Sunday, May 07, 2006 Sheila Stroup
From the people of southeast Louisiana, I'd like to say thanks to the people from everywhere else.
Thanks to the church groups and individuals who brought supplies across the country and stayed to deliver help and hope after the storm.
Thanks to the students who spent their spring breaks gutting houses and volunteering at soup kitchens and food banks.
Thanks to the music lovers who came to our first post-Katrina Jazzfest to dance to the music, savor the crawfish and stand in line to buy posters, T-shirts and albums, so you could take a piece of New Orleans home with you.
And most of all, thanks to everyone for witnessing what has happened to us. Thanks for driving through miles and miles of still-ravaged and eerily quiet neighborhoods, so you understand why we can't "move on" and talk of other things.
Like part of the family
I'd like to share an e-mail from Amy Schumaker that may help explain why your understanding means so much to us.
Amy is a junior at Capital University in Bexley, Ohio, who came here over her spring break to help out. She wrote to tell me how much the experience changed her and how much she learned from it.
Her team of students helped gut a house, and she says sifting through a family's personal possessions threw her "headfirst" into the lives of the people who lived there.
"I feel like I know them like my own family," she wrote. "I pray for them and still think about them all the time."
They found a young girl's Winnie the Pooh in a bedroom, a piggy bank, one lonely little-girl shoe. Amy found a woman's driver's license and saw that she and the girl's mom are the same size. On a windowsill, she found the same nail polish she wears. And someone found deployment papers that showed the woman's husband, the child's daddy, had been sent to Iraq.
"I hope to God he has come back," Amy wrote.
Spreading the word
Amy learned how special our slice of Louisiana is.
"As a music major, I loved the culture," she wrote. "I heard brass bands and the fabulous New Orleans jazz I had studied so much in class. There's nowhere else that has that flavor, especially with the tuba.
"The people made gumbo in their FEMA trailers for us. All other food suddenly tastes bland. I went downtown for a bit of Mardi Gras with my friend Jordan and never wanted to leave."
Another thing she learned is how vast our loss is, how much is left to do.
"Back in Ohio, many people think the devastation must be cleaned up already," she wrote. "We tell everyone who will let us that New Orleans needs help."
That's the best gift you who come from everywhere else can give us: take our story home with you. Let everyone know there is still much left to do here, and that this broken, beautiful place is worth saving.
