I am a native New Orleanian. I\'ve lived in Louisiana - including New Orleans, Alexandria, and Baton Rouge - all of my life except for two summers. Most time was spent in New Orleans, and second most in Baton Rouge. I lived back in New Orleans up until September of 2004 when I moved to New York City to pursue a PhD in anthropology at CUNY. \r\n\r\nI was visiting New Orleans when Katrina approached the city. I\'d evacuated to Baton Rouge several times before when storms were approaching the general area of New Orleans. I knew well the threats to New Orleans of a direct hit since my sister is an environmental scientist and my ex-husband is a geographer working in environmental science. I had just rented a car the Thurs. before Katrina and gotten to drive around the city visiting friends in the Treme and in Lakeview, as well as family Uptown. It was not until Friday night that I heard about Katrina\'s projected path.\r\n\r\nI was in a neighborhood bar in Mid-City with my brother, my sister, and two friends, one who met us there and one who just happened to be there when we arrived, when I first heard about the storm and saw it on the news. It was the closest to a direct hit I remembered seeing being projected any time that I was living in the city. Oh shit, we all said. My brother recommended that I immediately call the airport and see if I could get a sooner flight out of town, as I was scheduled to fly out to get back to NY the following Monday. I didn\'t want to leave early and said I would just wait until the morning and see how it looked then. We continued drinking and talking and saying things like \"Holy shit, that looks like it could be really bad\" as the news weathermen discussed the storm in the background at the bar.\r\n\r\nSaturday morning, things looked worse. The projected path was being inched over to the west, closer to being a direct hit on N.O. I began to call all of my immediate family to find out what they were thinking. I secured a ride for myself out of town for that afternoon with my ex-husband, who lives in Baton Rouge (I had to return my rental car that day - when I went to do so I heard the employees there telling people on the phone that they had no more rentals and one woman waiting there was happy that I showed up so she could rent the car I was returning). My sister, visiting from her own PhD program in Santa Barbara, Ca., planned her exit that day as well, also to B.R.. My brother, who lives Uptown, said he was going to wait and see, and maybe leave in the middle of the night. My other sister, who lived in Lakeview, said she wanted to leave, but needed to talk with her husband and convince him, so was waiting for him to get home from work that afternoon.\r\n\r\nWe took small old roads out of town and had no problems Sat. afternoon with traffic. I called my friend in town from Portland, Or. visiting her dad in Lakeview and she said she\'d gotten an early flight back home. My sister from Lakeview said she and her husband and my 4-year-old nephew were going to leave very early the next morning. She was trying to secure some things around the house and pack up. She was going to leave their new little kitten and I told her she needed to go get a cat carrier at the vet and bring him. She was luckily able to find one.\r\n\r\nRegretfully, I didn\'t call my friends in Treme until I was in Baton Rouge. However, I knew from previous conversations that they would not evacuate for a storm. I called them and Sylvester confirmed that he had to stay since his 90 year old mother was staying and more of his extended family.\r\n\r\nMy oldest sister from Lakeview arrived at around 6am Sunday morning and made plans to go to Memphis. I rode the storm out with my other sister, ex-husband, and some of my sister\'s friends. The winds were scary even in B.R. with trees being pushed and pulled down towards the sidewalks and streets, branches cracking and falling all around, power lines popping and transformers exploding. Since a tree had fallen on this same house during Hurricane Andrew, we never knew if we were better off outside or in.\r\n\r\nMonday morning we walked around the neighborhood and got a glimpse of trees on some people\'s roofs cutting into their houses, branches littering the streets and yards everywhere. Power was out. It came back on pretty soon on this block, though not on others nearby. We began to watch what was unfolding in N.O., incredulously and with dread.\r\n\r\nI couldn\'t reach any of my friends in Treme as my cell phone, still with a 504 area code, wouldn\'t work. Tuesday we heard from my sister\'s boyfriend who\'d stayed in N.O. downtown by text messages. He was trying to leave the city. My sister went to a movie with friends since the A/C was out at her friends\' house and it was hot. While she was there, her boyfriend called my ex-husband\'s cell phone from somewhere in B.R. to which he\'d gotten a ride. My husband went to pick him up immediately. He came into the house shaken and smelling horribly. He did not sit or get to close, but told the story of how he had to leave his hotel as the lobby was flooded and diesel gas had leaked from the basement, so the water was coated with fuel and a fire hazard. He left with his two bags and was on the street hoping for a ride from someone he\'d met with a car. Some guardsmen approached him on the street from a big tractor of some sort and told him to move the car. He was yelling that he couldn\'t move it because it wasn\'t his and he didn\'t have the key, and then trying to yell to the owner to come move the car, when the guardsmen jumped down and pointed automatic weapons at his head yelling to move the car, then knocked him aside with the weapon. He did get the ride with this man with the car after helping him fix the car. He said he didn\'t want to sit on the furniture in that filthy state and asked to take a shower. He seemed a bit in shock.\r\n\r\nThe next day my sister\'s friend who is a photographer and so stayed downtown, managed to get out of the city with her boyfriend. She said that at the Ritz, they were not letting people get their cars and leave. Finally, on Wed., they saw the opportunity with some others to get out. They literally busted through some wall to get out and make their way to the parking garage. They found their van and got the hell out of town. She said that even though her conditions at the Ritz were better than many other places, that two more days in the city and she would have lost her mind. She had taken pics at the Superdome as people were arriving there and tried to show that the majority of people were families, elderly, just regular people and very orderly and calm. She and her boyfriend arrived at my husband\'s talking non-stop about their different experiencs and stories, then both showered. They were planning to leave B.R. that night to head up to his family\'s place in NY, but after showering realized they were too tired. They offered me a ride back to NY since my flight was cancelled and we didn\'t know when the airport would be functioning again. But people were still stranded in N.O. and I immediately started crying. I wasn\'t ready to leave. I couldn\'t leave when things were still so unresolved. I wanted to do something, though I knew I couldn\'t really. I wished we had filled the back of my ex-husbands truck with people when we\'d left, though I knew that people just often don\'t want to leave for a storm. But I had no choice but to take the ride since classes were already starting back. It was the hardest departure I\'d ever made. \r\n\r\nOn the long drive up it was me, my sister\'s friend and her boyfriend and their dog, my sister and her boyfriend. First we couldn\'t find any gas on the way out. This had not yet been reported on the news and we were freaking. Just about to run out and having stopped at multiple stops that had none, we finally stopped somewhere that happened to have some. Whew! Luck. On our way out, I\'d heard from my ex-husband that they were telling state employees in downtown B.R. not to leave the building and told to do so because there were reports of violence from evacuees. This turned out to be false rumor and panic. \r\n\r\nOn the way up we bought newspapers at every stop and I read articles out loud to the van. We listened to radio news. We discussed what was going on and our city. We cried, we made jokes here and there, we were all going through different stages of shock and horror. And mourning. We grew increasingly depressed. We bonded and talked the whole way. I stayed in NJ with my sister and her boyfriend, at his family\'s, for a long weekend before going back to NY. I was trying to reorient myself. We watched the news constantly, frustrated and angry with the failures to help the stranded residents. I felt so sad and depressed and out of place. I just wanted to go home. But of course, that was impossible. I\'ve struggled with depression since. I like NY less and just want to be home. I did some volunteer work here in NY with evacuees here to try to help and connect with my home folks. They too felt out of place and disoriented. I have decided to direct my PhD work towards N.O. and rebuilding somehow. Still working out how. Trying to get through coursework. It\'s been very hard to concentrate on anything else and I am taking advantage of free counseling at school. Luckily, my dept. is understanding and supportive, unlike many I\'ve heard of. And I can focus on this in my classes. I\'ve gone back twice since I left in Sept. - once in early Nov. because I HAD to see it, and once for Christmas holidays just recently. I plan to go back for Mardi Gras too. Also for the summer, when I will try to start working out how I might approach my diss research project. Little has happened in the city besides individual people and small groups helping each other and working hard to get back. But so many are still gone and so much of the city is still empty, dark, filthy, and dead over 4 months later. And those who are there are struggling themselves with depression. I fear what the city will be like in the future. I identify with it very closely and love it very dearly. Many of my feelings about the city have been challenged - that it has more racial interaction than most, that is more joyful than most, etc. But I am beginning to understand that those things are still true in spite of all the problems that I knew of before but that have been exposed and treated as the main features of the city. My sense of loss is for the people, but also for my own feelings about the city. People now are focusing so much on the problems and missing all the beauty of the place and the people. Especially of the people. There was less materialism there. Anyway, I also was able to help find some people I knew and to reconnect them with other people wanting to help through the internet, and especially once cell phones were working again. My friends in Treme who never had cell phones had borrowed some and we kept in touch closely once I found them.\r\n\r\nMy sister\'s house in Lakeview was flooded and she is now in Baton Rouge. She wants to go back, but hasn\'t been able to settle things with her insurance company and doesn\'t know how to make decisions when everything is so uncertain. She has been very depressed and struggling, though she\'s found a pretty good job. She bought a house in B.R. even though she was surprised that she was able to qualify, simply because she could not afford to rent a place. Rents have been hiked up since the storm. They talk about price gouging, but don\'t include rent in that, absurdly. The real estate market is sacred, I guess. So she is now monthly having to call her mortgage company in N.O. to find out if she can extend her suspension of her payments for another month. This is a great cause of stress since she can\'t afford two mortgages. She hopes to fix up her place and rent it out for now while she waits to see what happens in the city and if she can go back there with her son.