In March, I went to Louisiana with a group of students who were willingly spending their entire spring break building a house for a family who’d been living in a FEMA trailer since Katrina. One of the family members told me that seeing so many people (both from Guilford and Friends Disaster Service) drive so far to help them really made him feel better about people in general. While that made me happy – I viewed it as a form of ministry – I also wondered how much our service would really alter this family’s circumstances in the long term.
I’ve been thinking a lot about them this week, as an oil slick the size of the Jersey Shore floats toward the Gulf Coast, with 5,000 more barrels of oil a day leaking from an offshore well that exploded earlier this week. The husband/father is a shrimper; his brother-in-law is a shrimper, and most of their area depends on shrimping, crabbing and fishing for their living. The family’s dog was even named Shrimper.
On the last day we were there, this man told me how hard shrimping’s been the last few years. His overhead has gone up 40 percent since Katrina, even as the catch amounts have gone down and it’s become cheaper to ship shrimp from Asia. It’s not hyperbole to say that many Gulf shrimpers are barely scraping by. And now this oil spill comes just a few weeks before the start of shrimp season.
According to the Times-Picayune, the Gulf Coast brings in a quarter of fish caught in the U.S., and a third of the oysters. Most of us will feel the impact of the oil spill in the form of higher seafood prices over the next year or so. But thousands of families in the Gulf – a region that’s never been rolling in prosperity, and that’s still recovering from Katrina five years later – risk losing their livelihood entirely.
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