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Cover Story Katrina in the Classroom Blown Away In the Big Easy:The Life Lessons Katrina Left Behind
Susquehanna University's first hurricane response team traveled to Katrina-ravaged Louisiana in January. Victoria Kidd, a regular feature writer for Susquehanna Today, accompanied the group for the first half of the weeklong service trip. Kidd, herself acquainted with disaster when her own home was flooded during Hurricane Ivan in September 2004, draws on her personal experience in writing the following account of the trip. Atlanta, Ga., Saturday, Jan. 7 2:45 p.m. EST: I'm settling into my seat, 21E -- a window seat, as requested -- on Delta Air Lines Flight 630 to New Orleans International Airport. I watch as other passengers file by, searching for their seat numbers below the overhead storage. A young man -- long, lean and smooth-skinned -- stops at the empty aisle seat beside me and checks his ticket. He will be my traveling companion on this, the third leg of my trip. My day began at 6 a.m. with a three-hour drive from Selinsgrove, Pa., to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, where I caught my flight to Atlanta. Like me, many passengers on this flight have a final destination of New Orleans, La., probably one of the last cities in the country most people want to be in this post-Katrina era. It's been more than four months since the hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast, causing levees to burst and flood much of the city. As the young man settles into the seat beside me, I wonder, "Is he a survivor?" My traveling companion smiles and says "Hi," as he stuffs a small duffle bag under the seat. By the time we take off, talk of our separate origins and common destination soon give way to discussions about the purpose of my trip and, of course, Katrina -- a subject that increasingly dominates conversations the closer I get to New Orleans. I soon learn that Raynard Bender is a 25-year-old MBA candidate at the University of New Orleans. At least he was before Katrina struck. He is a native of the Ninth Ward, ground zero of the hurricane's devastating aftershocks. In one fell swoop, his home, his college -- life as he knew it -- was washed away. In the past four months, he has lived in Texas and Wisconsin. Now Bender travels back to his hometown to work with an engineering firm hired to research feasible locations for FEMA's controversial "trailer cities."
We talk as if we've known each other a lifetime, and before long, he offers to show me a home video of his community, shot the week before while he visited family for the holidays. Placing a portable DVD player on my seat tray and handing me the earphones, he tries to set the scene, but nothing he says can prepare me for what I'm about to see -- a war zone on American soil, instigated by Mother Nature's violent wrath. It is then, before ever setting foot in Louisiana, that I realize how blessed my family was in September 2004 to be at the mercy of Hurricane Ivan and the Susquehanna River, rather than Katrina and a weakened levee system. Unlike much of Greater New Orleans, my family had warning, had time to save our mementoes, our heirlooms and ourselves. For people living along the Industrial Canal in the lower Ninth Ward, time was not a friend. Reminiscent of the 2004 Asian tsunami, a wall of water came barreling at them at a moment's notice, leveling scores of houses and washing even more off their foundations and into the streets. Unlike the family suspected of perishing in their Canal Street home when a barge broke through the levee and flattened their house, my family escaped the rising water of the Susquehanna River. We had a place to go, family to stay with nearby. We weren't forced into football stadiums in other states and left wondering whether loved ones were dead or alive. Over the holidays that followed our disaster, we didn't get notified, as one family from the Ninth Ward did, that an uncle's body had just been discovered in the attic of his home. That he'd climbed to the highest level of his house to escape the rising water, only to have his refuge become his tomb. We didn't have an orange X spray-painted on the front of our house, and we didn't drive through our neighborhood after the water receded, praying we wouldn't find the letters DB (for dead body) in the lower right-hand corner of the Xs on our neighbors' homes. As the images from Bender's home video play out on the small screen in front of me, tears blur my vision, and I instinctively reach over and touch his arm. He, in turn, takes my hand as if I am the one in need of comforting. And here we sit, at 30,000 feet, two strangers holding hands, staring at the massive destruction contained on that small screen, as a song, dubbed into the background of the video, plays through the earphones around my neck. It's a song I've never heard before, yet one whose chorus will play in my mind countless times during and after this trip: "Hurricane, hurricane, is sometimes the only way to wash away the pain." |
