While Amelia Colomb (COL ’09) and her family were arriving for New Student Orientation two years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit her home on the West Bank in New Orleans, gutted her father’s psychiatry office and shut down the hospital in which her mother worked as an emergency medicine physician.
Now a junior, Colomb, the historian for the Black Student Alliance, organized and hosted a vigil commemorating the second anniversary of Katrina. Nearly 70 students gathered in Red Square last night to light candles and reflect.
Colomb said before the vigil that her family did not return to their home when they left her at Georgetown; instead, they moved in with family in Shreveport, La., about five hours north of New Orleans.
“It was really tough for them, tough for all of us,” Colomb said. “I was in denial for a while. It was really hard: new place, new changes in college, and then, when Katrina happened, even more new changes.”
Colomb opened the vigil with her story. She teared up a few times as she spoke of the hardships people still endure two years after their lives were uprooted.
“This is still going on, still very much a part of our people,” Colomb said. “This is not something that has been resolved, something that was shown on CNN for a few months and then ended. There is still so much to be done, so much left undone.”
While there are people and groups who still offer their support and services—for example, a group from Georgetown, Blanket New Orleans, went down to help out last spring break—many are very frustrated with the slow progress of New Orleans’ reconstruction.
“It’s like feeling two emotions at once,” Michael Tyler (SFS ’09), whose mother’s family comes from New Orleans, said at the vigil. “You’re hopeful, you’re wishful, but at the same time, you just feel this sense of loss. The people want to come back home. People want to be able to hold on.”
Tyler was in the hard-hit Ninth Ward working on reconstruction for over a month this summer.
“You feel obligated to make it feel like home again, but it’s like, you can only do so much as a person,” he said.
Tyler worked for Emergency Communities, a group that provides free meals, laundry services and garden upkeep—an important service in a city whose government threatens to repossess homes with unsightly lawns. He spent much of his time working at a camp for kids of elementary school age. (https://thefoundationspecialists.com/)
Many of the schools the children will attend this fall are extremely overcrowded and structurally unsound, according to Tyler. “About half our kids still have to go to school in Texas,” he said.
The city, still ravaged, is home to many disturbing sights.
“You can’t know what it’s like unless you go,” Tyler said. “You expected it to look like hell. Obviously it was chaos and it was disgusting to walk around in, but you expected that.”
After the storm, the number of psychiatrists operating in New Orleans dropped by about 80 percent, according to the Catholic News Service. That leaves few qualified doctors to help the many children who are psychologically disturbed as a result of the disaster.
“The thing that stuck out the most for me was working with seven-year-olds who have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” he said.
“Their childhoods [are] defined by the storm. They’re still kids. They laugh all the time, they joke all the time. I mean, they’re jaded, but they’re still kids.”
After a moment of silence, Father Tim Godfrey, S.J., spoke about the federal government’s complacency during the aftermath of Katrina, before closing the vigil with a reading of the psalm Evening Prayer.
“We’re talking about the failure and breakdown of the country to be there for its people,” Godfrey said. “It’s unjust; it’s not what we’re about as a country.”
-Additional reporting by Daniel Newman
