Ryan Benjamin | Saving a city, despite the setbacks

Imagine this: One day, Philadelphia has 1.5 million people in it. The next, most of the population disappears, and nearly four years later, only half has returned. The city would be desolate, its institutions destroyed, its buildings abandoned.

This is reality for people in St. Bernard Parish, La., where Hurricane Katrina flooded 99 percent of all structures. Before the storm, the parish (equivalent to a county), just five miles southeast of downtown New Orleans, had a population of 67,000; now it's roughly 33,000. As I saw this spring break with Fox Leadership in New Orleans, or FLINOLA, home after home sits as it did before the hurricane, except with broken windows, graffiti X's to denote buildings not worth saving and yellowish lines showing where the 8 to 15 feet of Lake Pontchartrain floodwater sat for three weeks before slowly draining out of the parish.

In four years, the post-Katrina recovery effort has gone from critical to stable to good, but it is far from over. Over the past three years, the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and FLINOLA have sent hundreds of students, for free, down to New Orleans to help Habitat for Humanity and Catholic Charities in their rebuilding efforts.

Fox has taken the lead when it comes to supporting the city's rebuilding efforts with human capital. And the summer and post-graduation fellowship programs - which place students in nonprofit jobs - have more-lasting effects. Unfortunately, Fox was forced to cut its summer internship program this year due to University-wide budget cuts. The University should have come up with the money, but at this point, according to Fox director and Political Science professor John Dilulio, it's too late. Next year, however, the University should support the program, not only because it provides students with meaningful jobs but also because it contributes to rebuilding a community still in flux.

So many things went wrong in 2005, and continue to do so now, that it makes you pause before considering contributing to the effort: Bush told "Brownie" he was doing "a heckuva job." Mayor Ray Nagin should have provided buses for evacuation. And everyone's heard that the Canadian Mounties arrived before FEMA did. But even after discovering many of the complexities surrounding the hurricane and its aftermath, the city and region are, of course, only inhabited by humans, and we must continue to contribute to a full recovery, not just in dollars but in human capital.

Ambiguities and hypocrisy abound when it comes to Katrina. Though the federal government has given $175 billion to the recovery effort, layers of bureaucracy coupled with corruption have left much of the funding unspent. And while insurance companies have paid out billions more, anecdotally many residents have spent their settlements at casinos rather than on their homes.

Then there's the still-divisive question of who decided to leave and when. Certainly thousands of poor and elderly people couldn't leave, but as I discovered, that is not the entire story. Many who stayed did so by choice, and that can rankle those who left. For instance, in the high-poverty New Orleans East, I spoke with an elderly reverend that "got the hell out of here."

But at the same time, one man I met who decided to ride out the storm did so because this was his home. Tears flowed down his face as he described the intense pain of driving past lifelong friends stranded after the flooding, unable to help because there was no room in the back of his pickup.

Should we have assisted those who willingly chose to ignore the warning? Of course, and we still must. In any situation there are not pure victims and pure heroes. Inevitably, some victims make poor decisions, but this does not make them villains.

It's easy to sit here at Penn and fight over appropriating money to Fox and FLINOLA. New Orleans will sink again, they say. But let's put aside the fact that there is no place as crazy as Bourbon Street anywhere in the United States, or that the city is arguably the birthplace of modern jazz, or that jambalaya is extremely delicious. New Orleans is someone's home. We can all relate to that.

Ryan Benjamin is a College senior from New Haven, Conn. A Connecticut Yankee appears on Fridays. His email address is benjamin@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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