Before leaving to New Zealand, I took a trip to Louisiana with my family. Every year we went back to Lafayette, the city where we grew up, to visit our extended family. We stayed with my Aunt Wanda and my Uncle Hulon. The girls in the family would go shopping at the malls and my sister would spend everyone‘s money on clothes for herself. My dad and my Uncle Hulon would usually go fishing down on the bayou. I spent much of the day riding four wheelers with my cousins and we would come home in the evening to my mama and my Aunt Wanda cooking a hot pot of gumbo on the stove. They make the best gumbo.
The morning of the twenty eighth of August was unlike any other morning in Louisiana. We watched the news as they declared Hurricane Katrina a Category Five storm, the highest possible rating. We had heard about the hurricane and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco declared a state of emergency for Louisiana. This was after The National Hurricane Center forecasted that Katrina would soon be a Category Three hurricane on August twenty sixth. The next day, the mayor of New Orleans issued a voluntary evacuation order but it was only voluntary. This was not the first hurricane in south Louisiana, for we have been evacuated many times only to return to our homes as they were when we left. We were not going to leave, because we were almost two hours from New Orleans. There was no way the hurricane could affect us.
After watching the news, we drove to the grocery store to buy breakfast and enough food to sit through the storm. The grocery store was crowded and full of people buying food and water supplies to sit out the storm. The weather was nice enough to still go to the grocery store. It seemed as though most people were not taking the hurricane very seriously and neither were we. In Louisiana, there is a season for hurricanes so they come through every year. On the way out, a man jumped out from behind a car in the parking lot and stole our bags full of groceries. We handed them over, not wanting the man to harm any of us. We saw others stealing groceries as well as we were walking towards our car and then riots started to break out. I saw a glass door shatter as people shoved their way out of the grocery store with stolen food. People were acting as if the world was going to end. At least, the world as they knew it. Although Louisiana is a poor state, this was not normal in the city of Lafayette. Lafayette is one of the nicer cities in Louisiana and it does not have a very high crime rate. This grocery store was also in a very nice neighborhood, which makes these things very unlikely. We drove home shocked and afraid of what was happening to the city. As I stared out the window, I thought, “Maybe this is not going to be just a storm.” When we arrived back at home, we turned on the news and the mayor of New Orleans issued a mandatory evacuation order for the city and its surrounding areas. We spent the rest of the day preparing for the storm that was about to hit.
The morning of the twenty ninth of August, the whole family was awakened by the house shaking. I remember my mama walking down the hallway towards us as the house shook. She grabbed my little brother out from his bed as the window above it shattered. The rain and the wind were so heavy that I did not think our house would stay on the ground. We crouched and waited and listened as the windows and pieces of our house diminished.
A child’s view of Hurricane Katrina must be a scary thing. So much of the southern culture they have always known was battered and destroyed by a killer natural disaster. In Lafayette, Hurricane Katrina lasted two days. South Florida all the way to the Southeastern part of Texas was under water. Storm victims were beaten and raped, fires and fights broke out, bodies lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters were shot at as flooded New Orleans descended into anarchy. A storm that happened so fast changed America. I know it changed me. Things that once mattered to me did not matter anymore. Instead of thinking about the material things, I thought about family and wondered where we go after we die. Hurricanes may happen every year in Louisiana, but this was no ordinary hurricane. Survivors lost everything they had, including family members. Their homes, the places they worshiped, the places they shopped, and the places they learned were all taken away.
The effects of Hurricane Katrina were calamitous and long lasting. The center passed through New Orleans on August 29, 2005. By August 31, eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, with some parts of it under fifteen feet of water, and 1,836 people lost their lives. We were a few of the fortunate ones. My Aunt Wanda and Uncle Hulon and many others in my family only had to change homes.
Suddenly, leaving my family for only two years was not hard. I left to New Zealand in March of 2006 and told the story of Hurricane Katrina. I returned to America in March of 2008 to see New Orleans rebuilding. The city has continued to struggle since Katrina, the worst natural disaster in its history. It destroyed 70,000 homes and displaced many more. New Orleans, the city that I watched drown is continuously rebuilding and despite its struggles, is still going strong. The New Orleans Super Dome that tens of thousands were trapped in during Hurricane Katrina celebrates the victory of their team, the New Orleans Saints, in Super Bowl XLIV. This victory was not only for the New Orleans Saints, neither was it just a source of city pride for New Orleans. It represents a personal victory of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana over Hurricane Katrina.
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