"It's Jack Daniels time!"
 
That was the refrain of "T-Model" Ford, an ancient Delta bluesman I saw play in a small bar in Greenville, Mississippi. T-Model was in his 80s and had to be helped up on to the stage by two of the barstaff; a third carried a fire-engine-red electric guitar up and draped the strap carefully over T's shoulders. The man was geriatric, and as the staff buzzed around setting him up, I cringed the way I do when I see Dick Clark on TV at New Years. Part of me wanted to yell, "Just let the man fall asleep in his La-Z-boy already! Give him some I Love Lucy re-runs and leave him in peace!"
 
Then T-Model started to play, and the years literally slid off his shoulders. He rocked back and forth. He screamed and yelled. He muttered to the crowd in a practiced growl that made every word out of his mouth sound raunchy. And in between every song, he'd lean in close to the mic and yell, "It's Jack Daniels time!"
 
"Well, like, that is what always happens when freshmen date upperclassmen."
 
It's Spring Break in New Orleans, and in the "post-Katrina" era that means three things: beads, booze, and building houses. My hostel is packed out with organized groups from Ivy League colleges up north, here "to rebuild the city in a week" as one local bartender, dripping sarcasm, told me yesterday. It's my first up-close look at large-scale voluntourism, and to be honest, most of the kids don't seem to be enjoying themselves that much. There's talk of locals coming out to yell at them as they dutifully build playgrounds and paint fences. There's in-fighting, all the cattiness of a large group in close quarters for a week. Today, for a group from Columbia, there was a lecture from an organizer about their "arrogance" and "lack of respect".
 
I wonder how many of them are surprised by their reception, or are finding whatever it was they hoped to get out of the trip. Then again, I wonder (cynically) how many of them are just padding grad school, law school or med school applications, anyway.
 
This morning, two labourers outside the hostel were talking about the upcoming renovation jobs they had on tap. The question of pay came up, and one of them laughed, rolling his eyes in my direction. "Pay? C'mon, man, it's all volunteering around here, now. Nobody gets paid to work no more."
 
"We're Coming Back! Go Saints Go!"
 
Walking around the French Quarter yesterday afternoon with all the other tourists, I suddenly understood the appeal of the "Katrina tours". Down here, at least to my eye, there is absolutely nothing to tell me that anything bad has happened in this city in recent years. Katrina and its aftermath are invisible, and walking around enjoying myself, browsing gift shops and drinking Abita Amber and baking slowly in the sun, it didn't take me long to start feeling guilty. I wanted to see. I wanted to be reminded that there's more happening here than the beignets being served at Café du Monde and the bizarro circus music being played by the steamboat Natchez.
 
Today, accompanied by a British traveler I originally met in Charleston, I got in the car and ventured east on the I-10, towards the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. We didn't have a definite plan, and emerged from the highway in a posh upper middle-class suburb, rows and rows of large matching brick bungalows with two-car garages. But there was something wrong – the windows were dark, and the driveways were empty. The garage doors were pained with graffiti – like the line quoted above – as often as not. We looked closer, and saw that many of the houses were gutted, others boarded up. We learned to recognize the spray-painted symbol for "condemned". We were driving through a ghost suburb.
 
The effect was possibly even more eerie than seeing the same devastation in a lower-income neighbourhood. My eye has been trained to associate poverty with urban blight. But this neighbourhood should have been filled with minivans and soccer moms, basketball hoops above garage doors. It was beyond unsettling. Tom was the first one to drop the words, "post-apocalyptic". We didn't get out of the car, and we didn't stay long.