My coverage of stories took me to communities inside and around New Orleans.
In the community of Algiers, I accompanied medics from a California field artillery unit on foot, as they walked door-to-door offering free tetanus, and hepatitis A and B immunizations. Children came running out at the sight of us, and one little girl showed no bashfulness at all as she came up, hugged me, and smiled up at me, while her bold sister tried vehemently to get me to photograph her by showing us what a good dancer she was.
I wrote a feature on a first sergeant from a California unit who was returning to what was left of his grandmother's house, a place where he'd spent long stretches of his childhood. I donned a pair of hip waders and followed the man and his uncle into the shabby structure, dodging boards with rusty nails, and wearing a protective face mask to filter out any particulates. I couldn't believe the damage inside, and I looked incredulously upon a chair stuck in the ceiling and snapped photos as the first sergeant dug beneath dirty, jagged glassware in kitchen cabinets, searching for his grandmother's jar of rare coins she'd requested he find.
Another story led me to the small community of Violet. There, stranded dogs bounded unafraid and hungry, up toward the sides of our slowly moving vehicles. We moved in a convoy, our vehicle behind a truck bed full of Georgia firemen and ahead of a Humvee carrying California Guardsmen to pull security. I cautiously followed the firemen and armed National Guardsmen inside the former residences. The parts that still stood housed tattered, disheveled blinds and pictures of healthy chubby-cheeked children flanked by white walls and ceiling fans blotched with mildew. Floors were slick with inches of mud that clung to my combat boots. I photographed an unblemished American flag that stood vertically, as if with determined pride, in the middle of a storm-ravaged yard.
Now and then, we encountered the former residents of these homes sorting through the rubble. Outside one home, I found a middle-aged couple cleaning around their house. They told me they had narrowly survived by escaping their swiftly flooding attic and jumping into their boat, where they rode out over five hours of the storm's 150-mph winds.
During my coverage of a project to salvage the damaged Jackson Barracks Military Museum and its relics, I met Stan, its curator, and was amazed by his resilience. He had lived in the city for over a decade, Katrina had taken his home, and yet there he was, still faithful to his position, trying to uncover the historical remnants of a military past from the wreckage, so some of it could be restored. He said there was "no such thing as a problem," and that he only saw opportunities. He said this even as he stood among what was once a proud display of antique military equipment, not far from the theater of the museum that still held three feet of filmy, toxic water.
At a school in the town of Belle Chasse, I photographed a group of soldiers greeting students and presenting teddy bears to the children returning to school after a month of being displaced. For some of the children, it might have been the only toy they owned, since many of them had lost their homes and the possessions therein.
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