Building New Lives after Katrina

By Celina R. De Leon, WireTap. Posted October 25, 2005.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history displacing an estimated 1.5 million people. About 300,000 of these evacuees were grade school and college students, who are now living in temporary homes and attending new schools across the country.

JoAnn Bruster is one of these students, who used to live in Terrytown, La., a parish of New Orleans. A Social Work graduate student, she was enrolled at Southern University in New Orleans. JoAnn is now staying with her friend in Houston, Texas and is attending University of Houston, where she hopes to finish her master's degree by the end of the year.

JoAnn Bruster spoke to WireTap from her new home on October 12 about her evacuation from Louisiana and her new post-Katrina life.

Could you describe your experience with Hurricane Katrina?

We left the day before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Sunday, August 28. We were actually going to stay in a hotel in Metairie, right behind the airport, and we decided not to because we saw how bad it was getting.

When we left Metairie, there was a lot of traffic. So we got off the interstate and took the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Bridge and then we took a back road up the 55. Once we got on 55, we went all the way to Littlerock, Ark.

I was traveling with my younger sister, my roommate Brandi Dortch, her son Brandon, who was about 8 months old, and a few people in another car from her job. She is employed with JetBlue airlines, and they have a station at the Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans.

When we went to Little Rock, Ark., her job had already had a hotel waiting for us there. They took good care of us. They paid for the hotel, they paid for the meals, and we stayed there for about three days. But then we still weren't ever sure if we were going to get back into the city. So we left there and went to Clinton, Miss. Now that's when it really started getting bad, in Clinton.

Why did you decide to go there?

We were trying to get as close to the city [New Orleans] as possible. At that time we thought they were going to let us back in and we tried to get as close as we could to avoid some of the traffic. But when we got to Clinton, we got a word that the storm had hit and that it was really bad and they weren't sure if they were going to let people back into the city. ... The levees had just broke, the houses and streets were beginning to flood. And we stayed there for two days.

We then went to Bulmont, Texas. Her job once again had another hotel and people waiting on us. By the time we got to Bulmont, we realized that we weren't going to be able to go back home. So it was like a change from a couple of days vacation to making some serious life decisions.

At that point, I had no idea what to do because my home is in New Orleans, I've been living in New Orleans all my life, and I always said that once I finished up with my education in New Orleans that I would leave the city and go live somewhere else and then come back in my later life.

I had a very good friend that lived in Bulmont. ... When I get to Bulmont she [Chereese] asked, "What do you want to do because you're not going to be able to go back home?" I said what I need to do is find a school that I can go to because I need to finish up my education. I can't do anything without my education. She said, "Well, I'm going to call you back tomorrow and let you know what I find out."

She called me the next day -- by then it was Tuesday or Friday, at that point all the days were running together. She told me, "I talked to the Dean of the University of Houston. You are registered. You need to be here Tuesday to go talk to them and sign papers."

I said, "What?!" And she replied, "JoAnn, have you been watching the news?" I said I stopped watching the news because it was making me too sad. She said that New Orleans is under water. I said, "What?! I heard that the levee broke, but I thought it was just in Metairie." She replied, "No, the water has went totally into the Ninth ward, the Ninth ward is flooded. Quite possibly your school is under water." My school did suffer a lot of damage, every building on my campus got water to the second floor.

By that next Tuesday, I brought my little sister back to Louisiana but went to St. Francisville to be with my dad and my grandmother. And I left and went to Houston.

When I got to Houston, it was still not real. It was just not real. I went to the University of Houston, met with the dean and the admissions person of the school of social work, the graduate school, and they just took me right then and there. They wanted to know how we were doing, what we needed, and that was it. They had been really, really kind. They provided book vouchers to get the books, and the school gave us IDs, and you know they had truly accepted us into their university. [According to JoAnn, the master's in social work program at the University of Houston accepted 20 students from New Orleans, now there are 6.]

I can stay at the University of Houston and I plan to stay, but it's quite possible that I might not have any money to finish up my last semester because of this storm. So we need, all of us. And when I'm talking about all of us, I mean everybody from Louisiana, all the Gulf Coast schools, we need the federal government to make a decision on what they're going to do. It's not our fault. We're definitely the ones who are going to be penalized because of this situation.

Celina R. De Leon is a social justice journalist based in Brooklyn, NY.

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