Season of Changes
August 29th, 2005 was a day of infamy and came at a great cost to the people of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina hit this beautiful city and left it in shambles, my neighborhoods destroyed and it took my childhood with it. At age seven, I had barely moved to Louisiana three weeks before the storm came; so with my clothes freshly unpacked and toys neatly displayed, I was handed a tote box and told to fill whatever I could fit into it because we didn’t know what we would have coming back. With a mandatory evacuation order, my family set out for Houston, Texas on August 27th, 2005. My father was not with us at the time because he was still stationed in southern Texas, so my mother heavily relied on me to be the other adult and take care of my younger sister, age 2.
Ten exhausting hours of traffic later, for what would normally take three hours to drive, we arrived at a family friend’ house and were put in an attic like room with no windows. We waited there not knowing what had happened to our house, or if we even still had a house to go back to. Watching horrified images of the devastation and tragedy of people stranded on roofs struck a powerful chord within me; we all were helpless and waiting for something. Unfortunately, what came next was not the glimpse of hope we were expecting.
Due to it being hurricane season, hurricane Rita was right behind Katrina, only this time it was dead set on hitting both Texas and Louisiana. We tried to evacuate but there was no time, the traffic was bumper to bumper and we would be stuck on the highway when the hurricane hit. Our only option was to go back to our evacuation house and pray for the best and wait it out. My sister and my mom slept in the bed holding onto each other tightly; whereas I couldn’t sleep so I put on Boomerang and watched old episodes of Pink Panther- trying to create a placebo environment where the only thing that mattered was a humorous cat who invented his own interpretation of reality. I became fascinated with how at a flick of the wrist he could change the scene and get away from the troubled and menacing problems which came after him. I fell asleep to these cartoons and awoke to a static television and yelling, we had lost power and were in the very midst of the storm. We were warned to stay away from the windows, so we bundled together in middle of the room for multiple hours. Later that day, I snuck out to glimpse out the window and all I saw was trees uprooted and trash filling the streets. It rained endlessly for days and we were stuck in the house haunted by the sounds of what was happening outside. We had bath tubs filled with water for drinking and cooking, and even froze our milk to last us. It was endless games of monopoly and movie watching wasn’t possible because we had to save battery power. Sleep was our only real solace because it distracted us from the rationing we had to do. One day when the rain wasn’t as heavy, I wandered back to that window and saw a family of three- a father and his two children- dressed in yellow rain suits jumping in puddles. It was an interesting contrast seeing something positive come out of these events.
A few long days later, we decided it was safe enough to go outside. We went to the park where the swings were missing and the slides were covered in mud. It didn’t really matter at this point though because there wasn’t really time to play. It became a period of cleaning up the roads and the debris around the house. It also became the time of enrolling for school in Houston due to not knowing how long I would reside there. The students who were evacuees were put in portable classrooms at the back of the school with no desks and forced to sit on the carpet. Our education wasn’t valued as useless vocabulary worksheets were passed out to fill the hours of the day. After school, I would come back to the house and take care of my sister. My mother had left back to New Orleans to check on our house and file certain paperwork for a couple of weeks. I was in a vague environment where I became the main adult figure, it remained this way for a while my mother has nervous breakdowns from the result of the stress.
When it was finally time to return to New Orleans, the streets were still empty and aftermath was still heavily prevalent. I remember vividly stores were not open or if they were, they closed ridiculously early. No one wanted to or could work to the point that even McDonald’s was hiring for twenty dollars an hour. It took a long time for the residents of this area to recover from this. We were all in a perpetual state of waiting again; they say time heals all wounds, but it took a collective effort to reclaim what was diminished.
The people of New Orleans are the most resilient and compassionate people I have ever met, even through the continuing years or rebuilding. When the New Orleans Saints won the Superbowl in 2010, five years after the tragedies the hurricanes brought, it marked the celebration of how far the city had come. Unified under the passion of endurance, we all persisted to be complete again. Through these turmoils, we rose again and reclaimed our status as victors, and were not lost to the mass destruction.