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A decade beyond Katrina

It had been a pretty good spring and summer for us in 2005. Dre and I had our May 7, comedy-of-errors-but-all-was well-that-ended-well wedding in Monroe, La., enjoyed ourselves in Panama City Beach afterward and were going about the business of settling down to a new life as a married couple.

But nearly four months later -- Aug. 29 -- we found ourselves staring in horrified fascination at the images coming from New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina devastated the most prominent city in Dre's home state, a destination we had been pondering for a short visit.

The city has just observed the 10th year since Hurricane Katrina -- a pretty name for an ugly storm.

Commemoration pieces abound online, along with a repeat of the statistics: more than 80 percent of the city flooded. More than 1,800 people lost. Damage costs of more than $100 billion.

Other cities on the Gulf Coast took a hit, but New Orleans stood out in its devastation. The statistics bore out in the unforgettable images that burned into our collective consciousness: the people who wrote messages on roofs pleading for help. Aerial views of the flooded city. The red writing on the doors of flooded homes ... the crosses and the ominous numbers. Hungry and thirsty people wandering the highways and huddling inside and outside the Superdome.

The rescues. The debris. And the bodies.

There are those who helped. Some wrung their hands and wished they could help. Some sympathized with the poor; some smugly shook their fingers and judged the poor and the sinful. Some cast blame in various directions. Some predicted the city would never be the same, that it would come back sanitized and gentrified, stripped of the uniqueness that made "N'awlins" what it was. (Even now, the degree and nature of the city's recovery is being debated.)

One thing I have come to realize since Katrina is that everyone, poor or rich, is subject to have their levees break in some shape or form. We've all been broadsided by the breakdown of the stabilizers in our lives, things we didn't give a second thought to ... until ...

We may not have wandered down a freeway or huddled in an ill-equipped, overcrowded shelter. We may not have been labeled as refugees within our own country. We may not have had to paddle down a city street in a boat or search unsuccessfully for the bodies of loved ones who died in floodwaters.

But disasters aren't always natural.

As we've seen from current headlines, they can be health-related, relational and certainly financial. We're all subject to need the very people we think we can't relate to, think we're superior to or just don't understand.

Sometimes God sends the most unlikely people to provide that helping hand when our own levees break; therefore it behooves us to be lenders ourselves, and not just to those we relate to or feel comfortable with. We may not be able to be Brad Pitt and build houses for the poor in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. But we can build relational capital -- as my pastor calls it -- across the manmade barriers behind which we restrict ourselves.

For our 10th wedding anniversary, Dre wanted to celebrate in New Orleans. During a visit to see his mother in Lafayette, we made a shoestring-budget day trip -- with her -- to the Crescent City. We walked the French Quarter, visited several establishments and appreciated the melting pot of fellow tourists, street performers, businesspeople and just plain characters from all walks of life.

I was reminded that out of broken levees, whether literal or figurative, there is always hope ... if we link arms and do what is necessary to give rise to it.

Email:

hwilliams@arkansasonline.com

Style on 08/30/2015

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