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Personal Journey

Down and Out in New Orleans

BY Morgan Hawkins

Sunday, Aug. 28 Gray clouds fill the sky. Everything is gloomy. I’m among hundreds of students at a residential facility at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. It’s 11 a.m. and we’re waiting for Hurricane Katrina to hit.

The city is under evacuation orders. “We are leaving, right?” I ask a university employee. Apparently not. We spend the night crammed in windowless halls with no lights and no air conditioning.

Tuesday, Aug. 30 We’re angry. We could have been out of here yesterday but weren’t allowed to leave. Now a levee has broken, and water is pouring into the city. We’re told food is being “rationed,” but by day’s end, many of us haven’t eaten at all. In despair, many students break into vending machines. We share what we grab.

Wednesday, Aug. 31 We wake up, look out the windows and all our hopes of seeing a better day come crashing down. Cars, homes and who knows what else are completely submerged. We’re dirty, the toilets are stopped up, and it’s so humid that condensation drips down the walls. Some students are showing signs of mental breakdown. Some of us are crying, screaming and arguing.

We call a meeting and decide to take things into our own hands. We pull out a map and look for the nearest highway. We’ll walk to safety, as far as Houston if we have to. We leave in the morning.

Thursday, Sept. 1 At 9 a.m., I hear somebody running down the hall yelling, “The boats are here! The boats are here!” The Coast Guard has finally come to get us. We grab our belongings, run downstairs and, in batches of 20 students each, we’re out of there.

Hawkins, a second-year neuroscience major at Xavier University of Louisiana, is from Inglewood, Calif., and is now enrolled at UCLA.