Night and Day in New Orleans

"With God's help, we'll get our lives back," McCaleb, a 53-year-old with saggy eyelids, declared to his friend Berkeley Wong as they struggled with another load.

This time, McCaleb said, God provided him with an Amana side-by-side refrigerator, one of more than a million appliances ruined by Katrina. Countless refrigerators, enveloped in eye-searing stench, still line the streets. Almost all of them, it seems, carry messages of frustration: "Do not open. Michael Brown and Pres. Bush inside. . . . Send to White House, Pennsylvania Avenue."

Not Enough Workers

"Now Hiring" signs on nearly every street corner tell how severe the worker crisis has become. Burger King offers $6,000 bonuses -- paid in installments over one year -- to new workers. Busloads of Latino workers, some of them illegal immigrants, flow into the city for the wretched task of gutting houses.

And still employers cannot find enough workers, even in the upscale parts of town. William H. Hines, managing partner of Jones Walker -- one of the city's biggest law firms -- waits three weeks to get his suits dry-cleaned. JoAnn Clevenger, who owns the Upperline cafe, serves up her signature Tom Cowman's roast duck and fried green tomatoes, with only eight employees. Before the storm, she operated with 28. Irene's, a cozy locals' haunt in the French Quarter, fills the holes in its service staff with former employees, including a lanky cross-dresser who owned a St. Bernard Parish gun shop that flooded him out of the shotgun business and back into the restaurant business.

The fast-food joints and the back-of-the-house restaurant managers might have a larger pool of low-wage workers if the schools were up and going. But only one public school -- in a system that once had 55,000 students -- has opened. The education landscape is ceded to a few private schools and to the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which has 16 schools operating with more than 5,000 students -- including 300 former public school students attending free -- compared with 13,000 before Katrina.

Deeper into the city's center, Karen Porche spends her days trying to make sense of the carnage in the Fontainebleau neighborhood, where she and her husband live and own rental properties. Porche, an OB-GYN nurse, showers outside now because her handy husband connected a hot-water line in their back yard to compensate for a bathroom that doesn't work anymore.

"We are survivors," Porche said, adjusting her Louisiana State University wool hat under a magnolia tree seared brown because of the salt in the floodwater. Her SUV says "I love New Orleans." Other cars show off a now-ubiquitous bumper sticker: "New Orleans, proud to crawl home" -- instead of the old favorite, "New Orleans, proud to call it home."

Porche grew up in Mississippi, but her husband is a born-and-bred, won't-ever-leave New Orleanian. He's stubborn, but she has put him on notice: "If it floods again," she said, "I'm ready to call it quits."

North of her, Thania "Aunt Mae" Elliott dips her precious wedding china in bleach, hoping to salvage something from her abominable Lakeview home, where the 100-year-old oak toppled out back and the water rose to the roofline. Elliott and her husband, Bill, are weekenders now, joining a procession of tens of thousands that plods in miserable traffic jams every Saturday morning leading into the city from points west and north.

It took the Federal Emergency Management Agency a month to send an inspector to their house, and their insurance adjuster didn't show up until more than 2 1/2 months after the storm.

"It is so depressing," Thania Elliott said. "I don't think it will ever be the same." Her life has taken on a rhythm: "Laugh, cry, have a drink."

The Elliotts' little brick house is only blocks away from the 17th Street Canal, where a temporary barrier with no flood wall marks the scar left by a 500-foot levee breach. Louisiana's attorney general, the New Orleans district attorney and the U.S. attorney here are all conducting investigations to determine whether criminal charges can be filed related to the levee breaks, which researchers have blamed on shoddy construction and poor engineering.