There's No place like Home – I am not in Oz Anymore.

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There's No place like Home – I am not in Oz Anymore.

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Hurricane Katrina survivor
Amanda Gervais-Skelton talks about home and what she still misses. It
is coming up 3 years since August 26, 2005, when Amanda left her home
on a Greyhound Bus not knowing she would never return. Amanda’s 3
children, then aged 3, 6, and 8, were living with her parents at the
time, and there was no time to say goodbye. Felix, Amanda’s
husband, stayed behind to care care his sick and disabled parents to
try convincing them into leaving the disaster-fated city, before
things became too bad to get out. “When I left I was not overly
worried because evacuations were common. Later, when the levy burst
and the true magnitude of the disaster became apparent, it became the
worst day of my life. I did not know whether my husband had managed
to leave the city or not; I had no idea if he was alive or dead. I
cried and worried all day. “ “Thoughts raced through my head over
and over without the slightest bit of reprieve. I did not know
whether or not I would ever see him again. I had pleaded with him the
Saturday before telling him

' If you have a way to leave
please do so. I don't want to be a widow, do you understand?' That
was all I could think about. I knew my children would be safe with my
parents because they had a car and the means to leave, but he did
not. It was over 2 and a half weeks of hell before I found out he was
safe. The Red Cross called me at 9:30 P.M. on a Friday night and
asked if anyone had told me about my husband yet?”

“Hearing those words, I
thought they were calling to tell me he was dead. The call was to
tell me he was safe, though, and I was frantically running around the
shelter searching for a pen and paper to write down the information
of where he was.” “I had posted on one of the emergency sites
that I was looking for my family, and a couple of days later, a lady
named Lori called to tell me she wanted to help me find them. She
told me to trust her, and she managed to track them to another
shelter. It was a relief to them and to myself knowing, that they
knew I was safe.” “I ended up in Ohio and was later reunited with
my husband and my children. We were faced with the extremely grueling
and harrowing decision of whether to stay in Ohio or to try and
return home to pure demolition.” “I miss the culture, the food,
the music, the entertainment, the sights, the smells, the way people
talk, and the language differences. I miss knowing where things are
like shops, familiar sights, streets, etc.”
“The main
difference culture.” Amanda is in the process of creating a website
dedicated to her home town depicting the sights and sounds of New
Orleans. She says that the site is not finished yet because there are
so many things of which her culture is comprised, which need to be
posted on the site, but when I checked her site out at http://www.theresnoplacelikehome.bravehost.com
there was already a lot of information and photos on it. Amanda
joked, “I miss getting my hamburgers dressed,” That's New Orleans
slang for everything on it. “I gave a speech at School about the
1984World's Fair, which was located in the Central Business District,
the C.B.D., as we call it, and nobody knew what I was talking about.
Someone had to ask me what a C.B.D. Was.”
It is little
things like that which I take for granted because I was so accustomed
to our colloquialisms that I was unaware that not everybody used
them. Often, people struggle to understand what I am saying. For
Instance, we call the area in the middle of the highway lanes the
'Nutragroun' instead of the median.”
The term “Neutral
Ground” came from The Creole people who were selective about who
they allowed to live in the city, and they made the immigrants and
infiltrating Cajuns live across Canal Street. In the middle of Canal
street there was grassy area that never belonged to neither the
Creole people nor the immigrants and Cajuns. On that piece of grass,
which divided canal St. the people of New Orleans could conduct
business trades peacefully. It literally was “ Neutral ground “.

“It's little things like giving directions 'like go across
the neutral ground or saying it's in Jefferson Parish or St. Bernard
Parish, otherwise referred to as 'Da Parish,' etc. People would be
asking me, 'What are you talking about? What do you mean?' That gets
very frustrating. I still want to call counties parishes, and I still
want to say neutral ground, instead of median. And I really want a
Po-Boy, too, DRESSED!”
“In many ways introduced in this
article along with others I still feel so displaced. Part of “ME”
is missing, and sadly I just cannot be myself anymore.” Amanda
requested the article to be tiled, “There's No place like Home –
I am not in Oz Anymore,” because she says The Wizard of Oz is her
favorite movie and the city of New Orleans resembles Oz as it is just
as amusing, adventurous, exciting, loud, colorful, and above all
unique. And if you want to know what a Po-Boy is, go to the website!