In the back room of the New Orleans office of ACORN, a national grassroots community organization, grows a culture in a Petri dish.

A young organizer named Elliot told me, with only a little hyperbole: “It’s going to save the world.”

Well, maybe not the world. But if it works, it could help 200,000 families return to their Crescent City homes.

When ACORN volunteers rip out the mold-stained drywall from a house, they need to stop the mold from making its way into the wooden frame. Bleach, in many cases, isn’t toxic enough to stop the mold. The hope is that the culture will kill the mold by stealing its food.

ACORN’s science experiment is a pretty good metaphor for the state of New Orleans 11 months after Katrina. With colorful yet clumsy politicians tripping over each other and the levers of power, ordinary people have taken it upon themselves to find their way out of one of the greatest catastrophes brought upon an American city.

I went down to New Orleans with the New York Press Association, the state organization of community newspapers, which decided to turn its annual board meeting into a fact-finding mission in the Big Easy.

The joyous, raucous heart of the city in the French Quarter is still beating hard.

But venture just a little further and you’ll witness an entire city gasping for air.

The day after I arrived, I showed up at the ACORN office to volunteer in their house-gutting program. ACORN is one of a few nonprofits that has taken on the awesome task of ripping hundreds of soggy moldy houses down to their bones in the hopes of one day seeing them resurrected and occupied. It costs about $7,000 to empty and gut a house. ACORN and its volunteers do it for free.

I shared the sun-battered sidewalk with several other people from several other places as we got our assignments for the day.

I went with a group to the house of Dan Thompson, a 74-year-old former crane operator, at the foot of Lake Ponchartrain in an area called New Orleans East. Thompson, whose 21-year-old son recently gave him a kidney, greeted us in his driveway with prayerful gratitude.

Later that day, I saw the devastation in the Lower Ninth Ward — the houses on top of cars, on top of each other, on their sides, inside out. While I won’t ever forget what I saw there, in some respects it was Thompson’s situation that was more reflective of the greater tragedy because his house, like thousands of others, looked on the outside like it could be just fine. But a foot and a half of toxic water slushed into his neat, spacious house and wallowed. It made its way into the walls, bringing mold and toxins with it. Every bit of floor, drywall, ceiling, carpeting had to come out. There were some signs of neighborhood revival, but most homes were empty, and most families that had returned were living in white FEMA trailers. Schools are closed and only one supermarket is open within miles.

Thompson has been living with his family in Houston since the storm and hopes to be back in his house early next year. Like almost everyone else I talked to, he was tangling with his insurance companies to get the money he needs to rebuild.

The next day I went with the NYPA group to the home of New Orleans Times Picayune copy editor Kuumba Kazi. We came to gut his home with about 20 of his colleagues. His house looked mostly fine on the outside, but inside it was much worse off than Thompson’s. The water line was well over my head and under it was blotchy green mold. Kazi’s house had virtually not been touched since Aug. 29 and was still packed with a lifetime of memories and belongings. We threw it all — a wonderful book collection, dishware and cutlery, bedding and clothing, a treadmill – into a giant dumpster. Much of it was ruined, but those who had done this before, said most Katrina victims just want a clean start. 

As I went about my task – taking down the drywall with a crowbar, and removing the nails from the studs – I discovered a startling difference. Most of the nail heads disintegrated as I tried to pry them out of the wood with the claw of a hammer. Even the nails were soggy.

Three hours after we arrived, Kazi’s house was stripped to its bare bones, just like Thompson’s the day before. Eighteen inches of floodwater or 84, the result was the same.

Think of these two men and their interrupted lives and try to fathom the other 199,998 families that are still not in their homes 11 months after Katrina. Someone told me that the footprint of the destruction in New Orleans is eight times the size of Manhattan.

Speeding back from Thompson’s house the 15 miles or so into the center of the city, I began to register that scope of absence. Mile after mile of empty, destroyed houses, apartment complexes, gas stations, strip malls, auto part stores — all mixed in with surreal signs of an America with few worries, like billboard advertising for Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and a Monkees reunion concert.

But beyond the toll on the physical city, there’s the greater toll on people. “You can see the physical damage, but you can’t look at a human being and see the psychological damage,” Darryl Durham, the ACORN staffer who runs the rebuilding program, told me.

There is not room here to go into how our government failed to protect a major city like New Orleans when there were so many predictors of Katrina’s devastation. Much has been written about that.

But Bronxites who have been around a while should be able to empathize with New Orleanians’ sense of abandonment. Our borough was left to burn for a decade in the 1970s when 12,000 fires blazed a year and hundreds of thousands of households were destroyed. And much more damage would have been done were it not for those who stayed and fought, particularly here in the northwest Bronx, to save their neighborhoods. They demanded that the city put the Bronx back in its portfolio of responsibilities.

New Orleanians are demanding to be heard, too. In the absence of any clearly articulated governmental plan, people are fearful that their neighborhoods will be planned out of existence. They are getting mixed messages from the mayor and other officials. Public housing that many residents thought was salvageable was destroyed last month without any serious attempt to rehabilitate it. ACORN members have started planting “Do Not Bulldoze” signs in front yards all over the city in a bid to prevent demolition before they get straight answers from the politicians about what the long-range plan is.

What can we do to help New Orleans? A Wisconsin chef, who volunteered with me at ACORN, put it succinctly: “By swinging hammers and spending money.” Our colleges, high schools, and religious groups can organize service trips and help with house gutting and, eventually, the rebuilding. You can “adopt a home” through ACORN, by donating money to help with gutting and rebuilding. We can also study what happens when government chooses not to govern, and do what we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

New Orleans will never be the same, but even at its weakest, it’s still a vibrant, unique city. We had a lot of fun in New Orleans, too. We ate well and heard great music, and while I felt a little guilty, every local we encountered was grateful we had come down to lend a hand and help the economy.

At dinner one night, Lolis Elie, a terrific Times Picayune columnist, summed up what went wrong: “This is a lack of American will, not a lack of American ingenuity,” he said.

We clearly can’t expect our government to demonstrate that will on its own. It will need to learn from, and follow the lead of, the people it governs.