Good morning America, how are you?

I know that writing about this won't do it justice, and no matter what I write, it can't really ring true, or be an accurate enough description. There are certain moments that lodge in your memory without a clear order of events, accompanying sounds, or smells. You remember them only by the intense feeling you experienced at that time, feelings of dizzying glee or an electrifying excitement. Sometimes it's just a dramatic snapshot, a lone image that will stick with you forever, and be your only memory of a particular day or time.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove with a group from SU's chapter of Habitat for Humanity through the seventh and lower ninth wards of New Orleans. These are two of the most damaged areas, which have been mostly untouched since Hurricane Katrina destroyed them more than two years ago. My memory of these places will be defined by a handful of images and a couple of physical/emotional reactions. I'll remember a sickening weight deep in my stomach, of having so many thoughts at once, that eventually my brain slowed down almost to a stop. All I could do was look out the window. There's not much to say when there's so much to see. I'll remember the dozens of houses that had writing on them, left presumably by the people who lived there, begging for help. The front of one house was covered with the words, "HELP US, Please help, any donations," and other pleas, hastily spraypainted in a time of panic, still left for us to read years later. Did anyone ever come to help? When have you ever seen such a desperate, open cry for help, scrawled publicly for anyone who would read it?

Our car was quiet, we drove slowly, like tourists, through a place where people had died when a flood came, like something out of a disaster movie, and somehow, no one came to help. Two years later, in these areas, it still looks like no one ever came. What will stick with me are the foreign images of abandoned houses and empty streets, and the accompanying physical feelings I felt. What stays with me is the heavy desperation and overwhelming sense of hopelessness and heartbreak that hangs over those neighborhoods.

From the outside, some of the houses looked unremarkable. In most of them, it seems no one had moved back, because certainly, the insides would have been rotted through. The owners likely couldn't afford to fix it up, or wouldn't want to. How could you move back to a neighborhood that looks like a ghost town? A few people did; there were a few cars parked in driveways that still had the large X's on the houses, markers made by people who came through after the hurricane to check the houses for bodies. Four numbers were left in each corner of the X: the date, the number of people who came through, a number of dead humans found, and a number for dead animals. Imagine living in one of these houses, or even across the street from a house, marked with a number 3 beneath a giant X. I can't imagine what it must feel like to live in an empty neighborhood, staring at a number, left during a time of crisis and panic, a single digit strangely marking the needless deaths of three people. Who's been in the house since they removed the bodies? I kept wondering why the people who moved back didn't try to remove the markers from the fronts of their homes. Did they want to remember? Or feel too for guilty trying to forget? What does a person think, walking by something like that, every day on the way to the front door?

The devastation has taken extreme tolls on everyone left behind, not the least of which is a giant skyrocket in mental health issues among survivors, and very notably nearly 47,000 children. When we drove through those neighborhoods, I wondered how anyone could be okay still living there. What would a young survivor think? His school is boarded up, his home in ruins, and his parents might not have the resources to make anything better for him.

After all this time, there aren't answers for New Orleans. How can you rebuild something, when there's no way to stop the same thing from happening again? How do you begin to help? I don't know if my visit brought me to any conclusions. In fact, it probably muddled my opinion more. But it did renew my own sense of responsibility. It feels wrong to to drive through a devastated area, in your own country, rubbernecking out the window at someone else's sadness. But I think, even more than I did before, that it's all our responsibility. You shouldn't turn away because something's hard to look at or understand. You can't ignore news about genocide, war or a natural disaster because it turns your stomach. Katrina's devastation is largely a result of this type of ignorance and evasion-- people couldn't deal with issues of pervasive and persistent poverty, rapid climate change, impending crisis, and decisions involving government responsibility. We should look. We should remember, ask questions, and do something. Anything, really.