I took E from Louisiana out to dinner tonight. There was a huge brown cat on a chair across the aisle. It looked up at us with its big gray-green eyes, yawned, and went back to sleep. When some late diners arrived and were about to sit down, the waiter picked up the cat's chair with the cat still on it and moved it to the table next to me. When he saw we had noticed, he put the tablecloth over the cat to hide it.
E still hasn’t found a place to live in Paris, but she says everyone at the place she teaches is being unusually solicitous. “I wish I hadn’t sent all those emails about the hurricane when I was trying to decide whether to come,” she said. “Now everyone knows who I am and asks me about it all the time, and every time I just tear up. I’m having a hard enough time dealing with it. I’m getting a reputation as that girl who never stops crying.”
Her family is still in great difficulty. Her grandfather has moved to a nursing home nearer his son, but before the hurricane he was living with him. E’s brother went back into the family’s house right after the waters went down and did all the dirty work, tearing out carpet and sheetrock, emptying the refrigerator, carrying all the trashed furniture away before his father, who is in poor health, returned from north Louisiana. He has been helping out more than a month now, putting off his own future like so many young people across Louisiana and Mississippi right now. "He deserves a halo," said E. Her aunt is missing. She is mentally ill and refused to leave for hurricane Katrina, but was brought safely to a shelter right afterwards. But then she got onto a bus, not telling anyone where she was going, and no one has seen her for more than a month.
FEMA put almost $4000 into E’s bank account, but now it is
telling her that she has to document everything she spends, save receipts and
pay back any non-emergency buys. I told her not to, but she is worried they are
going to take back the money. I wouldn’t put it past FEMA. Isn’t it incredible
that there is no BIG PLAN, like the Marshall Plan, to help the South? Which is in our own country?
E can’t afford to go home for Christmas. She said she had so been looking forward to eating good New Orleans food and seeing her family again in these terrible times. But when I asked her about it, she swallowed hard and looked away.
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