End of the week

This has been a very eventfull week. I had been uneasy about returning to New Orleans even though we had been gone for over 20 years and could not consider New Orleans as an immediate past. I knew intellectually that my old neighborhood has been hit hard. We arrived early on Sunday and I had a chance to tour my old neighborhood. It was even worst than I expected. My former house was within 4 blocks of one of the levie breaks and was "gone". There seemed to be only a handfull of houses that had any signs of activity (FEMA trailers or any efforts at rehab). My parish church was gone but there was some signs of rebuilding. The public school my children attended was closed with no sign of rehab. The neighborhood of my closest friends was even harder hit since it was within a block of another of the major levie breaks. All of our immediate section of town (Lakefront area near the University of New Orleans) was in terrible shape. And this was more than 2 years after Katrina. This was not a neighborhood of the poor and I know that most of my friends had "alternatives" so although the houses were in terrible shape the consequences were not as sever as for those in other neighborhoods. However, it was still a shock to see and it made the true plight of the poor that much more vivid.
The rehab work in which a spent a week on a stairwell and even at that did not finish what needed to be done demonstrated for me the enormity of the rebuilding task. On our drive into and out of the worksite I saw many families that were doing rehab work on a part time basis at the end of a full work day. So I know that for them a week in stairwell is but a small part of what they have to cope with. We heard stories of the additional problems heaped on the citizens in terms of civil regulations, contractor "rip offs" and outright theft. However, despite all of the "downside" at the end of week I knew that there was one stairwell in New Orleans that was on the road to recovery and I truly felt that the city is on a positive slope for recovery. I can't specify what this feeling is based on other than the fact that I saw no neighborhoods in which "something" was not being done. There were no totally abandoned neighborhoods that I saw. So, the week ended on a positive note for me.
One morning as we drove over the lake into town I saw a pelican. When I first went to Louisiana, pelicans were common. Nowever, a few years later the entire pelican population was killed off by DDT ingestion. The pelican means a lot to Louisana (it is on the state seal) so this could not be left unchallenged. Pelicans were reintroduced from Florida and the population was slowly rebuilt. So if this can happen for the pelican community it can and surely will for the human community.
So I pray for the people of New Orleans and for the conversion of the "systems of evil" that oppressed the community and the pelican gives me hope that these prayers and those prayers of the poor will be heard.