Hearbreaking video of Charmaine Neville, NOLA evacuee   
The video is hard enough to watch. Actually painful to watch. But if you'd rather the transcript, its in the continuation. However, I think it needs to be watched. If we avoid it, we can't put the human face on this tragedy.

Additionally, we spoke with our landlord today. He told us his his sister was able to evacuate in time. A kind person/stranger inland lent them a travel trailer to stay in while they waited to get back into their home (not New Orleans obviously, but outside the city, I'm not sure which parish/town) They did lose a lot though.

I was in my house when everything first started, I was in the house,
yes, I live in the Bywater area of the 9th Ward of New Orleans.  When
the hurricane came it blew all of the left side of my house and the
water was coming in my house in torrents.  I had my neighbour, an
elderly man who is my neighbour, and myself in the house with our dogs
and cats and we were trying to stay out of the water but the water was
coming in too fast so we ended up having to leave the house. We left
the house and we went up on the roof of a school, I took a crowbar and
I burst the door open on the roof of the school to help people, to get
them up on to the roof of the school.

Later on we found a flat boat and we went around in the neighbourhood
in the flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them
to the school. We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people,
but then things started getting really bad.  By the second day the
people that were there, that we were feeding and everything, we had no,
no more food, no water, we had nothing and other people were coming
into our neighbourhood. We were watching the helicopters go across the
bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and
tell us "Hi" and that would be all, they wouldn't drop us any food, any
water, nothing. 

Alligators were eating people, they had all kinds of stuff in the water, they had babies floating in the water, we had to walk over hundreds of bodies
of dead people, people that we tried to save from the hospices, from
the hospitals and from the old folks homes.  I tried to get the police
to help us but I realised, we rescued a lot of police officers
in the flat boat from the 5th district police station, the boat, the
guy who was driving the boat he rescued a lot them and brought them to
different places where they could be saved. We understood that the
police couldn't help us but we couldn't understand why the National
Guard and them couldn't help us because we kept seeing them, but they
never would stop and help us.

Finally it got to be too much and I just took all of the people that I
could, I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs and I rowed them
from down there in that 9th Ward to French Quarter and I went back and
I got more people.  There were groups of us, you know there was about
24 of us and we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could
get and bringing them to the French Quarter because we heard there was
phones in the French Quarter and that there wasn't any water and they
were right, there was phones but we couldn't get through.

I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come ( video goes silent, I think she is trying to distinguish between the guys who came and the men who were already there with them)
...the neighbourhood where we were that were helping us to save people,
but other men and they came and they started raping women and they
started killing and I don't know who these people were.

I'm not going to tell you that I knew who they were because I don't,
but what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left
down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of
those things wouldn't have happened.  People are trying to say that we
stayed in that city because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do
this.  We didn't have resources to get out we had NO WAY TO LEAVE when
they gave the evacuation order if we could have left we would have left.

There are still thousands and thousands of people trapped in their
homes down in the downtown area....when we finally did get to
(interviewer asks "downtown or in the ??") in the 9th ward and not just
in my neighbourhood but in other neighbourhoods in the 9th ward there
are a lot of people who are still trapped down there-old people, young
people, babies, pregnant women. I mean nobodies helping them and I want
people to realise that we did not stay in that city so that we could
steal and loot and commit crimes.  A lot of those young men lost their minds
because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop, we
would do S.O.S. on the flashlights we would do everything and it came
to a point it really did come to a point where these young men were so
frustrated that they did start shooting.  They weren't trying to hit
the helicopters they figured maybe they weren't seeing, maybe if they
hear this gunfire they would stop then, but that didn't help us,
nothing like that helped us.

Finally I got to Canal Street with all of my people that I had saved from back there, there was a whole group of us and I,
I don't want them arresting nobody else, I broke the window of an
R.T.A. bus.  I never learned how to drive a bus in my life, I got in
that bus, I loaded all of those people who were in wheelchairs and then
everything else into that bus and we drove and we drove and we drove
and millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the
bus .........

at the end, she breaks down, and is consoled by Archbishop Alfred Hughes of New Orleans

Around a year ago on this day..

• Labor Day Weekend - 2007
• Whew, I survived yet another summer. - 2007
• Back to school - 2006