I was raised in New Orleans when I first came to the United States. I started living in Chalmette, Lousiana, close to the ninth ward. This area had bad damage after Hurricane Katrina. I left Chalmette when I was 7 and never went back. Things still look extremely bad, it looks as if nothing has been touched since Hurricane Katrina. A lot of attention has been focused on the lower ninth ward, where the levees broke, but going through the different parts, such as Calliope projects, Warehouse district, Magnolia, some places still look like Hurricane Katrina just happened yesterday. I was so surprised that some parts of New Orleans, such as the Magnolia projects have been developed and a lot of reconstruction is going on.
I still have family and friends that live in New Orleans, and have a house in the Westbank of New Orleans which luckily, only suffered wind damage. I’ve had family members that lost their houses, family members that had to move from New Orleans, and still can’t return. I’m blessed to say that when the hurricane hit I wasn’t in New Orleans at the time, I was already working in Chicago doing radio.
Just imagine what the people in Haiti went through when they couldn’t find their friends and family for weeks. You didn’t know where people were, if they were dead or alive.
[pagebreak]I couldn’t focus or think just knowing people that you grew up with, your friends, and family are gone, disappeared and there’s no way of reaching out to them. You’re looking at these internet sites trying to locate missing people and it gets depressing. Most people when I went down and talked about it said if you didn’t experience it first hand, the dead bodies floating in the water, no electricity, what happened at the dome you’d never know what they went through.
It’s definitely a humbling experience to go back to where you grew up, walk the streets, and not recognize them. It’s almost depressing to a point if you didn’t know the city, if you didn’t know the people and the culture, but the spirit of New Orleans is so huge. The people of the city have high hopes and if its one thing we always had, it was pride in our city no matter what. Everyone I talked to that returned after Hurricane Katrina, they’re like this is home, this is where I’m from.
The problem the people in New Orleans are having is with the city and with the rules about their houses and how to get their houses back. A lot of corruption was going on, insurance scams. People were not getting paid by insurance companies, for the damage done to their house, or the city just wasn’t helping at all. It became really hard to prove that the house was even yours after so much damage and loss of personal possessions, insurance contracts, birth certificates, everything got washed away.
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My days consisted of meeting with state representatives, I also met with Senator of Louisiana, and met with the mayors office. When I spoke to one state representative, he was talking about how some of the major hospitals in New Orleans, because they were owned by private sectors, weren’t re-built. They took the money from the insurance companies and never returned opening the hospitals, leaving people without jobs, hospitals, almost like a sense of no obligation and selfishness. Some people have returned and opened up private clinics for free, for the people.
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