I remember being at work at the Hilton Garden Inn on South Peters when the story of the hurricane was unfolding. We were all looking at the television in amazement and disbelief. However, none were making serious plans to evacuate. You see every year New Orleanians are told that this is the the year that New Orleans will find herself underwater. And every year we listen. However, after a while, one tends to grow a bit immune to the fear that these reporters and hurricane specialist try to inflict upon us.\r\n The next day at work, the hurricane had grown stronger and more massive. There was talk that the city had already started the counterflow of traffic on the GNO. Being from the Westbank, I feared that i would not be able to get back to my family. Therefore, i closed the hotel\'s restaurant so that we could all get to our families (even though we had to go back because as just a supervisor i did not have the authority to do it so the MOD called us all back).\r\n Later that night, after we looked at images of what Jackson Square Garden would look like if the city suffered a direct hit, we made plans to go to my cousin\'s apartment in Nachitoches, La. Sadly enough, those of us in college (I at a Xaiver, one sister at Dillard, and another one at LSU) were happy because this would mean that we would have time to catch up on our work, like we did every year when we had to evacuate. Even though we were going with my cousin\'s sister on a school bus, my mom still made us fill up our new cars, which we had just gotten a month before, with price gouged gas and park in our neighbors driveway and our driveway since the land where we live is like a slight hill.\r\n This had to have been the worst time of my life. We were approximately 20 people in a two bedroom 1 bathroom apartment. We watched in disbelief as images of the city and its people were shown. We did not know what to do next with our lives. We couldnt get to any money because the atm\'s were down. For the first time in our lives we had to depend on government assistance. No one got good service on their cell phones so we could not really get in touch with anybody. All we did know was that life would never be the same.\r\n This lasted a week before me and my immediate family went to atlanta. the others stayed behind but would eventually go to atlanta as well. i enrolled at gsu but later stopped going because i was too depressed. eventually my sisters and brothers went back to new orleans, my mother\'s job was temporarily in alabama, and i stayed behind in new orleans.\r\n I did come back to new orleans after a while and i am happy to report that i will be graduating this spring. but life here is different. there is not a day that goes by that one does not think of his or her life before and after the storm. in fact its a joke now that new orleans no longer uses calendar dates anymore, it\'s either \"before katrina\" and \"after katrina\". but sometimes when i think back, my life before katrina seems so far away, like from another lifetime. events that happened five years ago seems like things that happened in a previous life. it\'s all so strange now. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n