I decided to leave with my husband the Saturday prior to Katrina hitting. My husband and I really debated leaving. Our financial situation was pathetic and all we had was our rent money. After Ivan wiped us out, we were skeptical about taking another chance. A good friend of mine was an assistant manager at the Holiday Inn French quarter and was able to get all of us an employee rate in Dallas. We all drove together since she couldn\'t afford a car after being out of work for seven months. As a side note she was fired from St Peter House. They have a really high turnover rate of managers and the pay was very low with no medical insurance. My friend is in her fifties with an amazing resume from her many years in the hotel business outside of New Orleans. It was always her dream to work in New Orleans and arrived her four years ago. So after being unemployed for so long and her self esteem totally shattered from tons of rejections, she settled for a low paying job and it was quite apparent her creativity and opinions were not necessary. Anyway that\'s why my friend could not afford a car. \r\n1. We arrived in Dallas and watched with horrors as the events unfolded my friend ( who could not find a job for several months), called Intercontinental office in Atlanta and made sure they understood that the people they were watching on TV stuck on top of their house were their employees. She reminded these men that the people dying are the same people who work housekeeping, maintenance, front desk, etc. they are the minimum wage workers who keep their hotels running. We helped her call all the employees we could and told them to get to an intercontinental hotel and not to worry at all about the bill. Meanwhile, my friend’s manager had not contacted anyone.\r\nWe got a call from my brother-in-law who stayed behind it was crying and scared. He said he was forced on a bus and taken with a bunch of other men to New Orleans East to help clear bodies. The cops had guns turned on them and said it was for the good of the city. My brother-in-law couldn\'t take it and when he tried to stop and they hit him in the head with the butt of the gun. They loaded the men back on the bus and left them uptown. We told him to go to the Superdome he kept telling us it wasn\'t safe and he found a group of people and they were going to hold out at a Café Romas. My brother-in-law and his friends got out to us in Dallas the following Saturday. We took him to get his head checked out and he had some tissue damage but nothing too serious. It was hard to believe my brother in laws story about the cops but if you were there to see those guys faces there would be no doubt.\r\nWe stayed in the hotel growing more depressed and angry, then we took action. My friend got on the computer and started researching jobs. My husband and I were trying to figure out a way to afford a computer to continue our schooling. My brother-in-law returned home to Ohio for the first time in six years. Although we loved New Orleans, we wanted to see the opportunities which were available. We always knew that New Orleans had no protection for employees, but we needed to see what the differences were.\r\nMy friend got offered tons of jobs, in fact our friend who couldn\'t afford a car is working for twenty thousand dollars more where they insist on her using her brain and creativity. Although she misses New Orleans, she gets really sad when she remembers how useless she felt working there. She also gets angry when she thinks about the employees who worked for her hotel for more than three years and were only approved for a 28-cent raise. My brother-in-law learned a cook should be making more then seven dollars an hour and is going to culinary school. He did return to Café Masperos to work, but his boss begged him to come back for more money. When he got there, he was working fifteen hour days and his pay was cut to 65 dollars per day. He returned to us pretty soon after that discovery. Right now I and my husband are getting ready to study abroad and we are living in a hotel working hard on our internet classes.