"NOLA" by dovalyn

It was a few months after Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans. My best friend Carmen who is a survivor from that devastation can still recant her days and nights up on the roof of her next door neighbor's house with her son, elderly mother and a few neighbors that didn't evacuate in time and she is now living in California with her mother and son. Her brother followed them a few weeks later. Carmen was going back to New Orleans to try to claim her personal items that she thought she still had in her rented house on Elm Street. She received numerous eviction notices from her landlord advising her of the situation. When she told me of her pending trip, I offered to go along to help her in whatever way that I could. I brought along my digital camera to record her journey and story.

Arriving in New Orleans was erie. It was a calm that I've never known this city to have which was usually vibrant and spirited. The airport was quiet and a silence that was piercing. During Katrina, this travellers sanction was turned into a hospital housing residents who could make it here by any means they could, looking for food, shelter and loved ones. The tarmac held the bodies of those that didn't make it through the storm.

Carmen's home was completely gutted when we arrived. Her personal belongings strewn about and discarded. Vandals, the landlord, the workers. We couldn't say who was so heartless to sow this upon another human. I could feel her pain as her eyes wandered over their belongings scanning on what she could salvage. The inside of the home was battered and torn away by the landlord wanting to repair what he could due to the FEMA aid and it's slowness at getting to the residents. He was in a bind as well. There was some hope when she had tucked away some things in the attic and retrieved them out of harms way, vandals and the rising water from the floods. A look of elation and the discovery that no one had touched them, precious photos, Halloween and Christmas decorations. These things meant so much to her when she lost everything.

Riding throughout the neighborhood, we saw devastation beyond belief. Trees hundreds of years old, toppled over with weakened roots like a chess piece. Automobiles that were now encrusted with the remnant of the muddy mississippi water, lawns that were brown and ravaged, no signs of life on the ground we walked on, no birds in the sky to sing us their morning songs, dogs and cats were no where to be found, where had they all gone?