I was in the 9th grade when Hurricane Katrina hit. I had just started at Benjamin Franklin High School. When I was a kid, we lived in a small apartment in New Orleans east and were not too well off financially, at all. But right before Katrina, my dad had gotten new work and we were rather well off, to that point where you don\'t even notice how good you have it. The night before Katrina my family and I went to have dinner with some family friends in Old Metairie. I remember having my feet in their pool and the water being as hot as bath water. I also remember my mom and I driving at night and seeing a bunch of people lined up at the gas station. We called my dad to ask what had happened. We hadn\'t even heard about Katrina. \r\nWhen we found out a hurricane was coming we brushed it off and said we were staying put. The last time we evacuated they said it was going to be a big one and we boarded our windows and sat in traffic for hours and hours just to get to Baton Rouge. It didn\'t even rain. We are residents of New Orleans, this happens all the time. Why would this time be any different? And things were going so well now weren\'t they?\r\nMy dad had a bad feeling. So while the rest of the family slept peacefully he stayed up and watched the news. At 5 a.m. he woke me up and said pack a carry on now we are leaving immediately. I took a bag filled with about 2 outfits (not the good clothes either, I had been in school a week and worn it all then) and my Harry Potter books. No, I did not bring my photos, money, jewelry or laptop. It didn\'t seem necessary, sine we would be back in a couple days right?\r\nSo we raced with all the late stragglers in New Orleans to get out to the airport and take one of the last flights leaving the day of the Hurricane. We went to Houston. We were lucky. Not everyone could leave. Had this happened when I was a kid. We would have been at the Superdome at best. \r\nIt was blurry after that. We spent a month shuffling around. We went to Houston, Nashville and Atlanta. And I think at one point Mississippi. Hotel and friend\'s house after hotel and friend\'s house. At least I had my books to keep me company since I had no house, no personal belongings, no friends (I didn\'t even know where most were), no school, no city. Actually, for two weeks we didn\'t even know how the house was doing. We stared at the news but they didn\'t know what part of town was what and couldn\'t tell you how your house was doing. \r\nWe then met up with 2 other families in Dallas, while my dad went on a month long business trip to Thailand. We shared an apartment with one of the families for a week and then moved into a garage apartment for 3 weeks. In that month I went to an art school that I really enjoyed with a friend from my old school\r\nBut of course it\'s never that easy to bounce back and we ended up moving just before my October birthday to Prairieville, Louisiana. Around this time we also went to visit our house. It was awful. I remembered our house really fondly and we were adding on to it since it was a bit small to make our dream house big enough for our whole family. We never got to live in it. We were just greeted with black mold and extensive water damage. I couldn\'t even sit on my bed. My photographs had become blank pages. I couldn\'t take any clothes or any of my favorite possessions. My house had stood for 100 years before we moved in and my dad did most of the renovations to make it livable himself even if that meant spending a summer sleeping on the wooden floors. All gone in so little time.\r\n I hated it in Prairieville. But I was really just mad that I wasn\'t in New Orleans. At least there were other kids from New Orleans there to talk to since the kids who already went there didn\'t appreciate us being there. One guy keyed \"N.O. sucks\" into another guy\'s car. I hated it and I moved in with my friend in New Orleans and went to my fourth high school in January 2006. I won\'t go into detail about what happened next, but I will say that it all related back to the drama of Katrina. I went to many high schools before I finally graduated and went through some serious mood swings and had problems coping at times with reality. There was a lot of stress in the family. Not all caused by me though, we still haven\'t gotten our insurance money and are forever in debt from a loan with Hibernia Bank because they claimed we were late on payments that were suppose to be deffered in September 2005. They drained money from our accounts and now have us in a neverending lawsuit. We also had to fight with FEMA and other organizations like the water board that says owe $900 in waterbills since Katrina (our house is gutted). \r\nI think what hurts most about Katrina is the stuff that still lingers around and no one seems to be able to help you get back to normal, the way it seems other people live. I think I am a stronger person now though, more appreciative. And I think I know who is important in my life. My dad really took care of us and slept in the car for days, went to New Orleans alone, found us a place to live and did anything that needed to be done. My 5 aunts and uncle in Baton Rouge on the other hand couldn\'t even offer us a place to stay in the days after Katrina.