Aisha Howard, 11, doesn't like to mince her words. A year after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her house in Gulfport, Mississippi, and forced her into a FEMA trailer with 12 other family members, Aisha (not her real name) is known in her neighborhood for her grinning putdowns. "Girl, you need to do something about that outfit," she will say. Or: "Man, you got a big nose."
What Aisha does enjoy -- Pharrell Williams, orange popsicles and galloping piggy-back rides -- she now sees very little of in the FEMA trailer park where she lives. Like the thousands of other Mississippi and Louisiana residents struggling to find normalcy after the storm, she and her family are just surviving.
I met Aisha in August, when I went to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to do research for my senior thesis on faith-based organizations. Reminders of the disaster's anniversary were everywhere. Stacks of Katrina books and DVDs appeared beside the racks of Maxim and Inside Nascar at the Gulfport Regional Airport bookstore, where a wizened cashier told me about her her home. "I haven't watched the DVDs," she said. "I lived it. I don't need to watch it again."
On the street, stretches of restored houses and renewed businesses signal that the region is steadily rebuilding. But even the fastest recovering areas can't cover the storm's impact for long. Buildings where restaurants or small shops used to stand remain in stripped, tattered states. Piles of debris can be seen dotting otherwise neat neighborhoods. In the hardest-hit parts of the city, blue tarps still serve as roofs.
The side-by-side alignment of the whole and the destroyed can be jarring -- a perfectly intact Waffle House sign standing, for instance, where the restaurant itself had blown away.
"After Katrina, everything had this horrible smell," one volunteer coordinator in Gulfport says. "We realized it was because some big trailers that once contained frozen chicken had split open, spilling the chicken everywhere. And it was rotting. Volunteers had to dump it all into the gulf."
The objects that make their way back to the water defy description. Rotten chicken. Mass quantities of spilt dog food. A church's organ. Oak branches. Kitchen sinks. During the broiling afternoons, busloads of workers, many of them Mexican migrants, do the dirty work of beach cleanup.
But if the reminders of the storm are everywhere, so are calls for a speedy recovery. "Rebuilding the Coast -- Together," a sign, advertising a new checking-account plan at the local bank, said. Near a flattened shrimp shack by the beach, someone writes on a piece of cardboard, "We'll be back."
Much of the recovery effort is being propelled by faith-based volunteers, who come from all over the country to work on damaged houses. They sleep in cramped quarters -- in tents or warehouses lined with cots -- and eat mass-produced slop for a week or two, to put up dry-wall and restore roofs. The Handsboro Presbyterian Church in Gulfport houses many such volunteers. A quaint 19th century building that would not look out of place in a children's book illustration, the church now houses the headquarters of a volunteer organization. The church itself had lost its steeple during the hurricane. But a newly-designed steeple -- now made of tough aluminum rather than wood -- was hoisted atop the building this summer, a sight I witnessed during the morning of an unusually beautiful day.
The steeple designer, a historical restoration expert by trade, admitted that he was deeply affected by his latest project. He had survived Katrina alone. "I was in my house, holding down the windows while the wind blew," he said. "I fought Katrina for hours."
The fight against Katrina is now a fight against its memory. In New Orleans, a city still visibly reeling from the storm's destruction, doing battle with Katrina's aftermath has become a way of life.
Only about half the city's population has returned, and the recovery process has been slow-going and fraught with disruptive politics. The Ninth Ward, one of the areas most heavily affected when the city's levees broke, is an eerie ghost town, where the tiny "shot-gun" houses that proliferate the neighborhood are now abandoned. Shriveled and warped beyond repair, most of them will be bulldozed by the city government.
The time I spent on the Gulf Coast is full of these images, but I return most often to Aisha Howard, the girl in the FEMA trailer park with her big mouth and Devil-may-care attitude. More than the run-down houses and the restored beach-side Casinos -- more even than the work of the tireless volunteers -- she makes me think about what it means to survive.
