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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 | 5Floodwaters swamped more than half a
million acres of forest and farmland in
the lower Mississippi Delta more than
six months ago, gulping up highways
and homes, livestock and tractors. Last
week, for the first time since, the river
gauge at Vicksburg, Miss., on the west-
ern border fell below flood stage.
“This is biblical proportion,” Paul
Hartfield, an endangered species biolo-
gist with the United States Fish and
Wildlife Service, said of the floods.
“Nothing like this has ever been seen.”
Climate change is increasingly turn-
ing the extraordinary into the ordinary.
Extreme floods and snowfall, at times
moving to extreme heat and droughts,
are forcing cities and farming communi-
ties across the United States to grapple
with the threat to their homes and liveli-
hoods.
In the Yazoo Basin, a section of the
delta where farming is the linchpin ofthe economy, people are still struggling
to cope with a flood that seems forgotten
by nearly everyone outside the disaster
zone.
Hours tick by with absolutely nothing
to do. Fields where towering corn and
chest-high soybean crops normally
grow are saturated with water. Sandbag
levees still surround many houses, forc-
ing people to wear fishing waders and
boat in and out of their homes.
Flooding is a perennial part of life in
this low-lying rural region. Relentless
rains this year, combined with drench-
ing storms that brought devastating
floods across much of the Midwest and
halted barge traffic, funneled much
more water downriver than usual and
compounded the damage.
The surge of freshwater, for example,
has killed sea porpoises and turtles and
created a toxic algal bloom along the
state’s gulf coast some 300 miles away,
closing all the beaches.
Farmers with crop insurance shouldbe able to hang on for another year, but
other business owners and workers in
this sparsely populated area worry
whether the local economy will survive.
Banks aren’t making crop loans. Farm-
ers aren’t buying seed, fertilizer and
tractors. Grain elevators are empty, and
cotton gins sit silent. Fields remain un-
der water. The summer months have
brought some respite from the rain, but
the heat has been intense.
“Last week, it was hotter than the
fires of hell down here,” said Chris
Libbey, who lives year-round in Eagle
Lake, a vacation and hunting spot.
He still has four feet of water in his
front yard, but because his house is built
on stilts, it escaped most damage. He
put up scaffolding outside the back door
and drives a boat to get around.
“Millions of gallons need to be
pumped,” Mr. Libbey said, and “until we
get this water pumped we still have 200
residents who can’t get to their homes.”
“We’re a small community, and it rip-ples down,” said Andy Anderson, the
chief executive of Anguilla Bank, the
only local bank in Sharkey and Is-
saquena Counties, where the combined
population totals 5,774. “It ripples into
the churches, it ripples into the schools,
and several businesses here are feeling
the crunch.”
Hunting brings in tourists and income
during the winter months, but the deer
population has been so thinned that the
season could be curtailed or canceled.
Wayne Ricks, a John Deere salesman
who has worked at the company for
more than 46 years, said sales were
down and were likely to drop further.
Lately, Mr. Anderson said, the bank
has been making small loans — a couple
of hundred dollars for one family to buy
groceries, and for another to purchase
clothes at Walmart to replace some of
what was destroyed.
Rolling Fork is near the birthplace of
Muddy Waters, the king of the Chicago
blues, and next to the County Court-house, a Blues Trail marker honors the
singer and guitarist. It’s the biggest
town in the area and was mostly spared
the flood but not the aftereffects. At
Chuck’s Dairy Bar, there are fewer or-
ders of Chuckburgers and strip steak.
“The bulk of our business does come
from the farming community, and that
part has been almost cut in half,” said
Tracy Harden, the owner. She has 11 full-
time workers and four part-timers. “We
are just struggling to keep everyone em-
ployed,” she said.
A complex series of levees built
around the Yazoo Backwater area be-
tween the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers
has turned the zone into an enormous
triangular-shaped bathtub. The latest
flooding has prompted residents and
state officials to revive calls for a mas-
sive federal hydraulic pumping project
near the metal gates that now sit astride
the Steele Bayou.
The Vicksburg District of the United
States Army Corps of Engineers sup-ports the pumping project, which was
first proposed in 1941. But a broad range
of opponents argue that the costly plan
would devastate vital wetlands, hard-
wood forests and wildlife, and affect bird
species that migrate through the region.
They warn that it would also worsen
flooding further south.
At a meeting in Warren County last
week, officials from the Corps of Engi-
neers told residents that they expected
floodwaters to be gone by mid-August.
The slowly receding waters have yet
to reveal the full extent of the damage
not only to farmland, roads, wildlife and
businesses, but to the levees, locks and
dams that undergird the system.
Many people are going to have to start
all over, Paul Hollis, the Sharkey County
commissioner on the Mississippi Levee
Board, said.
“We don’t know what we’ve got until
the water is completely out of here,” he
said. “There’s so much unknown until
then.”Chris Libbey of Eagle Lake, Miss., leaving his home in June. His house is built on stilts and escaped most of the flood damage. Floodwaters inundating a farm in the lower Mississippi Delta. The damage beneath the slowly receding waters has yet to be seen.Stifled by floods of ‘biblical proportion’ in Mississippi Delta
BY PATRICIA COHENworld
The last time President Trump held a
rally and his supporters shouted a deaf-
ening chorus of “Send her back,” the
Franciscan Sisters of Oldenburg were
outraged. Some of them called the chant
and remarks the president has made
about immigrants “racist,” “terrible”
and “disgusting.”
But the biggest event of the year, a
German festival, was getting underway
so the nuns let people gulp down fried
sauerkraut balls and line the streets in
lederhosen before they made their
mark.
They stepped from their 1850s-era
convent and planted a sign in their yard.
“Immigrants and Refugees Wel-
come,” it read.
But it wasn’t how everyone in town
felt.
The nuns’ yard sign was noteworthy
for where it stood: A small town in Indi-
ana, a conservative state, just an hour’s
drive from Cincinnati, the city where on
Thursday night President Trump held
his first rally since the night of those
“Send her back” chants.
Oldenburg, where the sisters live, is a
place where people are deeply proud of
their German immigrant heritage and
deeply conflicted about how to think
about immigration today. It’s a commu-
nity where many people celebrate the
past, and hold tight to it, but often sepa-
rate it from the present: They admire
their grandparents, who came to Amer-
ica with nothing and did not speak Eng-
lish, but do not always see similarities
between those stories and those coming
from the people crossing the United
States border now.
They are following the debate over
immigration — what the president says
about building a wall, what Democrats
say about the border — and agree that it
is problem, but disagree on a solution.
Jeanette Lamping, an Oldenburg resi-
dent, said she voted for Mr. Trump but
opposes the United States spending its
own money on the border wall. She be-
lieves her German ancestors knew how
to work hard. But that’s not how she sees
the current wave of people crossing the
border.
“They sneak in and want benefits,”
she said.
Oldenburg, founded in 1837 by Ger-
man immigrants, has bilingual street
names, in both German and English and
church spires that mirror those of a Ger-
man hamlet.
The city flag of Oldenburg, Germany,
is flown alongside the American flag
outside many homes. The town’s Ham-
burg Road leads to the 128-year-old
Stockheughter Covered Bridge. Family
names like Ferkenhoff and Schwert-
feger label street signs and gravestones.
Two weekends ago, thousands of peo-
ple, some in traditional German outfits,braved a heat wave to crowd the streets
for Freudenfest, “The Biggest Little
German Festival,” to mingle at the Bier-
garten, sing the Schnitzelbank Salute
and dwell on the small town’s German
roots. (The dachshund races were
called off because of the heat.)
“It celebrates our history and her-
itage,” said Jeff Paul, 61, owner of the Vil-
lage Store grocery who, like many resi-
dents, has ancestors who came from
Germany to Oldenburg in the mid-1800s
to settle on a farm. “Immigration is how
we all got here.”
Indiana has a Republican governor,
and Republicans hold a supermajority
in both chambers of the state legisla-
ture. The state voted overwhelmingly to
send Mr. Trump to the White House. But
Oldenburg, a town of about 700, is a
mostly moderate island in a sea of red
communities. Part of that is because of
its Franciscan nuns.
The nearly 200 sisters tied to the con-
vent, which also functions as a retire-
ment home, hold considerable sway in
the community, where they teach in the
parochial school, volunteer at the food
pantry and sell vegetables from their or-ganic farm. Fire hydrants are painted to
look like priests and saints. Women
wear golden Mother Mary necklaces
and the streets fill up with cars on Sun-
day for Mass.
Putting up the “immigrants welcome”
sign in the convent yard was a culmina-
tion of efforts by the sisters to remind
their neighbors of what they stand for in
this community built by people who also
crossed borders to get here.
“Some of the community — they don’tsee the connection,” said Sister Amy
Kistner. “They are all immigrants.”
In Oldenburg, residents talk about an-
cestors who had been shepherds in Ger-
many, who arrived at Ellis Island, who
initially moved to other parts of Indiana
but then fled a cholera outbreak, all to
settle here. Some said their parents and
grandparents forbade them from speak-
ing German outside the home.
When Oldenburg was filling up with
Germans in the 1800s, immigration lawsdidn’t exist or were lax. But in the dec-
ades that followed, Germans and Catho-
lics in this part of the country faced sig-
nificant discrimination and even were
targeted specifically by the Indiana Ku
Klux Klan.
“I certainly have not forgotten about
it, but I think others here have,” said
Mark Stenger, 52, whose family immi-
grated from Germany in the 1920s dur-
ing a time when even some elected offi-
cials were Klan members. He became a
member of the Hispanic Community
Committee of southeastern Indiana, a
nonprofit in an adjacent town, he said,
because he sees history repeating itself
with desperate parents arriving who
can’t speak English and need help.
Many residents here said they had
cast ballots for Mr. Trump, though not all
said they would do so again.
Don Obermeyer, 71, a retired engi-
neer, stood beside his 1956 scarlet-and-
cream-colored Chevrolet Bel Air and re-
called some family history: His grand-
parents arrived 136 years ago from Ger-
many, and he has traced his family’s
roots to 1700s-era Germany.
He celebrated at Freudenfest just theother weekend. But for Mr. Obermeyer,
present-day immigration is entirely dif-
ferent. His relatives arrived legally, he
said, in a time when immigration num-
bers were far lower.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do
with all these people,” he said.
Jim and Carolyn Meyer, both Republi-
cans who did not vote for Mr. Trump,
were scooping homemade ice cream in
their antique store in downtown Olden-
burg amid the old beer steins and
cuckoo clocks. They expressed sympa-
thy for people crossing into the United
States. In his previous job as a fifth-
grade teacher, Mr. Meyer assigned stu-
dents to research their family trees.
“We’re all immigrants fleeing from
something,” Mr. Meyer said.
“Or for something,” his wife added.
“We like to preserve history, but change
is good, too.”
Alexandra Maher moved just outside
of Oldenburg 11 years ago after she mar-
ried an American citizen she met in the
Dominican Republic, where she was
born. Her children were bullied at first
in their mostly white school in Indiana,
she said, but it lessened over time. Ms.
Maher, a business consultant, is proud of
her American citizenship and upset by
what is happening at the border now. “I
think immigration should be like I did it
— the legal way,” she said.
The community of Oldenburg hasn’t
changed significantly since it was
founded. It is still overwhelmingly white
and overwhelmingly Catholic. Many of
its buildings are listed on the National
Register of Historic Places.
For more than a century its residents
have made a living farming or working
at a giant coffin factory several miles
away in Batesville. They are proud of
their community’s heritage — that is ob-
vious in the old-fashioned lamp posts
and flowers that burst from baskets
along sidewalks — and proud of their
country.
That’s why Cindy Ziemke, a Republi-
can state lawmaker who owns the Brau
Haus restaurant in Oldenburg, thinks
the system is broken. Over a basket of
peppery fried chicken and fried sauer-
kraut balls, she explained that she be-
lieves anyone who wants to come to the
United States legally should be able to
do so. She thinks anyone crossing the
border illegally was most likely tricked
and “horribly abused” by people they
paid to guide them. But she also thinks
something needs to change. In particu-
lar, she wants to stop the flow of drugs
coming into the country. Her two sons
are recovering heroin addicts and now
help others who are struggling with ad-
diction.
At the convent, the nuns are also quite
clear in their belief that something
needs to change.
“How can people not see other people
as human beings and treat them with
dignity?” said Sister Noella Poinsette,
sitting in a convent meeting hall one
evening.A town of immigrants, conflicted
From left, Sisters Marge Wissman, Amy Kistner and Noella Poinsette at the Convent Chapel in Oldenburg, Ind. A welcome sign they made for immigrants was not wholly accepted.PHOTOGRAPHS BY AARON BORTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESOLDENBURG, IND.BY DIONNE SEARCEYCuckoo clocks for sale. Oldenburg was
founded in 1837 by German immigrants.A statue of the Virgin Mary. Germans and
Catholics faced discrimination in Indiana.РЕ
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