Day 1: St. Thomas Clinic - Monday and Tuesday are Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras, so basically the city shuts down, and we can't start our tobacco project (Project 2) until Wednesday. So the entire New Orleans group went to St. Thomas Health Services at St. Andrew and Magazine Streets to help rebuild the clinic. One of the New Orleans groups will continue to help the clinic throughout the week. One this day, we repainted the downstairs clinic rooms, after a small discussion with Dr. Mary Able, the doctor who manages the clinic.

St. Thomas Clinic is the only community-based primary health clinic that serves the Irish Channel community in New Orleans. With a predominently African-American patient base, the clinic has a particular understanding and interest in the intersections between health and race and the (in-) ability of the health care infrastructure to provide adequate care.

Dr. Kimberly Richards of the People's Institute gave us even more insight into the problems produced by the history of this nation based on race and their manifestations in health and health care.

Institutional 'isms - Finally I am able to verbalize what the social anxiety I've always had about living and growing up in this area. I never really understood the meaning of institutional racism until now, thanks to Dr. Richards. Instititutional racism is not necessarily an intentional or conscious effort to discriminate, but rather, often the design of a policy, process or system disproportionately affects certain races or ethnic groups more negatively others. From the People's Institute's standpoint, the entire nation of the United States was founded on an institutionally racist document, the Constitution, which set out the principle that an African American (slave) was less of a human than a white person. And even with the civil rights movement, the systems and processes still discriminate against the poor, uneducated and disadvantaged. This is why New Orleans was in bad shape before Katrina, and this is why the the recovery efforts are so slow.

New Rooms - We painted about nine rooms on the first floor of the clinic, which will be up and running on Wednesday when the patients start coming. The group that will be coming back all week will also help reorganize the pharmacy and paint the nursery upstairs. The rooms were all initially pink and blue, and we wondered by we'd go and paint all the rooms "Walmart White." I guess it is the cheapest, but a patient that came in Wednesday also said that the newly-painted rooms looked clean. It's important that all patients feel like they're getting good care, and a clean environment is important for that.