Isolated with no communications and none of the social structures and services that existed in New Orleans before Katrina, people who remain in the French Quarter are forming "tribes" to survive.
As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.
While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods – humanity. "Some people became animals," Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. "We became more civilized." (…)
When Tryphonas showed up at Johnny White's [bar] with his left ear split in two, Joseph Bellomy – a customer pressed into service as a bartender – put a wooden spoon between Tryphonas' teeth and used a needle and thread to sew it up. Military medics who later looked at Bellomy's handiwork decided to simply bandage the ear. "That's my savior," Tryphonas said, raising his beer in salute to the former Air Force medical assistant.
A few blocks away, a dozen people in three houses got together and divided the labor. One group went to the Mississippi River to haul water, one cooked, one washed the dishes. "We're the tribe of 12," 76-year-old Carolyn Krack said as she sat on the sidewalk with a cup of coffee, a packet of cigarettes and a box of pralines.
The tribe, whose members included a doctor, a merchant and a store clerk, improvised survival tactics. Krack, for example, brushed her dentures with antibacterial dish soap. It had been a tribe of 13, but a member died Wednesday of a drug overdose. After some negotiating, the police carried the body out on the trunk of a car.
Update
Jon Power says,
Last night BBC Radio 5 ran an interview with Joseph Bellomy at the Johnny White's bar, including his ear stiching work.
The piece starts at 21:00 minutes in. The show will be there for 7 days. Link
