Displaced Students Return To La. for 2nd College Try

Florence Farris enrolled at Georgetown after Hurricane Katrina thwarted her first year at Loyola. She is back in New Orleans and hopeful that "a lot of life is going to come back into the city." (By James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)

After Segal's last exam in December, he emptied his dorm room, turned in his key and went home to a strangely unsettled New Orleans.

"Nobody knows what's next," he said. "There's no sense of where the city's going from here."

At Tulane and Loyola, about 90 percent of students are returning. About three-quarters signed up this fall to return to Xavier University of Louisiana. At the much harder-hit Dillard University, 48 percent had come back when classes started yesterday, though they weren't on the badly damaged historic New Orleans campus; a hotel will serve as a dorm, faculty housing and teaching space this spring.

Some students couldn't wait to go back to New Orleans.

"I felt like I was cheated out of a semester of the college experience," said freshman Thomas Gibbs, who lived with his parents in Alexandria last semester, commuted to classes at Georgetown and missed months of workouts with the Loyola baseball team. "It was like being in high school again. . . . It was depressing."

Peter Lane, a freshman who had wanted to go to Georgetown for years but couldn't get in, said one semester there got that out of his system. "I have never worked so hard in my life," he said. "My brain was just in a coma afterward."

Farris is used to starting over, having moved every few years with parents who worked in the military and the Foreign Service. She was born in the District, lived in Bangkok for five years, then Hawaii, Jamaica, the District again, back to Bangkok, then South Africa and Paris.

Freshman year of college, the first chance at real independence, was a time she had been waiting for. "I was definitely ready," she said, "to have the ability to make my own decisions, to study and get into subjects I like, and also to goof off."

As Katrina barreled toward New Orleans, she had just met her roommate at Loyola, unpacked her dresses and swishy skirts, a favorite book by Salman Rushdie and DVDs such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." She planned to buy big rolls of paper to paint gold stencils on the room's walls and envisioned blue fabric billowing from the ceiling.

Instead, she emptied the refrigerator, grabbed her iPod and a few clothes in a small bag, padlocked the closet and evacuated. After she spent nights sleeping on a church floor without enough blankets and days volunteering for the Red Cross, the levees broke.

"All of a sudden, this traumatic upheaval," said her father, George Farris, "and she's back living with us again."

She enrolled at Georgetown, went to thrift shops to buy clothes and made friends. But it wasn't how she had pictured freshman year.

Instead of freedom on campus in outrageous New Orleans, she was in the small apartment her parents had moved into while repairs were underway at their house -- a place just large enough, they thought, with their daughter away at school.

They reimposed her curfew, usually midnight or 1 a.m. "That's when parties start ," she said.

She always knew she'd go back to New Orleans. The city needs people now, she said; besides, it's the life she had chosen for herself. She started a club, Wolfpack at Georgetown University, to help displaced Loyola students and to raise money for the school.

The first thing she'd do back in New Orleans, she said, was collapse onto her bed, just be alone for a minute. Then she'll take some new friends out to explore the awakening, uncertain city. They'll order coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde and see what comes.