New Orleans
The time we have had to relax/enjoy being tourists has been a blast with the total extreme of horror that we have observed with the state of the city almost two years after Hurricane Katrina. Today we had the chance to talk to an amazing woman from ACORN in the lower 9th ward of New Orleans, which was said to be one of the most devastated areas from the levees breaking after the storm. Her explanation of the groups of people that the agency has served as well as everything that they have been working to do to restore basic rights to the people of this area was astonishing. Our meeting was in a meeting room/office where we were cramped to have enough room for our entire group to be able to hear what she had to say while one of their staff members was sitting at his desk in the same room working on paperwork because there is a deadline for funding for the people of the lower 9th ward to be able to return home. After we left the ACORN office, we took a driving tour of the area that ACORN has really been working to put back together and we met a North Carolina native who has been working here in New Orleans since the storm to help take care of the devastation in the area. His testimony of what all they have had to work through and the devastation of the area was incredibly humbling.
Today has been a very large amount of information and psychological processing to deal with through the information in the session with the ACORN staff and also the first hand experience of the devastation, so our responses to everything that we heard about today, while they may have seemed to be uninterested, I really feel that it was just an overload of what we had expected to be exposed to while in New Orleans.
There was a sign at the ACORN office that I really feel summed up the thoughts and opinions of the people of New Orleans: No Whining. While many of the people of New Orleans have had so much taken from them…their homes, their rights as voters, their rights as people–they do not whine, they’re just working as hard as they can to get back to the way they were before Katrina, and this was a huge inspiration to me.
Our last night in New Orleans was a great adventure into the heart of the French Quarter after a long evening of completing homework and getting mentally prepared for a long day on the road on Sunday.
I was very excited to find a group of Phi Mu sisters to be staying at our hotel from a university in Louisiana, with whom I did a t-shirt exchange with as well as a contact information exchange so that they could let me know if they were interested in coming to visit ASU one weekend for skiing in the winter, which was very exciting.
I feel absolutely amazing about the remainder of our trip together because after yesterday, I really feel that I have clicked with the group. Being a student from another university on this trip was something that I had been struggling with until our time in New Orleans and I’m really grateful for this.
Lauren, Arlyn and myself went to a local diner called “Mother’s” to get a traditional New Orleans PoBoy, which was big enough for lunch and dinner on Saturday, so that was a nice dinner as well as a nice chance for us to see an area of New Orleans outside of the French Quarter.