It’s only by travelling to the deep south of the US that you can truly understand the carnage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Even now on the second anniversary of the devastating storms there are thousands upon thousands of abandoned homes on silent streets as the Big Easy struggles to get back on its feet.
It has been all but forgotten in Europe. It might even have been forgotten in most of the US but in the scorching heat of Louisiana and her surrounding states it is still a burning and resentful issue.
New Orleans epitomised the American urban sprawl and housed over a quarter of a million residents. Most are still waiting to return.
Over 100,000 residents are still stranded in Texas and tens of thousands are crowded into basic state-owned caravans around the city.
If this wasn’t a famous city in the richest nation on Earth and was instead a scene from the shanty towns of Africa we’d call the survivors refugees.
And that is exactly what they are; make no mistake about it.
The majority of the displaced come from the underclass of American society and nobody in the US wants to talk about it. Why? Because the line between race and class continues to blur as the underclass is virtually always black.
In the past it has been easy for many to simply say, “Out of sight, out of mind”.
Katrina blew this all open. As the crippling footage and pictures from New Orleans burst on to the world’s television screens two years ago it was impossible to not be left dumbfounded that they were being broadcast from the most advanced country in the world.
Those who could leave the city did; the middle class and financially self sufficient left in droves under their own steam.
But many had no choice but to stay.
In Houston and other nearby cities there are swathes of taxi drivers that are recent arrivals from New Orleans, working all hours to return to their loved ones at the weekends with as much money as they can make.
When they get back in the week to earn their paltry salary they are competing for the worst housing. They’re rarely seen in the big city centres and are usually packed into the outlying ghettos.
Initially it was portrayed as a positive move as the big urban centres breathed out to accommodate neighbours who had hit hard times. But this bonhomie is now creaking and, just like in other blighted parts of the world, the “refugees” are struggling to be accepted.
It struck me that, unlike the South East Asian tsunami, the genocide of Darfur or the earthquakes of Indonesia, the aftermath of Katrina has not been revisited and supported.
Whenever there is a natural crisis in the world it is always well portrayed in the media across the UK and Europe.
And yet this natural crisis has been consigned to history and left behind solely because it happened in America. Nobody has helped out and nobody has contributed. Many secretly asked the silent question, “Why should we help? They can handle it themselves.”
Which means that whilst one nation acts alone slowly and unsupported, its people suffer.
Those that I bumped into and met in New Orleans reminded me of the impoverished I have spent time with in Kenya and South Africa. The only difference was that in Africa the Western charities were in full flow.
In the Unites States the situation is more hopeless – there is a strong feeling that their own government has let them down and after that there is no where else to turn.
There is no cavalry arriving.
Surely there is no excuse for this to happen.
This is the First World; there is money, there is democracy, there is knowledge. There should not be suffering on this scale.
