I'm from the southern border of New Orleans, Louisiana. Yeah that's right...we call it "KatrinaVille". I was born and raised in that house with my three sisters, a bayou girl, swamp-rat through and through. Katrina left us with seaweed on the roof, we were at "Ground Zero" for the Gulf Outlet six mile levee breach. Our entire community of over 30,000 homes leveled. We're still missing neighbors and most of our old friends and relatives have relocated elsewhere, some we still have no clue where they are. People do not realize that we still do not have land-line telephone service here and that just last month we finally got a full-service grocery store. No hospital or even pay phones. The place where I'm from is like the stereotypical bayou town you see on the movies. Cypress trees with moss hanging down, crawfishing in the canals on the side of the road, catching and boiling crabs on the weekends just in time for the football games....A fishing community providing seafood for the country, boats are still washed on some lawns. Andrew Jackson fought the British in the Battle of New Orleans here and there is a cemetery where the old soldiers are buried. Unfortunately, most everything is dead here now. What Katrina did not destroy, the chemicals that washed in from companies that got washed away landed on us. My mom's 50 year old rose bushes dead, the grass dead, trees....well you get the picture. Anyway...we are trying to persevere but we seem to have been forgotten. Oh we hear blurbs about us on the news sometimes, a comment about Katrina fraud, yeah...we haven't seen a dime to steal but we can't leave our broken homes without someone stealing what little we've been able to gain back or save from our ruined lives.So here we are...I for one have totally changed. Over time maybe I will be able to explain. For one I don't take myself so seriously now. I have fought some public battles lately over issues (crap) and have found myself on numerous public t.v. stations all pissed off with an angry face but its not all about me, its about saving a community, restoring a way of life that will be lost forever to the rest of the world. Its not all doom and gloom. We actually threw together a Mardi Gras parade last year and it was totally awesome. People came home from all over the country. I guess its hard not to call us refugees cuz that's what we are in our Goodwill clothes. The Spirit of Louisiana is alive and well in what's left of St. Bernard and we are starting to laugh again, shrimp again, fish again and there's a hawk in the dead tree across the street who seems to stand guard over my "hood" and we point at him and smile as he cocks his head and watches over us all.