No Place Like Home

For more than a year after the floodwaters receded, Alicia Sanchez 05C avoided her old home. Located just south of Lake Ponchartrain in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans—one of the worst flooded areas of the city after the levees broke following Hurricane Katrina's storm surge—it was one of the first to be overwhelmed.

Seeing what the neighborhood looks like now, it's understandable why she was hesitant to return. What was once an attractive in town neighborhood has been destroyed. The shells of abandoned homes are everywhere—some in the middle of the street. At night, Lakeview can be a frightening place. There are no streetlights, few street signs and practically no landmarks. It's unrecognizable.

In October, Sanchez finally drove past her old apartment complex. Shockingly, her possessions were piled up on the street. The building had never been cleared out; the landlord finally got around it more than a year after the waters receded.

“I drove past and I was thinking, ‘There's my bed. That's my sofa,'” said Sanchez, who evacuated to Houston with her family when Katrina hit. Blessed with an engaging sense of humor and an earnestness common in recent college graduates, Sanchez is very open about discussing the painful memories of the past year. Yet there also is an edgy undercurrent to her. Just because a person is nice doesn't mean she can't fight back.

Sanchez lost all of her possessions in the flood, but they are replaceable. She said her most painful losses, were pictures and her many books—not just personal ones, but all of the textbooks and notebooks she kept from her four years at Emory.

Nearly every New Orleanian has suffered since the flood and Sanchez is no exception. Many New Orleanians are working hard to rebuild their city and their community, and, again, Sanchez is no exception.

A sociology and religion double major at Emory, Sanchez was a member of the 2004 class of the Emory's Community Building and Social Change Fellows Program, a national model for engaged scholarship that is the centerpiece of Emory's Office of University-Community Partnerships. As a Community Building fellow, Sanchez, who minored in community building and social change, learned the importance and necessity of collaboration and engagement to promote positive change in urban communities. In the still-recovering city of New Orleans and its devastated neighborhoods, such skills are crucial. She uses them everyday.

This past March, Sanchez got a job as community development coordinator with A Shared Initiative Inc. (ASII), a nonprofit organization within the ASI Federal Credit Union, which predominantly serves low-income individuals and families.

ASII is designed to expand the credit union's antipoverty programs and assist in the redevelopment of New Orleans' most needy communities. ASII was just getting started when Katrina hit. Now, its redevelopment work has taken on a whole new importance.

The center of ASII's efforts is in New Orleans' Bywater neighborhood. The Bywater, which is located in the Ninth Ward is one of New Orleans' oldest neighborhoods. Prior to the flood it also was one of its poorest. Many of the decades-old homes in the area had been in disrepair before Katrina, but frequently they were the only asset the residents had. That was a contributing factor—along with a lack of transportation—to why so many of the Ninth Ward's residents stayed in their homes to ride out Katrina. When the levees broke, they had nowhere to go. Still, there was a strong community base.

“All the lawns were mowed, and there were flowers in the yards,” Sanchez said. “Little old ladies would yell at kids in the street. Now it's just a ghost town.”

Debris still fills the streets. There are broken chain-link fences on nearly every corner and weeds have overtaken any lawns that may have remained.

Many of the houses in the Bywater and the adjacent Upper Ninth Ward remain standing, just like in Lakeview, but are uninhabitable. About one of every six is connected to a FEMA trailer—a sign that the owner has come back and will eventually rebuild.

ASII owns several houses in the Bywater and Upper Ninth Ward. One of them is across the street from the Musicians' Village, site of the Association of Emory Alumni's Emory Cares project. A banner proclaiming “A Community Revitalization Project of A Shared Initiative Inc.” spans the front of the double shotgun house. The building will eventually be razed and a new one built in its place.

Standing on the porch, Sanchez extends her arms, indicating her surroundings. The block is filled with similarly abandoned homes on one side of the street, and the neat and colorful half-finished homes of the Musicians' Village on the other. “This is my work,” she said. “This is what I am trying to bring back.”

For Sanchez, the personal healing process has been gradual but steady. She has a new place to live—a double shotgun town home not far from her old neighborhood. She's reacquiring possessions, she has a great job and she has kept her strong connections to Emory.

Sanchez also has found inspiration in some very interesting ways. “Watching the horror of the news on TV, I vowed never to return to the Superdome, a place where so many suffered,” she said, recalling the wretched conditions inside and around the city's former shelter of last resort.

But in September, through a connection with the concert's planners, Sanchez was one of several hundred young New Orleanians invited onto the Superdome's turf during the U2 and Green Day show that kicked off the building's grand reopening in front of a national audience on Monday Night Football.

“That was one of the greatest things I've gotten to do,” she said. “It really was a healing experience after the storm. I wanted to take a piece of the Astroturf.”

While Sanchez and her friends had the best view in the house of the pre-game show, tickets to the football game didn't come with it. So, after the concert, they hit the exits. But the night wasn't over.

“We watched the rest of the game from an empty bar in the French Quarter,” she said. With the moral support of most of the country's football fans and even a few from the team's biggest rival—and opponent that night—the Atlanta Falcons, the Saints won the game, 23–3.

Like so many things in post-Katrina New Orleans, it is the small triumphs that carry lasting meaning. For Sanchez, it's having her alma mater come to her hometown to help rebuild.

“It's truly been a struggle down here,” she said. “For some reason, having [visitors from Emory] in New Orleans gives me a sense of normalcy. We need as many people as possible to keep its voice alive. It's the only way we will be heard.”— Eric Rangus

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A tour bus. A FEMA trailer. Block after block of flooded and abandoned homes. This is the reality of life in post-Katrina New Orleans. Alicia Sanchez is a New Orleans native who lost her home in the flood. Now she is helping others move into new ones.

Photo by Eric Rangus