Tuesday

We were able to get started and get going pretty early and get our heads. I had my first client come in to sign her papers. She was just so excited that after 9 years of separation she was finally going to get divorced. It was a bit stressful and nerve wracking with her being my first ever client, but eventually we got it all signed and notarized and she will now be divorced in 10 weeks. It is exciting, but also a little depressing helping people to end marriages, some of which have lasted years.

Myself, Jen and Joe went out for lunch to a popular local place where we met Anne who runs the pro bono project and she was more than happy to answer all our questions about the hurricane. When Katrina hit she had already evacuated to her parents house which was above ground with generators and a well etc. She had seen it coming in and knew that as it was bigger than any other hurricane she had ever seen. People didn't evaciate for many reasons including because this was the 4th evacuation of the season and nothing had happened the lkast 3 times. Also many people had exhausted all their funds evacuating on petrol and hotel stays and so they felt that they had no options. Some people where physically unable to get out. And what made this all worse was that after the flooding the locals were not allowed to go back in boats or 4 wheel drives to help others to evacuate. Her father was on the hurricane committee, hence his house was built on high ground. Even this wasn't enough as it took them 4 weeks after Katrina to be able to leave their development because of the trees. The only reason they were able to get out was because a neighbor had a small bulldozer and they took turns using the chain saws to dig their way out. The Red Cross would not set up shelters etc anywhere near where the flooding occurred. There was so much going on, so many things that went wrong, so many was the people in the poor areas that were flooded were just ignored and forgotten.

In the evening we went back to Café du monde where we had gotten the beignets the day before. They are just so good, they are hard to resist. We then walked down to another area of town called Frenchman st which was much quieter and more relaxed and chilled than the insanity of bourbon street. It also gave us a chance to see a lot of the local buildings and architecture which is very European, with a lot of balconies. The music was good and the craic was great. I had a chance to speak with Sunny who is a visiting scholar from China and we were comparing notes on being exchange students.

However the streets in New Orleans do not run on the same simple grid as most US cities do and they twist and turn and run in concentric lines some times. So we got lost as the lonely planet map I had did not accurately reflect the state of the streets we were walking on. We did find out way back eventually but it did take us rather a long time.

Wednesday

We were a little exhausted after the night before's excursion but we made it to work for 9am and got stuck into some more cases. I didn't have any clients come in but I spent the day working on the petitions of divorce and contacting the clients who were not responding.

That afternoon Jen and I were able to hitch a lift with another group of DePaul volunteerswho were going to take a tour of the 9th ward to see the continuing devastation of the houses that were built there. When we entered the 9th Ward there is a sculpture that shows the height that the water reached and settled at at different times. At the highest it was above the rooves of some of the houses built there. Numerous plots of land were completely empty and this is 2.5 years after the levees broke. The houses that were washed off their foundations have been moved off the roads but there was a house that was sitting on top of a car, another that was upside down, numerous with broken roofs, walls etc and nearly all of them still had the markings from the investigators who entered the houses in the aftermath of the disaster. On them they marked the date, the organization and the number of dead found. There are so few houses that are currently being rebuilt. There are perhaps 10 in total out of maybe 400 hourses that have been fully rebuilt. A number have been started and so many others are just sitting empty waiting for the owners to get back. Even more have just been washed away completely. It was so eerie to see the complete desolation at one end of a street where before there would have been houses nearly on top of each other, now there is knee high grass and nothing else. There are no schools, no churches, no shops no community places. The only sign of hope that there is are the pink houses that Brad Pitt is building. He is supporting a project that is rebuilding in the worst hit area, right beside where the levee broke, and these houses will cost 150 000 dollars. It blew my mind that we were in the United States of America, the worlds richest country, the land of the free where anyone can live the American dream. Yet these people have been forgotten by everyone except a small group of supporters who are doing whatever they can to try and help these people put back together their lives. But Yet the levees have not been rebuilt much better than they are before so the next time a massive hurricane hits, if it is next year or in 10 years, the same thing will just happen all over again. It was absolutely heartbreaking just to see the lives that some of the clients I had been dealing with during the week had been living in. The Fema trailers which cost so much to provide are parked outside these falling down houses wuth the residents having to look out every day and see the devastation they have had to live with for the last 2.5 years.

It really shook me to see what was happening, what the world had forgotten, but father tony a man who was looking after us had bought us all basketball tickets for a lakers v Hornets basketball game. I had never been to basketball before so I decided I could wallow later and went out. It was fun, even though the hornets lost disasterously by like 70-100. After that I headed out with the other Irish people for an Irish night, and it was fun, we had hand grenades (another New Orleans tradition) and watched a man called big Al singing . He was a fantastic blues singer and it was a good night. I was able to talk my way into all the bars that I wanted to get into which was a novelty. But it was such a diametrically opposed situation than that earlier in the day, here there is no water damage, there is a huge amount of money spent every night on alcohol and partying while people 15 minutes down the road are one step from being homeless. It was a real awakening.

Thursday

We were back in work again at 9am and I had a client in in the afternoon so I was working on that most of the day. We ordered In from a local southern food restaurant called Mothers which was pretty good. The rest of the group went to one of the court houses to file some of the documents we had finished and I was able to get them to file a final declaration of divorce for one of my clients. There was not much else to do, we had basically made our way through the vast majority of the files Rebecca had for us. When my client came in I had a little time to talk to her about her situation and why she was getting divorced. She had been waiting for 12 years to get divorced, until her children were grown. The reason they had separated in the first place was because the husband was abusing the daughter. It was just a horrific story, it put the work I was doing back into perspective. I had felt at times like the legal work could have been done remotely, and we might have done more good on the labour team, but when I heard that what I was doing wasn't just divorcing people who had just given up because they didn't like each other any more, I could see the difference I was able to make. Another one of the girls had a client who was dying and she wanted to divorce her sbusive husband so he didn't get her property on her death.

I did a little bit of shopping that evening, just wandering round some of the shops in the French Quarter which was niceand relaxing. A couple of girls, me Jen, Jenny and Rose went out for wine and dessert and just had a good chat and gossip and relaxed in a slightly smaller group. We then took a walk to see Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's house which they live in when they are in New Orleans working on their project. Sadlly they were not in New Orleans but they do have very good security with a fingerprint scanner and everything!

Friday

It was a bit sad that it was our last day but I had a non stop morning with 2 clients coming in to sign papers and then we had to file the papers in the local courthouse. It was interesting to do it, but not terribly exciting! But we were able to get the processs started for our clients which was very rewarding and also meant they weren't being left in some pile for some other student to restart at some other time. Rebecca then came and debriefed us so we were able to take a half day.

We took a tour of the 9th Ward again, this time in day light and we were able to stop the van in a deserted area beside a house where it was obvious no-one had returned to in the last 2.5 years where all the furniture and stuff from inside the house had just been tossed about and pushed up agains thte windows and doors. It was such a sad sight. We were also able to see the hand made signs that had to be made after the disaster to mark streets, at the beginning they were just painted on telegraph poles and it looks like a 3rd world country.

We headed out for dinner to a nice Cajun restaurant called pere Antoine's. I had the catfish which was very good. Jen and I then went to the funky pirate to hear Al Carson singing again, then onto Presevaton hall which was very cool and then we met up with Brett, Amy, Elizabeth and Joe and went to a nice jazz bar. It was a fun night and a great way to end an amazing week long experience.

Saturday

So we were up at 5am to be on the road at 6.30 which was very early. Luckily I sleepy pretty much til lunchtime. But one of the great things about this trip was also the chance to get to meet some really amazing people and learn so much more about this country I am in for the year.

The whole trip was an amazing experience from meeting fantastic DePaul people, to the insanity of Bourbon Street to the desolation of the lower 9th ward. It is something that i shall not forget any time in the near future.