The first time I heard about Katrina, I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Charlottesville, VA, celebrating a friend\'s birthday. I\'d just gotten in from New Orleans a week before to start my fall semester at the University of Virginia. I remember looking back at a TV in the corner of the restaurant and seeing New Orleans right in the middle of the path predicted for a huge hurricane that was coming up through the Gulf. I prayed that, like always, it would turn and spare New Orleans one more time, but this time it was already so close and things just didn\'t feel right.\r\n\r\nThe next day, Saturday, I called my parents, who were on I-10 evacuating to Baton Rouge to stay with my grandparents until the hurricane passed. It was standard routine, evacuating to Baton Rouge--it seems like we\'d done it at least once a year since I can remember--nothing new. They had thrown a few days worth of clothes in a suitcase, gathered some important documents and the cat, and evacuated with a good part of the city, expecting to be back early the next week.\r\n\r\nBut the next week (and weeks) didn\'t turn out as we\'d all expected or hoped. I spent that time in front of the tv and in front of the computer in Virginia, trying to get more information about what was happening, and on the phone, calling as many times as it took to finally reach my grandparents\' house and to talk to my family. Before Katrina hit, I would\'ve thought that being away during a catastrophe like this would\'ve been better than being in the midst of it--and maybe it was--but to me at least, everything that was home to me for the first 17 years of my life was possibly ruined and gone forever and I was away and couldn\'t do anything about it. I was lucky to know my family was okay, but the idea that our pictures, our piano, my books, the home that I had lived in since I was 2 or 3, might have all been ruined by the flood tore at my heart--and I couldn\'t even be with my family to deal with it all . The uncertainty and the pain of everything made concentrating on school almost impossible. I would try to read for class, but every minute, it seemed, I would think of something and of its relation to New Orleans, or rather what New Orleans was, and then how it wasn\'t like that anymore and how it might never be like that again, and that hurt a great deal. I love New Orleans, and it hurt to see something I love so much be completely torn apart.\r\n\r\nLater, I was able to find my house using satellite images of the city posted online, and I found that our small section of the neighborhood, up against the lake, had managed to miss the flood. It was a feeling of relief in many ways, but I\'d be lying to say that it made things all better. I cared a great deal about my house, but New Orleans was my home as well and it hurt still to know that things I loved so much, that the place and culture I had come to love and planned to return to after college, would never be the same.\r\n\r\nAs the semester passed, I came to grips more and more with what had happened. My family was doing well in Baton Rouge, and they\'d been back to the city a few times since the storm, so I was able to hear about the actual state of things from them. I returned to the city for the first time over Thanksgiving break. Seeing all the destruction around me was heart-wrenching, despite all the pictures I\'d seen online while I was in Virginia, but it was good to be home, no matter what. It was good to be able to deal with what happened with my family, and to know how things really were, not just how the media portrayed them..\r\n\r\nStill, it wasn\'t until spring break of this past school year that I finally came to grips with everything. I went down to the city with a group of UVA students for a week of gutting homes and exploring the city post-Katrina--both the parts still in ruin and the parts that had come back to be almost as they were. It was an amazing experience for all of us, to help New Orleans, even if it was just gutting two houses to the studs. But I think it was especially good for me, to finally feel like I\'d done something to help, and to finally understand that I didn\'t need to feel guilty for having being away when it all happened. It wasn\'t my fault, and knowing that gave me the chance to move forward in a way that would let me better help the city and let me finish what I\'d started at UVa as well.\r\n\r\nNow it\'s July 2006, and I\'m in New Orleans for the fifth time since Katrina. It\'s a little bit cleaner and there are more trailers and more lights in Lakeview each time I return home. I\'ve gotten used to passing by blocks upon blocks of devastated homes now, and looking out for new potholes and new road signs/stoplights as I drive has become routine. We still have to go a ways for groceries and other things, but we\'ve finally gotten a gas station nearby and a hardware store just next door to it, and that\'s a start. While I head back to school next month for my second-to-last year there, I know that in two years, there\'s only one place I want to come back to, and I pray that by that time, we\'ll have more than just a start.