Finding hope in the Ninth Ward

Just when it seemed the BCS and the college football national championship mattered, there’s the Ninth Ward.

That’s the below-sea-level New Orleans community that was the most ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. You know the story. The winds howled, the levees broke, thousands of people died, many more were stranded, displaced and otherwise made miserable.

What you may not have known, unless you have a relative from the area or just happen to pay a lot of attention to such things, is that this low-lying area looks much as it did immediately following the storm, minus the flooding and rotting corpses.

Roaming its streets today Ryan and I found flood- and wind-damaged homes, some of them destroyed and condemned, others requiring intensive rehab. There were FEMA trailers, debris piles in the streets, abandoned apartment buildings. The gloomy sky seemed to reflect the mood of the blue-tarped neighborhoods below it.

But there was a ray of hope in the form of Cheryl Partridge, a Jehovah’s Witness from Twin Falls, Idaho. She and some of her family are in New Orleans this week rehabbing houses and spirits. Ryan and I found her outside a damaged home on Andry Street not very far from the levee that was breached on Aug. 29, 2005.

Just as other faith groups have done and are doing, the Witnesses have adopted the Ninth Ward as their own, embracing its people, absorbing their pain.

Partridge said she cried when she arrived here. She had heard the damage was still widespread and intense, had even seen pictures. “But it’s totally different to look at it and to be in the middle of it,” she said.

Most disturbing she said is that the school yards and playgrounds are empty. “I don’t see any children.”

But she hasn’t lost hope. If anything, she said she is more encouraged by the strength and determination she sees in the survivors. It fuels here desire to help them and even makes her grateful.

“This gives you a way to tell people what you believe because you’re doing it. You’re living what you’re preaching.”

See a photo gallery from the 9th Ward

Jeff