I Know What It Means...To Miss New Orleans

March was an extremely busy month for Joshua and I. It was full of all our usual busyness, school and work (well, barely for me, I have worked a grand total of ONE! SHIFT! since before Christmas. oh yeah, i am ensuring our financial freedom). But it was also full of this:




New Orleans, baby. Ok, I'll be honest - we were on a rebuilding trip with school, so no actual bourbon was consumed on the Rue Bourbon. Which is fine, because the French Quarter is actually quite skeevy and I would be literally afraid to be inebriated with some of the characters around. Like this one:




Yikes. But the real reason we were in New Orleans, the land of jazz, beignets, jambalaya and po'boys, was of course the fact that the city is still (2 and a half years later) devastated from Hurricane Katrina. No matter what natural disaster strikes, after 2 and a half years should an American neighborhood still look like this?



How would we feel if the poorly constructed safety system for our city failed, like these levees that broke and flooded the Lower 9th Ward?



I'm going to bet that if your house was washed away, your insurance didn't cover your home, and your government housed your family in a trailer for two years (and then told you, oh hey! those trailers are full of asbestos! we had no idea!) and then never sent you the money you were promised to actually rebuild your home...I'm going to bet you would agree with the woman I met who stood crying in front of me and shook her fist and said she would like to see George Bush go to prison for crimes against humanity. One of her friends died on a rooftop waiting for help. And another of her friends died in the Superdome, which is where the 'help' was supposed to be.

We worked on several different projects in New Orleans. We helped put up a circus-sized tent over dog kennels at Animal Rescue of New Orleans, which is still working tirelessly with only 3 full-time employees to shelter and care for hundreds of animals that were abandoned in the storm. We also drove all over the city with Greenlight New Orleans, installing compact fluorescent light bulbs in homes for free. This non-profit organization is helping reduce energy use and save residents much-needed money on their energy bills, which are very expensive in New Orleans. We also weeded the gardens at City Park, which is larger than Central Park and a huge source of revenue for New Orleans.

While the needs in New Orleans are overwhelming, there is an amazing amount of hope in the city:






It was an incredible experience, one that Joshua and I want to have again. We've been home for three weeks and our time in New Orleans and the people that we met are burned in our minds and hearts. (and bodies - we wandered into a tattoo place the week after we got back and two hours later found ourselves the proud and somewhat shocked owners of fleur-de-lis body art). It was very hard to come back after an intense week of new faces, new friendships, new emotions, and 70 degree weather. It felt strange to go back to the mundane everyday-ness of life in Chicago, knowing that the needs in New Orleans are still there each time we wake up to go to work and school. We want to go back and we don't know yet when and how.

One thing I do know - five weeks from today I will be celebrating (maybe with bourbon, but probably tequila) the fact that I will have GRADUATED COLLEGE.

And six months and five weeks from today I will be weeping over my first student loan bills. So that may be a good time for a trip to New Orleans, don't you think?