I met my cousins' cousin E from one of the Louisiana towns that was badly hit by hurricane Katrina. E is in Paris to teach at a collège which she had been lured into believing was in a nearby suburb. It turns out to be about an hour by train east of Paris.
E and her family and indeed all of southern Louisiana have had a traumatic month. She had to leave the city with her mother in the middle of the night before hurricane Katrina hit. She pointed out that the evacuation of New Orleans was very well organized and that with all the coverage of the Superdome disaster, there was not enough emphasis on how almost the entire region emptied out in orderly fashion. This was due to the interstates being converted to one-way roads with all four or six lanes going away from the hurricane zone. The southernmost parishes were evacuated first. "All the highways were one-way all the way from New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi," E said.
E's grandfather is very ill, and he and his son decided to stay behind in their house which was 12 feet above sea level and had never flooded in the past. His grandson, E's brother, argued and argued with them that they needed to leave, but when they refused, E's brother stayed behind too.
E and her mother made it to Monroe, in north Louisiana, to a relative's house. Then they sat listening to the radio and watching TV for the next few days as things got worse and worse, not knowing if their men were alive or dead. Meanwhile, the house shook and shuddered. A huge live oak crashed through the roof (this is a tree so heavy that it sinks in water), then, when the wind changed direction after the eye of the hurricane passed, the tree was blown off their roof and onto a neighbor's roof. Lake Pontchartrain surged into the house and they had to take shelter in the attic, where they at least knew to take an ax to break through the roof if necessary-- in hurricane Betsy, people had died by drowning in their attic refuges. There was so little air with the water in the house and the intense heat that in spite of the rain, E's father ended up opening up the roof to be able to breathe.
When the water went down a little, E's brother slung an old purse around his neck and set off with his bicycle, towing it while swimming through the filthy water full of water moccasins (poisonous water snakes), for a nearby family house on higher ground to see if the car was still there. It was and eventually they all made it north to Monroe, not before E and her mother had several days of thinking they might have died. E lost all her things that had been in storage in a low-lying area; FEMA allowed her to apply for emergency help and she has already received about $4000 worth, but her parents are not eligible for grants, only loans, because they are homeowners and not renters.
They have had to strip out the carpet and all the sheetrock all through their house, and there is still a line of mold all the way around, and the house stinks. All their photos, books, clothes and furniture are gone. E's grandfather has not completely recovered from the shock and because his son has so much work to do with the flood damage, he has had to go into a nursing home far away until his son can find a local one open again.
No one thinks New Orleans will ever be what it was before. Who will live again in the Ninth Ward, hardest hit by the flooding? "We are all afraid it will just turn into a theme park for tourists," said E.
All the 10,000 fish in the wonderful New Orleans aquarium, the best one I've ever seen, died. E hadn't heard that, and it brought another shadow to her face. The Aquarium of the Americas was the pride of New Orleans, a magnificent, state-of-the-art building. You entered the aquarium through a tunnel of glass, 
under the vast sea tank, with sharks and rays swimming over your head and around you. There was a jungle aviary and a Louisiana section and many individual tanks with ghostly delicate jellyfish and iridescent sea snakes and piranhas (they had to keep all the dead ones refrigerated for state inspection-- piranhas would be in seventh heaven if released in the wild in Louisiana). The staff had stayed throughout the hurricane and its aftermath. It looked as if the aquarium would survive-- it was near the Mississippi levee on high ground, and was not flooded; they had two generators to keep the water aerated, and they had enough food for the fish for almost a week. The staff was dedicated and stayed all week through all the fright and shootings, even though they were right near the scary Convention Center area. Who would ever have thought that a week's emergency supply of food and electricity wasn't enough for any disaster in a major United States city?
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The 6th Harry Potter book came out at midnight on Friday night in Paris, about three months after its arrival in the English language (also at midnight and also in Paris). In French it is called "Harry Potter and the Prince of Mixed Blood." Harry Potter has probably taught more French children to read English than any school ever has. There is an element of one-upmanship in having read it in English three months before your classmates. Here are a couple of Harry Potter photos. On the movie mag cover, advertising the 4th HP movie, Harry is called "Seigneur des ados," "Lord of the teenagers," a pun on "Seigneur des anneaux," Lord of the Rings.
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