussard, a deacon at the predominantly black St. Maria Goretti. "But it has also opened up another side, that of

Schmidt, who has helped maintain St. Maria Goretti for nine years and lives seven blocks from the church, watched as many of his white neighbors began to pull out in the early 1970s as blacks, and then Vietnamese, moved in.