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Today's Featured Biography
Cathe Nelson Mizell-Nelson
2017
Hi everyone—we're still in New Orleans, still loving it. I work at an art & history museum and research center called The Historic New Orleans Collection. It's a FREE museum, so be sure to stop and say hi if you're in town.
2007
So sorry I can't attend the reunion and catch up with everyone, but we're kind of busy rebuilding a city here. Since the President won't make good on his promises from September 2005 to "do whatever it takes" to get New Orleans back on its feet, we have been left to our own devices and have been getting by on the kindness of strangers. Thousands of church groups and student groups and concerned individuals have come to New Orleans to help people gut their flooded houses, haul debris, cut down dead trees, etc., and we're very grateful for their help.
Individual citizens opened their hearts and wallets wide after Katrina, and thank you very much if you were one of those people. My family and I spent September of 2005 bouncing around between hotels, friends, and family members. From October through December, we lived in a newly bought and renovated vacation home on Cape Cod that total strangers let us use for free. I still choke up when I think of their incredible generosity.
On New Year's Eve 2005, we made it back to New Orleans, which has been my home for 17 years now, and it's the only place I care to live, in spite of the huge obstacles we still face. What do you think your community would look like if 80% of its homes had been destroyed? How many years do you suppose it would take for people to rebuild their homes and jobs and hospitals and schools?
I drive through one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods on my way to and from the University of New Orleans every day (I teach English). Perhaps a third (optimistically) of the houses are occupied; some are in the process of being rebuilt, while the families live in tiny FEMA trailers in the front yard; some have been gutted but no other work has been done; and some are still untouched, with weeds reaching the eaves. It's depressing, but more than that, it's infuriating. The government at every level--federal, state, and local--has created a bureaucratic quagmire, throwing up roadblocks rather than helping people get into their homes. Insurance companies have done everything they can to send the tiniest possible checks, or no checks at all, to people who faithfully paid premiums for decades.
As for my family, we made out all right, as Katrina stories go. Since we have young children, we always evacuate well in advance, whenever there's any chance of a hurricane hitting New Orleans. At the time, we were renting a townhouse across the street from the now-infamous 17th-Street Canal. We were lucky, though: we lost one car, but we evacuated in our van, so we still had that. Most of the homes in our neighborhood were one-story brick ranches, and they flooded to the ceilings. We had a second story, so we only lost half our household goods. When my husband came back for a salvaging trip, he saw in a neighbor's yard dozens of their family photos--what used to be family photos, that is--scattered across their front yard. That keeps our losses in perspective.
My husband teaches U.S. history (his specialty is New Orleans) at the University of New Orleans. Within weeks of the disaster, he was working with a center at George Mason University in Virginia to create the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, www.hurricanearchive.org, where people can submit and preserve their experiences, observations, photos, e-mails, Podcasts--anything in a digital format. It's a staggering collection, and I hope you'll check it out.
Some people here call the aftermath of Katrina the Federal Flood, as a reminder that it wasn't the hurricane that devastated our homes, it was the failure of the levee system that was supposed to protect us. Unfortunately, the Army Corps of Engineers only designed the system to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, knowing full well that the classification systems goes up to Category 5. Not only that, but the design of their Category 3 protection system was faulty. Not only that, but the Corps didn't even build the system to its own (faulty) specifications. Much of the Netherlands would be under water if it weren't for their sophisticated levee system. If they can do it, why can't we?
People outside the Gulf Coast want to know why their tax dollars should go to rebuild New Orleans, which is just going to flood again, they say, because it's below sea level. Much of Boston and Washington, D.C., were built on land created by filling in parts of their harbors. How long before massive storms flood those cities? Sacramento, the capital of California, exists only because of an extensive, and even more vulnerable levee system. The floods last month throughout the Midwest prove that just about any community that lies next to water (hmm, that's . . . every community) is vulnerable to flooding.
I had the pleasure of visiting Decorah in July, just before Nordic Fest. (Sorry, but we couldn't make our schedule work any other way.) We had a great time at the pool, canoeing, walking the prairie trails next to the river. Some neighbors of my parents chatted with me about how things were going in New Orleans, and then shook their heads and remarked that people really shouldn't be living there, since it's below sea level and all. These folks live just a block off 5th Avenue, which is just a few very flat blocks from the dike that protects them from the Upper Iowa River. "Dike" is just an Anglo-Saxon version of the French word "levee." A couple generations ago, that land would have flooded just about every year, I'm guessing.
Sorry to go on and on with "woe is us," but we spent a month last summer driving around the Midwest and New England, and it seemed that more than half the people we talked to wanted to know why anyone would still want to live in New Orleans and why we felt we had a right to exist in the first place.
If you've never been to New Orleans, you should come. Just today (9/15/07), my family went down to the French Quarter for a little art & music festival, with African drumming, Cajun music, and more. The French Quarter, the Garden District, all the historic areas are still intact and lovely and open for business. They're part of what makes this city worth living in. The other part is only half restored: the people. I know the Midwest prides itself on being friendly--and I certainly believed it as long as I lived there--but if you want to know friendly, you need to come here. People are ready to talk to anyone at any time about anything. Last week in a grocery store near the university, in that neighborhood that's barely limping back, the old, old woman in line ahead of me exulted when she found her discount card for the store in her wallet: "It's still there after two years!" She had only just made it back to the city. "Spent part of the time in Virginia, part of the time in Georgia," she said. "Couldn't stand none of 'em!" I knew just how she felt, having spent just four months in exile.
If you don't believe me that New Orleans is worth visiting, if not living in, ask Paula Reitan. She came to visit her sister Rachel, who's also here, in January, and she found much to love here.
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