Burning Bright
A Burning Man bohemian and business owner helps clean up after Katrina.
Entrepreneurs are experts at thinking innovatively, and so are
attendees at Burning Man, an annual art festival in the Nevada
desert. So when a group of Burners put their skills together to
help some of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, it was a
no-brainer for entrepreneur Lisa Benham, who had attended four Burning Man
gatherings, to get involved.
Using a temporary Kyocera hot spot to maintain her Los Gatos,
California, graphics and web design business while volunteering,
Benham, 42, went to Biloxi, Mississippi for two weeks in January to
help Burners Without Borders volunteers rebuild a Vietnamese
temple. After that, her entire camp picked up and moved to
Pearlington, Mississippi. "Basically, everything had to be
razed and replaced. That's where we came in."
Burners are experts at building and removing structures in the
inhospitable environment of the Nevada desert. After Burning Man
2005 (which was getting underway just as Katrina struck), burners
took the heavy equipment they used there to Mississippi. Benham and
about 20 other BWB participants spent more than two months in
Pearlington, demolishing homes and reclaiming materials while also
organizing community art projects for the displaced residents.
"You just have to lean down and pick up one brick at a time.
That's how anything ever [gets] done," says Benham. Look
for BWB to continue on well after the Katrina cleanup, with
volunteers like Benham working to bring aid to hard-hit areas.
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