“I sure need something to come through,” he said. “I used to get a lot of work done.”

Greenleaf, a day laborer , stood in the blazing sun in the parking lot of the Lowe’s store in Elysian Fields on Friday, hoping a passing car will stop and ask him to work.

On a busy day, more than 150 day laborers – or “subcontractors” – like Greenleaf gather in home-store parking lots and on street corners around New Orleans, waving at moving cars. The gatherings developed after Hurricane Katrina, when a steep increase in building created work for hundreds of day laborers.

The scene is played out across the city, not just at Lowe’s, but at places like the Home Depot on Carrollton Avenue, where on Friday a couple of dozen men lined the fences outside the store parking lot.

At each corner and lot, construction bosses and private homeowners cross paths with the day laborers, who stand out with their tanned skin, paint-stained clothes and baseball caps. Loud hums from cars, buses and trucks combine with the faint smell of gasoline and alcohol. With every car comes the possibility of a meal, with every driver the possibility of a day’s work.

Greenleaf said he sleeps less than blocks away from where he waits for work. He makes his bed under the I-10 overpass near the Elysian Fields exit. He said he drove commercial trucks for 30 years, until 2006. Greenleaf, who is originally from Bayou Lafourche, in Lafourche, La., said he stopped driving trucks after his license expired.

Shortly after Katrina hit, he turned to the street corners for day work, averaging about $100 a day. The work is usually manual labor, digging, painting, and landscaping. Prices vary: Painting a medium sized room is usually $75, digging, $100 to $200, and plumbing, $200 to $300.

Sometimes, drivers have other requests. “I don’t turn nothing down,” said Greenleaf, who said he has, at times, been offered money for sex.

At Lowe’s, every hour or so cars pull up to the corner. A hand motion by the driver denotes how many workers are needed. At one point on Friday, despite the hand signal – three fingers for three workers – at least seven workers run up to each stopped car begging for work. Chaos quickly ensued, but eventually the driver made his choice and speed off.

Greenleaf said the majority of people who hire him and others are kind, often providing workers food and water. “The majority treat you well,” he said.

However, some employers take advantage of workers by refusing to pay them after the work. To address these concerns, outreach workers visit the day laborers’ sites. Six days a week at 8 a.m., Jacinta Gonzalez picks up fellow outreach worker Dennis Soriano. The two work for the New Orleans Worker’s Center for Racial Justice in a department known as the “Congress of Day Laborers.” Gonzalez and Soriano work on educating laborers about their rights and organizing them into grassroots movements. “The members decide what they want to work on,” Soriano said. Education can mean training in people’s homes as well as workshops on worker’s rights.

Getting legislation passed that will make it illegal to withhold payment from laborers is currently his organization’s primary goal, Soriano said.

Meanwhile at Lowe’s, some of the workers find rest in the cool shadows under trees, solemnly looking at the ground. Others laugh the wait away, smiling at passing cars. If they don’t find work, most will not eat. Sometimes they will find places giving away food, such as churches. Other times, they must nap the hunger away.

Work used to be steady, Greenleaf said. But these days, people seemed to have stopped building and renovating their homes as much.

“I used to be on this lot for less than5 minutes before I found work,” Greenleaf said.

And so, he waits.

At the time of his interview, he had been outside for almost three hours without work.

Nevertheless, when an outreach worker asked me if I wanted to go into the dilapidated home , I didn’t hesitate to say “of course”. My curiosity was too overwhelming for any other reply.

Trying my best not to hit my head, I followed the guys under the house to the “secret” entrance, using my Canon: Speedlite 430EX II to give my footsteps reference. I came up through the floor and immediately smelled something reminiscent of defecation and disheartenment.

Sad would be a gross understatement to describe the living conditions of the person who had been living there. Disgusting would be a compliment. There were piles and piles of used toilet tissue scattered in various areas of the house. Feces was thrown, or perhaps wiped, on the walls.  There were huge holes in the ceiling. And there was a sense of the truest despair I have ever encountered.

We visited several more houses that night, and each one had its own unique level of despondency but nothing seemed quite as deplorable as the first. All the same, I am grateful to have had another once in a lifetime experience.

When he saw his neighborhood filled with over five feet of water, his family displaced by the storm and his friends suffering each day, he wanted to do something to make a difference, to make things be the way they used to be.

“Katrina comes along and destroys our neighborhood,” Zeller said. “I’m sitting there keeping up with the information, watching the news, trying to decide what to do. Do we come back to New Orleans and try to help rebuild?”

He decided to do just that, going back to the place that, for months, he had been watching on television from New York.

Zeller set up a nonprofit called the Mothership Foundation, with a mission to be “dedicated to social change by bringing forth a higher quality of life for all Louisiana and New Orleans residents through the promotion of arts, culture and recreation.”

Through the foundation, in 2006 Zeller created a free annual music festival for the local community called the Bayou Boogaloo. The event, held each Memorial Day weekend on the banks of Bayou Saint John at Orleans Avenue in Mid-City, ended Saturday.

“I wanted the festival to have a representation of musical genres from around the world, really which New Orleans has,” Zeller said in an interview on Saturday at the festival. “We have funk, jazz, blues, reggae, a little bit of everything. So it’s a diverse bag of talent.”

Zeller has never shied away from challenges. He spent 10 years as a music producer and an event coordinator. He also works for a local nonprofit radio program in the New Orleans area.

In general, Zeller said his life’s work can best be described as “full-time work for part-time pay.”

“I’ve lost a lot of money over the years on some of my endeavors, I guess you can say,” Zeller said with a grin. “People have said I’m overly ambitious, but I don’t mind. As long as I’m making a difference in this neighborhood, in this community, then I am OK with it.”

Since its first year, Bayou Boogaloo has featured popular artists from Louisiana. This year the list of acts totaled 16 musical performances featuring the likes of the Storyville Stompers, Little Freddie King and Equal Opportunity Employment, and five art shows by Rhino Contemporary Artists, a group of painters from the area.

One musician who represented the festival’s diversity was Charmaine Neville, a Louisiana native who heads an eclectic band whose music ranges from blues to funk.

Neville said the music festival means more than just a good time to the people of Mid-City, because music represents what makes New Orleans and its neighborhoods what they are today.

“Music is everything in New Orleans,” Neville explained. “I mean, without music, what would New Orleans be? It would be just another city in America.”

The post-Katrina recovery for the neighborhood has not been easy, Zeller said. But with the free music festival, he said, the residents now have something to look forward to every year as they continue to rebuild and reshape their neighborhood.

“Bayou Boogaloo gives people a break from the stress of everyday life. I think that was important after Katrina,” Zeller said. “We were completely consumed with rebuilding, preplanning our lives, and we needed a day to say this is why we live here. The people, the culture is worth saving.”

The most pleasant for a temporary reporter in the Crescent City: People just really want to talk. On top of that, when they can’t get back to you by deadline, they let you know they’re sorry about it.

It seems simple, but take a minute to consider it from my point of view.

Working in Washington D.C., it can feel like even the unkempt man next to you on the metro has a media relations agent-and probably wants you to talk to his “people.” Prepared statements are the proverbial soup du jour for journalists in the nation’s capital, and it starts to taste instant-preheated-and it spoils fast.  

It’s refreshing to strike up conversations with area residents and just talk, like two associates, about something. Yes, a recorder might happen to catch the conversation or someone might get distracted by the gigantic badge that says “PRESS” dangling from our necks. But the beauty of interviews here is that they feel like genuine conversations instead of interrogations of the dismissive and press-savvy.

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve always said I couldn’t “do” journalism in the South. My stance on that weakened when two representatives from the same state agency called me back within hours of each other, apologizing profusely for not getting me quotes by my deadline.

Imagine that. It took a walk across campus and dinner to get over the shock of it.

“I just didn’t want you to think we were trying to shaft you,” one of the representatives said to me.

When’s the last time I heard that in D.C.? When is the last time I got the impression anyone cared in the slightest if they shafted…anyone?

Later in the week, photographer Mylan Cannon and I were exploring a neighborhood nearly recovered from Katrina.

While I was on the phone with my back turned, coordinating a ride back to Dillard, Mylan and an elderly woman had struck up a conversation on her doorstep about her neighborhood. Barefoot and in a nightgown, she welcomed me to the doorstep and the three of us talked about the neighborhood like Mylan and I lived there, too. 

Friday, I was fielding calls for another article and spoke to a man who stopped the interview to congratulate me for being selected to participate in the institute. He was a print-journalism major turned government worker and said he needed to let me know how important the profession was, despite the state of the industry.

The fast paced and indifferent culture of Washington did a lot to sour my image of public figures, government agencies and media relations departments I now consider to be the “black hole” of almost any agency.

It’s only fitting that the concept of Southern hospitality extends to the way people relate to media professionals here. I’m just surprised that when I’ve been trying to talk to people, they’re so enthusiastic about talking back and being listened to.

We’ve been told a few times that everyone in the city has a story to tell. I’m just happy people don’t mind taking a few minutes to tell me one.

I could really get used to this.