Little did my family know that on August 29, 2005 our lives would be changed forever. We lived in New Orleans right around UNO supposedly the second highest elevation in the city, boy were we wrong. I can always remember the day, September 18, when we snuck into the city. My uncle had a business in New Orleans and he said nobody was stopping people that were driving though the streets so we decided to see what we did or did not have. The streets that had had looked so familiar when approaching my house looked nothing liked what I remembered when we evacuated. When we turned on Mirabeau Ave we saw the water lines on the houses and my dad said that these lines better start going down or we are going to be in trouble.\r\n We then turn on Arts St where my house is. When we looked at our house I knew that it was ours, but the water marks and the big X on the front just made us tear up because this wasn\'t how we left it and we knew we had trouble. My mom looked in our mail slot and said that we got water, and everything is gone. We tried to open the front door with our key, but the door was swollen so we couldn\'t open it. We then tried the back door but it was even worse. So our last choice was to break the window in my bedroom. After my dad broke the window I climbed inside my room and couldn\'t believe what I saw and smelt. The smell was just so bad I could barely stay in there. I had to hold my nose because the moldy smell was just awful. But worse was the sight of what used to be my room. All of my yearbooks, clothes, shoes and pictures were taken by Katrina but I learned after that at least my family was okay and eventually I could replace most of these items. Our house was already 3 feet off the ground and we got about 3 feet in the house. You would think that with 3 feet we could take most of our stuff out of the house, but because we got in the house so long after the storm the mold had just taken over everything. The policeman down the street said that two weeks after the storm we still had water up to the steps of our house. Our living room had mold all the way up the ceiling and we just couldn\'t believe this has happened to us. This was our worst nightmare. When evacuating my dad said to put my car in the garage to protect it from any wind damage, we had no idea that we were going to have about 6 feet of water in our neighborhood. \r\n After looking at the house we went around our neighborhood to see how everything either survived or did not survive. We got on Franklin Ave and we couldn\'t go any further than Filmore because water was still in the streets even three weeks after the storm. Everything around us that we used to go to like Teddy\'s restaurant just wasn\'t the same. This neighborhood didn\'t look like the one that I grew up in and spent the 20 years of my life in.\r\n Again on October 5 we went back to the house when we were actually allowed back into the city to get anything we could out of the house. When we went back the mold had gotten worse and the smell had gotten worse. We were able to get out family pictures and photo albums out of the top closet. My brother had just moved out and he and his wife were expecting a baby. The baby shower was going to be in September but the brand new stroller and car seat was destroyed. The only good thing that came out of Katrina was that I was getting my first nephew.\r\n I took the semester off from UNO and I took a couple of months off from work and my dads company put us up in an apartment in Houma, LA. I always wanted a bigger closet because our house on Arts St was an older house so the closet\'s was small. This apartment had wonderful walk-in closets but the only problem was that I didn\'t have any clothes to put in them. Before the storm we had owned a piece of property in Robert, LA at a camp ground were we had our camper with a huge cover over it and a storage building in the back. After we had to leave the apartment in Houma, my parent\'s went to the campground and I went to live my aunt and uncle in Metairie. I stayed with them because it was closer to UNO and to my work so I didn\'t have to drive across the Causeway Bridge every day. It\'s almost two years later and I am still there but I am in the process of moving back with my parents in Robert because things just aren\'t the same, I need some type of normalcy being with my parents since I have no \"house\". Now my dad has finally given in and we are in the process of getting a house in Abita Springs, LA. New Orleans is my home but the process of getting home is just ridiculous and I need somewhere that I can call home again soon.\r\n