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After Katrina, A Lonely Homecoming
(A.j. Sisco)
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But the faltering recovery is also tied to the almost primal fear of another inundation. While the Army Corps of Engineers is making massive improvements to the earthen mounds that keep the floodwaters out, many who suffered their failure in Katrina are reluctant to trust the engineers again.
But whatever reasons people have chosen to stay away, their absences are having a staggering effect on St. Bernard Parish.
Neither the Sears, nor the Wal-Mart, nor the Kmart in the parish has reopened. The only hospital and movie theater are closed. So are the two skating rinks and seven of the eight Catholic churches. The neighborhood still lacks phone lines and cable connections.
"The United States is not a Third World country," Anna Simpson, 55, a former neighbor, said in exasperation. "This shouldn't be happening here."
Connections Across Generations
The origins of St. Bernard Parish lie in farming, fishing and shrimping, but by the 1950s, it had evolved into a more conventional suburb of New Orleans.
The population, which was predominantly white and Catholic, was not particularly affluent, but 75 percent of people owned their homes, many of them modest brick houses set close together.
Residents were remarkably clannish. Many people in St. Bernard could boast of having parents or a sibling living within a few houses, and many families had been there for generations.
Darren Dupont's house on Fox Drive was next door to his father's. Phyllis Puglia's on Fawn was a block away from the house she grew up in.
Honie Bauer's father, brother and two sisters had all lived within a few miles of one another, some within walking distance.
Now her brother and sister and their families are living in her three-bedroom house on Fox -- nine people, four dogs, two cats and a ferret -- as they rearrange their lives after the storm.
Tall and outgoing, Bauer speaks with the r-less regional accent particular to St. Bernard, which here is pronounced something like "Sayn Bin-odd." She seemed surprised that families elsewhere might be far-flung geographically. "We all get along," she explained.
"We don't know any other way -- I just don't know any different," she said. "For me to not live near my family would be a struggle."
