Social Stratification in the Deep South

Words cannot describe the people and the stories that I have heard from the people that I have met on this trip about their experiences in Hurricane Katrina, and more importantly, the aftermath. I cannot comprehend the pain and devastation that these people must have felt. I mean, I know how frustrated I get when I cannot get in touch with friends when I feel that I have something “important” to share with them, so I cannot even imagine what the residents here in Bay Saint Louis went through when they were unable to get information to their relatives about whether or not they were alive, how difficult it was to obtain medications that people needed to get in order to go from day to day.

There was one picture that the people in the library showed us that had the side of a house spray painted with their names and that they were okay in hopes that the house would be on a TV broadcast so that their relatives would know that they were alive because everything: landline telephones, cell phone towers…everything, was out and there was no way for these people to contact their loved ones.  One thing that gripped me about this photograph is that the people also had a note with their names that they were looking for their mother’s urn, which contained her ashes.  I mean, losing your home and everything that you have worked your entire life for is devastating, but then losing the remains of a loved one…that would be totally unbearable to me.

I guess this trip has made me begin to put my life into perspective about how it’s the little things that we take for granted and how lucky we are that we haven’t had to go through anything this terrible in our lifetimes first hand.