I spent all day Monday, Nov. 12, in New York, both volunteering and reporting. I made my way to one of two hub sites in Brooklyn operated by Occupy Sandy volunteers. While waiting for my brief orientation, I interviewed Dan, a young Brooklynite who said he sat on his couch for the first week after Hurricane Sandy hit the city before deciding he needed to get involved. His home was unaffected by the storm. He came down to St. Jacobi Lutheran church on busy 4th Avenue, and after a steady week of volunteering, said, "Now I can't stop." He was working at the same site on Staten Island every day and said shell-shocked residents would come out of their houses as soon as the Occupy volunteers drove in with basic supplies and claimed everything within a few minutes. He added his greatest joy was passing out stuffed animals to the kids and urging them to "take care of" the teddy bear he handed them. On the day I met him, Dan was scouring the large church basement for cleaning and building supplies. He even said, "Now I'm just kinda hooked."

I spent the morning prepping food that was cooked and delivered to points around the city where residents still had no power and no heat and hot meals were a rare treat. The two guys in charge of the kitchen and dining room where dozens of volunteers were cutting veggies or making sandwiches -- including 30 fifth and sixth graders from a city program -- were good-humored and incredibly organized and kept us all working efficiently.

In the afternoon, after doing a few more interviews, I headed out to Far Rockaway, Queens, in a carload of women to help in a distribution center in Ocean Village, a low-income housing development. The drive out took a half hour, but two hours on the return to Brooklyn (worst traffic jam maybe I've ever been in). We passed miles of flooded out cars on the main drag's median strip, waiting for insurance adjusters to do their thing before they could be towed away and junked.  Also saw several boats marooned on the pavement;  shades of New Orleans and the bayou after Katrina.

I found that same intense energy that Dan had in Sabrina, a resident of Ocean Village who was in charge of distributing all the supplies donated through Occupy Sandy. Although still without power and heat after more than two weeks, she seemed remarkably upbeat. Despite serious health problems she said she put "on the back burner," she said she gets up every day and goes to the distribution center. "When I wake I'm like, okay, Let's get it going. Like your coffee, you know what I mean," sh." And she laughed. I asked her if she thought her life would ever be the same, and she said no, "because somebody saw something in me" and called her to take on leadership. Click here for a story for WIN (Workers Independent News) featuring both Dan and Sabrina.

That's not to say that tempers weren't short at times. But things seemed to be running remarkably smoothly, and all on volunteer energy. I interviewed Pablo Benson-Silva, the site coordinator at St. Jacobi, who said he'd been involved with Occupy Wall Street from Day One (Sept. 17, 2011 to be exact) but that Occupy Sandy had brought in a much larger group of people. Click here to listen to/read his explanation of how Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy are both "disaster relief."

I've been in touch with Sabrina since she got her power back, at least by generator. She's  now confronting the letdown after 18 days of crisis. There'll be more to say about this in future posts, like what kind of mental health services are going to be available for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and New Jerseyites in need?

We never lost power and had barely a few twigs to pick up around our yard after Superstorm Sandy passed through. I ran into a neighbor at the gym who joked that she had "survivor's guilt" because she also passed through unscathed.

While there was some severe damage along the Connecticut shoreline, it kind of pales in comparison with what hit New York City and the Jersey shore. Hundreds of thousands are still without power there (exacerbated by the nor'easter that hit this week), and an aerial photo I saw this morning on Democracy Now! did remind me of New Orleans after Katrina. My friend Victorya and I drove down there two months afterward, in early November 2005, her Outback loaded with supplies. The cars piled up on city streets and the boats dry-docked in people's front yards in the bayou looked eerily like the scenes on Staten Island and other devastated neighborhoods. My four trips to Louisiana post-Katrina were always split between reporting and volunteering, and I'd like to do that in NYC, though I haven't actually done it yet, despite it being in my back yard and easy to get to on the train.

Just as we saw very little evidence of the Red Cross helping in New Orleans,  it's been MIA after Sandy, to the point of being publicly chastised by the borough president of Staten Island.  Yet Americans are still being asked to donate to the Red Cross, and the telethon featuring Bruce Springsteen raised money for it. I wish it would have raised funds for the on-the-ground, grassroots groups that have no money but are still somehow providing more help to desperate residents than the Red Cross. Occupy Wall Street, for one, has transformed itself into Occupy Sandy Relief. Even the name conjures up the grassroots group in New Orleans -- Common Ground Relief -- where I volunteered as a cook in a health center they set up on the non-flooded west bank of the Mississippi on my first trip, and where, on a subsequent trip, I helped plant sea grass on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain (I think) as part of a massive, multi-organization effort to combat land loss and blunt the impact of future storms.

As I write, I'm inspiring myself to go to NYC.  Check for a report in my next post.