Writing Scholarship 2015

In New Orleans I did something unusual for my style of travel: I went on a guided tour. I normally find tours are passive to their surroundings, passing them by in air conditioned mini-buses, looking but not really seeing. This was different. We were learning, and reacting on this tour. Our guide, Skip, made this his goal.

“We’re not going to see the area and try to compare New Orleans to Haiti. We’re not going to do that.”

But he did. He wanted to compare the two. He wanted to so badly that he had to preface his need with a denial that only called more attention to his words than if he had said nothing at all. If he didn’t want to compare them, he wouldn’t bring it up. We were an audience who didn’t have a choice, we had nowhere to go. We were the people he could talk to that would listen because we had no other option. He needed this from us and we had no choice but to give it to him.

“The difference with Haiti and with New Orleans is the response to Haiti came immediately, as soon as it happened. It took them five days just to get water to the Superdome, where many New Orleanians were sitting at the convention centre, watching their grandparents die. I mean, to watch somebody slowly deteriorate, it kinda hurts, because we all kept thinking about was ‘the cavalry is coming, they’re coming’.”

Even years later, he couldn’t contain the hurt and bitterness he still feels. I felt it every time he spoke. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and decimated the city’s flood-walls and levee, flooding over 80% of the city—most prominently the Lower Ninth Ward. Many of those people never returned to New Orleans, and many of the homes have been left decimated and neglected. They are physical metaphors of how the people of New Orleans still feel.

I stood there, staring up at the hurricane waterline markers in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, listening to Skip share his own thoughts and feelings on the area, on the events, on people and on his own experiences instead of working from a straight script, drawling out dates and facts of history that no one will remember or care about when they get off the bus at the end of the day, and that was something that I couldn’t have learned any other way.

“The reason I come to the Lower Ninth Ward kinda in the beginning is to get this over with, get it out of your system. I don’t want this to be the last thing you remember.”

Ironic, then, that this would be the one the thing I still remember most from the tour.