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It's the simple memorial that Randy Yardley remembers.

Two weeks ago, while helping to rebuild a smidgen of New Orleans, he crossed the bridge into the Lower Ninth Ward. And there, at the bottom of the bridge, in the median, is a semi-circle of windows and chairs.

Randy Yardley reads from his New Orleans journal

It's hard for him to talk about, even today. He chokes up and thinks of the enormity of what happened two years ago tomorrow.

New Orleans, our country's motherland of culture, hit by 125 mph winds. Eighty percent of the city flooded. More than 700 bodies recovered two months later.

In all, Hurricane Katrina killed 1,833 people, caused $96 billion in damage and became our country's worst natural disaster .

And two years later, the city is still broken. Like that small stack of chairs and windows.

Now, let me come clean. I go to Greensboro's United Church of Christ, and Yardley and a dozen other parishioners helped repair three homes in New Orleans.

I've been on our work trips before to poor pockets of eastern Kentucky. But this time, my church went to New Orleans, a glaring example of our government's failure to protect its own people, and I wondered what they saw and heard.


It was both subtle and powerful.

Two sets of steps rising to nowhere.

A child's rosary dangling from a front-yard faucet.

And the Xs, spray-painted big and broad on houses across New Orleans. The parishioners from Congregational UCC saw them everywhere. And every time they did, they thought about who lived. And who didn't.

"You felt empty," said Alec Bargebohr , a rising junior at Greensboro's Weaver Academy who went on the work trip. "You were sorry you couldn't do more. They didn't deserve it."

The tragedy is immense, almost daunting. But the personal stories are what you remember, even with the shortest of conversations, in places as ubiquitous as a grocery store, as ordinary as a construction site.

The Rev. Julie Peeples, my minister, winced when she mentioned our drought to a grocery store clerk in New Orleans. Talking weather, she thought, with someone from New Orleans.

Well, the clerk told Peeples we should consider ourselves lucky. She said everyone in New Orleans worries about the next heavy rain. Then, the clerk paused and added: "Thanks for not forgetting us."


\Since Katrina, hundreds of churches and nonprofits have come to New Orleans to help repair this broken city. And in doing so, the city has started to right itself.

Sometimes, it's subtle.

Like the sounds of an ice cream truck coming around the corner.

Or the sight of a metal-stake sign outside the Lower Ninth. The sign reads: "We Will Be Back. We Will Rebuild. We Are New Orleans."

Or the smells of Ya Ka Mein, a beef noodle soup concoction called Old Sober, wafting over a classically American springtime ritual: the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

UNCG's Michael Frierson was there in April. He helped produce for the festival seven short documentaries that captured its spirit and verve through its people, art and music.

But thoughts of Katrina still hang heavy.

"The Jazz Festival is a happy time, a money-making time," said Frierson, a broadcast professor at UNCG. "But you can tell just underneath — and you don't have to scratch very hard — that people are still suffering."

In its post-Katrina world — or "post-K'' as they say in New Orleans — the city has lost about a third of its population . But people are coming back. Like the young pregnant woman, in her 20s, who Randy Yardley talked to less than two weeks ago.

He helped repair her house.

"I apologize for asking this question," Yardley asked her, "but it looks like you may be having a baby soon."

"Yeah,'' she told him. "I'm due in October, and I'd like to get into the house by Sept. 10. That's why it's important. I want to have enough time to put a room together for this baby."

Life goes on. Even in New Orleans.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jrowe@news-record.com