Okay, let me get this right. There is a horrendous affordable housing shortage in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. According to Color of Change and human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, rents in New Orleans have gone up 45 percent, over 100,000 people have not yet returned to New Orleans, half of those who want to return make less than $20,000 a year, and 12,000 New Orleanians currently have no place to live. Now, in the face of this serious affordable-housing crisis, the city of New Orleans and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are planning to demolish 4,600 public housing units in the center of New Orleans.

Well, you might think that these public housing units must have been badly damaged by the hurricane and that they are only now getting around to bulldozing them.

But you would be wrong. Most of these units are in well-built structures, barely damaged by Katrina. Many of the units above the first floor were not affected by the flood waters. In fact, architects who have been taken on tours by UUA-UUSC partner The Advancement Project have testified that it would take minimal renovation for these buildings to provide decent housing.

While thousands of families are camped out in friends' living rooms, living in cramped trailers that FEMA is repossessing, or living in other cities waiting to go home, HUD wants to tear down solid brick buildings that would actually provide people with adequate housing.

Oh, and they want to do this before Christmas, apparently to make sure that the Katrina survivors in trailers and temporary houses get the point that "home for the holidays" most assuredly doesn't include them. HUD has said for the last year and a half that housing demolition orders for public housing take 100 days to review before approval. In the case of New Orleans public housing, they managed to speed it up a little. The review and approval took one day.

On the surface, HUD's stated goal to replace the the public-housing projects with affordable -housing units in mixed income areas could be a good strategy for affordable housing until you take a closer look at the numbers, and obstacles rooted in issues of race and class facing survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The new plan will demolish 4,600 units of affordable housing and rebuild 744. Rents have gone up 45 percent in New Orleans. Many of the African-American families who could raise the extra money for rent wouldn't be able to find landlords to rent to them. According to the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center, there has been pervasive racial discrimination in housing in New Orleans since Katrina. According to their report of April 2007, 57.5 percent of landlords discriminated against African-American renters.

The public housing residents have been fighting back for two years, trying to get the city council and HUD to come up with a better plan that would make maximum use of the resources that exist. Many UUA/UUSC Gulf Coast partners, such as People's Hurricane Relief Fund, C-3 Iberville, The Advancement Project, and the Women's Welfare Reform Project, are deeply involved in this struggle to stop the demolition of public housing. They are asking that the demolitions be halted so that a better -- and fairer -- plan can be put into place. The public housing units could be renovated easily and used as temporary housing for residents until new public-housing units are built.

Over 95 percent of the public-housing residents in New Orleans were low-income African Americans. HUD's goal should be to get low-income families back into decent housing in New Orleans as fast as possible. It's precisely low-income African-American families who face the twin obstacles of high rent and racial discrimination in the New Orleans housing market. If HUD moves forward with its plan to demolish the public-housing projects, it would be difficult not to conclude that their real goal is to keep low-income African Americans out of New Orleans.

Many groups are working hard to stop this travesty of justice as Christmas approaches. Please add your voice to theirs by clicking here to send an open letter to the New Orleans City Council.

Okay, let me get this right. There is a horrendous affordable housing shortage in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. According to Color of Change and human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, rents in New Orleans have gone up 45 percent, over 100,000 people have not yet returned to New Orleans, half of those who want to return make less than $20,000 a year, and 12,000 New Orleanians currently have no place to live. Now, in the face of this serious affordable-housing crisis, the city of New Orleans and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are planning to demolish 4,600 public housing units in the center of New Orleans.

Well, you might think that these public housing units must have been badly damaged by the hurricane and that they are only now getting around to bulldozing them.

But you would be wrong. Most of these units are in well-built structures, barely damaged by Katrina. Many of the units above the first floor were not affected by the flood waters. In fact, architects who have been taken on tours by UUA-UUSC partner The Advancement Project have testified that it would take minimal renovation for these buildings to provide decent housing.

While thousands of families are camped out in friends' living rooms, living in cramped trailers that FEMA is repossessing, or living in other cities waiting to go home, HUD wants to tear down solid brick buildings that would actually provide people with adequate housing.

Oh, and they want to do this before Christmas, apparently to make sure that the Katrina survivors in trailers and temporary houses get the point that "home for the holidays" most assuredly doesn't include them. HUD has said for the last year and a half that housing demolition orders for public housing take 100 days to review before approval. In the case of New Orleans public housing, they managed to speed it up a little. The review and approval took one day.

On the surface, HUD's stated goal to replace the the public-housing projects with affordable -housing units in mixed income areas could be a good strategy for affordable housing until you take a closer look at the numbers, and obstacles rooted in issues of race and class facing survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The new plan will demolish 4,600 units of affordable housing and rebuild 744. Rents have gone up 45 percent in New Orleans. Many of the African-American families who could raise the extra money for rent wouldn't be able to find landlords to rent to them. According to the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center, there has been pervasive racial discrimination in housing in New Orleans since Katrina. According to their report of April 2007, 57.5 percent of landlords discriminated against African-American renters.

The public housing residents have been fighting back for two years, trying to get the city council and HUD to come up with a better plan that would make maximum use of the resources that exist. Many UUA/UUSC Gulf Coast partners, such as People's Hurricane Relief Fund, C-3 Iberville, The Advancement Project, and the Women's Welfare Reform Project, are deeply involved in this struggle to stop the demolition of public housing. They are asking that the demolitions be halted so that a better -- and fairer -- plan can be put into place. The public housing units could be renovated easily and used as temporary housing for residents until new public-housing units are built.

Over 95 percent of the public-housing residents in New Orleans were low-income African Americans. HUD's goal should be to get low-income families back into decent housing in New Orleans as fast as possible. It's precisely low-income African-American families who face the twin obstacles of high rent and racial discrimination in the New Orleans housing market. If HUD moves forward with its plan to demolish the public-housing projects, it would be difficult not to conclude that their real goal is to keep low-income African Americans out of New Orleans.

Many groups are working hard to stop this travesty of justice as Christmas approaches. Please add your voice to theirs by clicking here to send an open letter to the New Orleans City Council.

Yesterday, it was hard to reach several of our partners in Louisiana involved with disaster response to Hurricane Katrina, because they were all on buses going to another kind of disaster response -- the rally against the racism and injustice in Jena. UU ministers and congregants from Baton Rouge and New Orleans were also on buses to Jena.

Jena is a small town in Louisiana that reminds those of us who need reminding that racism still runs deep in our country. A tree in one of Jena's schoolyards was known as a "whites-only tree." Some African American students asked the principal if they could sit under that tree. He said yes and they did. The next day, three white students hung nooses from that tree in the school colors. They got a three-day suspension and the school superintendent called it "a prank. " Some prank. The racial tension mounted quickly over the next several months.

According to the Color of Change website, as racial tensions mounted, threats of violence were made against African American students, some of which were carried out. A black student was beaten up by white students at a party. The next day, black students at a convenience store were threatened by a young white man with a shotgun, but the district attorney took no action.

Then a white student, who had been a vocal supporter of the students who hung the nooses, taunted the black student who was beaten up at the off-campus party, allegedly using the "n-word" to refer to several other African American students. He was beaten up by African American students. In this case, action was swift: six African American teens were arrested and initially charged with aggravated battery and intent to kill. Although the white youth had been bloodied and bruised, he did not sustain serious injuries. The bail posted for the six African American teenagers ranged from $90,000 to $138,000. (Bill Quigley relates the whole story in Truth Out.)

The mass demonstration in Jena yesterday was held to protest the double standards of justice for whites and blacks. Mychall Ball, the first student tried, was defended by a public defender to an all-white jury, and called by a white prosecutor. The trial was presided over by a white judge. The public defender presented no evidence and called no witnesses in defense of his client, who was summarily sentenced to 22 years in jail. The case was later thrown out of court by another judge because Ball was a minor and could not be tried as an adult. Nonetheless, he is still in jail, where he has been held since December 2006. The other young men involved in this matter also remain in jail -- none of them have yet to be tried, but their lives are being ruined as day after day goes by while their families struggle to raise the exorbitant bails.

My first response was: how can this be happening? But one of our partners said to me, "I am surprised that you are surprised, particularly after all you have seen down here after the hurricane." She was telling me that to be surprised is a luxury, while for her it is a bitter reality. She was right. This is not a time for surprise, only outrage.

As UUSC Programs Director Atema Eclai and I jolted over muddy roads in Northern Uganda, I kept asking myself, “What makes the world decide to ignore a terrible war? How do we decide to close our collective eyes to thousands of young children kidnapped from their homes and brutalized into being soldiers against their own people on pain of death? How can we see Darfur but not Northern Uganda?"

Atema and I were in Northern Uganda to explore the possibility of UUSC program work there. The war in Northern Uganda has made it on to every list of “Forgotten humanitarian emergencies” since the early 1990s.

Since 1986, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda waged war against the central government by kidnapping Acholi children and youth and forcing them to fight. They have terrorized the Acholi population by brutal killings, torture, maiming, and rape. At the end of the 1990s, the Ugandan government rounded up the entire Acholi population, more than 1.5 million people, and forced them into large, poorly run camps around towns. Thousands of people died from disease due to lack of sufficient food and poor sanitation, others died when they were killed or kidnapped by the LRA. There are now peace negotiations between the LRA and the Ugandan government, and everyone is waiting and hoping for peace.

Every camp is a cluster of hundreds to thousands of neatly thatched, round, mud-walled houses. Between us, Atema and I have seen many refugee camps across four continents but neither of us had ever seen such neglected, underserved camps as these in Northern Uganda where the Acholi people are waiting for the current negotiations to lead to a deeply desired peace.

In a main camp of 20,000 people in Pader district, there are no clinic or schools. Camp residents are supposed to go to the town clinic and schools, which are totally overwhelmed by the numbers of displaced. There were children everywhere, some carrying other children, many acting as heads of households, struggling to look after their orphaned brothers and sisters.

And these children were comparatively lucky. They had not been kidnapped by the LRA, raped, beaten, and brutalized. We saw some of the girls that had escaped from the LRA, young girls whose eyes it was hard to even look into. How is it that we, in the rest of the world, just decided not to look?

Even the architecture in Northern Uganda reflects 19 years of war between the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the government of Uganda. In many outlying towns, stores have almost no windows to the street and only metal doors for better protection during armed attacks.

One night during our trip there in August, UUSC Programs Director Atema Eclai and I were invited to eat dinner with a young priest. He told us about coming to take up duties in the parish three years ago when the LRA was terrorizing the population. Although peace talks are now in progress, the war has been so brutal that people’s trauma shows in every conversation.

In the flickering light of the weak electric bulb, the priest told us of one attack by the rebels two year ago. “It was late at night when I heard them come, shouting that they wanted to get into the parish house. I hid in the corridor where there are no windows,” he said. He headed them off by yelling that there were soldiers in an adjoining building. In another attack, the rebels got into the house where the catechists were and killed all those who were staying there.

The priest told us that part of the movie, “Invisible Children," a film made by American youth about what was happening to Acholi youth in Northern Uganda, had been filmed in the parish. Caritas had courageously established a reintegration center there for youth who had escaped from the LRA. Children stayed there for counseling, education, and health care before returning home. These youth continued to be in danger from the LRA if they were re-captured. The nurse at the center told the chilling story of an attack on the center that took place one night before the peace talks. The LRA killed all the children they found.

The next day, we took pictures of the center in the sunlight. It's empty while the peace talks proceed and all the children in the LRA are now concentrated in camps in the Congo for the duration. We can only hope the peace talks succeed and the children waiting in the balance will be able to come here and be reunited with their families again.

Everywhere we drive in Northern Uganda on muddy bone-jarring roads, we hear terrible stories. We also see hope planted by the roadsides, as people sow amaranth, sunflowers, peanuts, millet, and corn again for the first time in eight years.

Since 1999, the entire population of Acholi land -- between 1.5 and 1.7 million people -- have been cooped up in overcrowded, terribly undersupplied camps. The Ugandan government tried to separate the rebel force, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), from the civilians by ordering the entire civilian population of the north into government-controlled camps clustered around the towns and trading centers where the military established barracks. The Acholi, an agricultural people, were severed from their land, which is central to their lives and livelihoods. People who did not come into the camps were considered by the soldiers to be LRA sympathizers and attacked accordingly.

The peace talks between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army are moving. The people in the north, which has been ravaged by 19 years of war, are desperately hoping for peace. Now, peace talks have advanced enough so that people are cautiously moving from the main camps closer to their homes.

It's still too early to return to their villages, so people have clustered in transition camps along the road. The clusters of round, thatched houses are smaller versions of the main camps but with even fewer services. What people do have for the first time in years is food they have grown themselves.

Programs Director Atema Eclai and I were in Uganda for ten days, visiting camps and NGOs, exploring the possibility of opening up program work in this “forgotten emergency." Walking through the camps, we passed women and girls setting out groundnuts to dry, threshing millet, grilling corn. People still haunted by the terrors of this war smile when they talk about tasting grilled corn again. Everywhere in the morning, we passed women carrying children on their backs and hoes on their heads as they go to the fields. As we returned in the afternoon, we saw them returning along the road as well, carrying firewood and food they have harvested, the children on their backs nodding asleep.

People in these transition camps are moving through a geography of fear and hope. “Just seeing all these things growing in the fields now is such a wonderful sight,” says one of the people accompanying us. "Of course people are afraid to go home to the village until we know there is peace, but they want to get closer to their land." They have enough fear to keep close to the road and enough hope to work to plant for a harvest they hope they can see.

When I recently visited our tsunami response partner, Grassroots Human Rights Education in Phang Nga, Thailand, and talked with the Burmese undocumented workers with whom they work, I was amazed at the stories of abuse and injustice I heard.

The Burmese are employed to rebuild the Thai tourist hotels and infrastructure in Phang Nga that were destroyed by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Having fled a brutal war, most are undocumented, all are suffering grave abuses of basic human rights. They are paid half of what they are promised -- or not paid at all -- they are kept in sub-human conditions, shaken down by the police, jailed if they cannot pay, and threatened with deportation if they protest.

The most eerie part of that discussion, held in a restaurant within sight of a beautiful beach, was how the stories of the undocumented Burmese rebuilding the Thai coast after the tsunami mirrored the stories of the Latin American undocumented workers rebuilding the Gulf Coast after Katrina. I could shut my eyes and -- save for the translator -- the stories of labor rights abuse were frighteningly similar.

UUSC supports the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice in New Orleans and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance in Gulfport in their work to organize and advocate for undocumented workers in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast who face the same problems the Burmese do. In Thailand, we support GHRE, a courageous organization staffed by Burmese themselves who help organize the Burmese, advocate for them, defend their rights, and provide services such as education for children of undocumented workers.

With the last UUSC grant in 2006, GHRE was able to secure legal migrant status for 25 of their workers, enabling them to travel freely to do their work without continual fear that the police would detain or deport them. GHRE sent us a photo in January of a group of workers holding up their legal migrant IDs, jubilant because they had successfully used them to get past police checkpoints without harassment. This mobility has given GHRE the ability to expand their defense of the undocumented workers and be effective advocates.

Now these workers are being hounded by new laws. Last week, Htoo Chit, the head of GHRE wrote UUSC about Phang Nga province's new restrictive laws against legal migrants. On June 9, a new law was passed prohibiting legal migrants from Burma to drive motorbikes, use cell phones, gather in groups of more than five people, or be outside between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Thai citizens are allowed to confiscate motorbikes or cellphones from Burmese migrants.

Equally draconian laws were passed in other provinces. The Thai government is trying to tie the hands of those Burmese who are struggling to improve the lives of their compatriots by making it almost impossible for them to travel, communicate, or hold meetings. These are basic human rights that are recognized worldwide. If this is how the Thai government treats the legal migrants, the undocumented workers are more vulnerable than ever.

Htoo Chit from GHRE is an inspiring human rights worker who continues to find creative solutions to the thousand and one obstacles he has faced to defend the undocumented Burmese in Thailand. We will be working with him over the next few weeks to support him against this latest violation of basic human rights.