Katrina Circa March 2008

So I’ve been writing things but not posting them. Sorry. I now find myself at an art education conference in New Orleans and somewhat shaken by the Katrina damage. It’s a couple of years later and the swath of devastation is so widespread one can’t absorb the enormity of it all. So many people have been displaced or left and so much is rubble. How can one contemplate what needs to be done, even? The job is too big and it was made so much worse due to bureaucratic delays and mismanagement.
Our tour bus (yes, I took a tour bus because I was afraid to venture out in a rental car by myself) went to many affected areas, from the domed arena to the various levees and canals to the two 9th Wards. There are empty lots where neighborhoods used to be. Store after store is closed. Blocks and blocks have a house or two and then nothing. Churches have no roofs. You can see the holes in the roofs where people axed themselves out and holes where rescuers sawed their way in. The “x’s” on the front of buildings tell us when the National Guard was there, what they found (how many dead) and how many occupants were there.
Our driver told of two sisters who were put on different buses and their ailing mother on a third. One sister wound up in Tennessee and the other in Alabama. They still have no idea what happened to their mother or if she is even alive.
A lot of people can share the blame for the lack of response to this disaster. But you would think things would be a little further along by now. I’ll see if I am able to post some photos for you from here. And I’ll get back to the business of blogging more frequently, I promise.