The Harvard Extension School Newsletter            Spring 2006

Students Displaced by Katrina Search for Normalcy

by Leslie Busler

Two days before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, Tulane University senior Rachael Bley abandoned her New Orleans apartment at 1 am and headed for Chattanooga, where she and her fiancé planned to camp out in a hotel room her parents had originally reserved for a trip. Rachael figured that after midnight there would be less traffic across the twin spans, an eerie 5-mile segment of I-10 that crosses Lake Pontchartrain, and she was right. The drive was like any other out of the city—though on this particular Saturday three of the four lanes were outbound.

Rachael remembers the scene as unusual, but it was nothing compared to what she’d find when in October she crossed the twin spans on a return trip. “They cannibalized one side to fix the other,” she says. “On the northbound side you could see these large 20- to 30-foot holes where there used to be lots of concrete.”

Eric Martin Scott also left town on August 27. The University of New Orleans graduate student drove to his mother’s home in Angie, Louisiana, 70 miles north of New Orleans. On Sunday, he moved on to nearby Varnado, where his mother was working at a high school-cum-shelter for evacuees of nursing homes. There he rode out the driving winds and rain. At one point a portion of the roof blew off. “We were without water, electricity, and phones for three days before roads could be cleared enough to reach us,” he says.

During the chaotic weeks that followed the hurricane and the levy breaches, both Rachael and Eric managed to find their way to the Harvard Extension School, where they joined 19 other students displaced from the Gulf Coast in accepting emergency scholarships.

“We felt compelled to do what we could,” says Dean of Students Christopher Queen, who headed the effort to assist displaced students. “These students were facing so much personal strife, including a lost semester or year of studies. We felt fortunate to be in a position of offering them a temporary academic home.” In addition to waived tuition for four fall semester courses, Harvard Real Estate Services assisted students in finding housing, and Dean Queen and his staff offered counseling and orientation to life at the Extension School.

“After Katrina, I didn’t know what I’d do,” Eric says. “Then I saw Harvard was offering a scholarship. I wrote a letter—it was probably half nuts. And when I finally talked to someone on the phone, who told me I’d been accepted, I just cried. There’s no way they could have known what they were doing for me.”

In New Orleans Eric, 28, had lived on the second story of a duplex on Waldo Drive, near the London Avenue Canal, which breached in two places. “It wasn’t until some time in November, after being at Extension,” he says, “that I heard from my roommate that our part of the apartment didn’t flood but the roof caved in. There was a family below us, and apparently they lost everything.”

The news of Eric’s apartment hardly fazed him. He had already been through far worse when, four days after the storm, he was finally able to drive the 5 miles from the shelter in Varnado back to his hometown, where he found the back side of his mother’s house destroyed by an uprooted oak tree.

They spent nearly three days in the grim landscape of their neighborhood, cleaning and salvaging what they could, sleeping on towels in the undamaged kitchen. “The land looked like a giant had gone through and just slapped everything down,” Eric says. Power lines and tree branches hung low. Cars were abandoned along main roads, roofs damaged, windows shattered. With no electricity for miles, the night sky seemed endless. No one, says Eric, had a firm sense of what was real. It was easy to believe the wildest rumors, of large gangs of looters marauding towns and sharks swimming in the French Quarter. Eric could not fathom what his future would be.

After the interstate reopened, he and his mom drove to his sister’s home in Birmingham, where his sister took them shopping. “I thought, ‘Well, I better buy only clothes that will last because I’ll probably be spending the next two years digging ditches and driving a tractor,’” he says.

Rachael's home, a first-floor apartment near the Tulane campus that she shared with her fiancé, was flooded. Before leaving, they’d managed to move some belongings to high shelves. They packed the laptop, photo albums, books, and CDs in their car. All else was ruined. Their landlord had to gut the apartment, and today there’s such extreme competition for construction work in the city that there’s no telling when, or if, the work will be done.

Rachael turned to the Extension School last fall when she realized she could find courses that complemented her studies in medieval Christianity at a university close to her parents’ home in Mansfield, about 35 miles south of Boston. Since returning to Tulane in January to fulfill the last of her requirements for graduation this spring, Rachael has lived in a 6- by 12-foot room in an all-girls freshman dorm. The close quarters don’t bother her. “I’m more aware of the impermanence of material things now,” she says. “So I don’t have nearly as much crap as I used to; I realized I just don’t need much.”

Outside those walls, however, Rachael is constantly faced with a city that’s both familiar and alien. Sitting in a classroom in the history building, she can see the shell of a house that burned. Nine months later there’s still a military presence in the city, and it’s commonplace for army hummers to drive through campus on a Wednesday afternoon. On Broadway Street near campus a major stoplight remains dark. Her old boss’s house on Canal Street is gone. Everywhere century-old live oak trees are uprooted. The historic St. Charles Avenue streetcar is still not running because whole sections of track are torn up. Many businesses have yet to open again, while others have dramatically reduced their hours. For a college student, the old haunts and the late-night food are no longer dependable, she says. “Progress is being made, but it’s slow.”

A number of residents who have returned spend their weekends clearing debris in the hardest-hit sections of New Orleans. From ruined homes they pull what now amounts to junk. “It’s tough,” Rachael says. “I mean, these things used to be people’s precious items and you can’t even tell what they are anymore.” During Mardi Gras, she encountered visitors who were in town to lend a hand rather than partake of the revelry. “I’ve definitely become less cynical about human nature,” she says.

Rachael is no less practical, however. She plans to go to law school within a couple of years to study criminal law. After graduation, she’s moving to Boston. She and her fiancé will marry in the fall.

Though Katrina didn’t change her plans, it changed her outlook, her awareness. “I watch the news all the time now,” she says. “I feel like I need to know what’s going on. I keep an eye on the rebuilding and do what I can to help.”

Eric, who has remained a student at the Extension School, talks to his mom several times a week. She’s renting a house in Bogalusa, close to her hometown and her family. “She tells me, ‘Things still aren’t good here, Eric. They’re not good,’” he says. Bureaucracy has made the rebuilding of housing and infrastructure frustratingly slow. “People are hanging in limbo—or, as a proper Louisianan would say, purgatory,” he continues.

To be so far away is both a blessing and a curse. Cambridge is a far cry from Washington Parish, one of the poorest parishes in Louisiana, where he grew up. But when Eric was offered the Extension School scholarship, he knew that he couldn’t pass it up. “Most of the men in my family work in factories or off shore, in construction or at odd jobs, doing manual labor—or they’re in jail or dead,” Eric says. Because his mother loves to read, she introduced her children to D. H. Lawrence, Melville, Shakespeare. But they never had much access to the arts beyond their home. In New Orleans, Eric had found a way into a new life. And he admits that, in those early days of uncertainty following the hurricane, a part of him feared that he’d lose the strides he’d made in building a different life for himself.

Now a candidate for the Extension School’s Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies, he’s managed to stay on track to pursue a career in the arts. “I’ve had the opportunity to learn so much about nonprofit and business management since being at Harvard,” Eric says. “I hope to translate that into being a true leader and social entrepreneur for an area that needs not just economic help but cultural help as well.” Foreseeing misery on the Gulf Coast for a long time to come, Eric plans to do whatever he can, from digging ditches and swinging hammers to helping the arts flourish.

He does miss the South. “Sometimes I just want to go to a crawfish boil and drink some beer and talk with my hands,” he says, gesturing. “You don’t do that in New England.” Early on, there were times when Eric felt as if he were sleepwalking through parallel universes: one here, one in New Orleans. He’d be drinking coffee at Starbucks on Church Street but recalling the aromas of CafÈ du Monde. A night at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square would morph into one in the French Quarter.

He is waking up now. “The steps I’m taking this semester are deliberate,” he says. He dresses neatly for class—sometimes wearing a tie or an Oxford shirt and V-neck sweater. There is no posturing about it. Never for a second does Eric wish to forget his roots. But neither does he want to take anything for granted. Thus, every time he enters Harvard Yard he purposefully walks by the statue of John Harvard. He slows to give the University founder a nod or wave. He needs to remind himself that he’s here.