My mom and I drove up to New Orleans on Friday, and it took us the better part of a day to get here. When we got closer to Mississippi and Louisiana you could see trees bend over completely, or snapped in half, their sharp tips pointing at the sky, almost as if threatening to poke holes in it. Closer to New Orleans you could see huge business signs bend over, crushing the businesses they used to advertise. Even Wal-Mart had shut down. Old hotels were being used as apartments.

Right now New Orleans has only about a third of its original residents still living, working, and trying to get by. In addition, I haven't seen too many tourists. Walking around, or riding the streetcars, you get the feeling you're in a ghost town. My mom spoke to two gentlemen from the Central Business Guardians. They're basically guys paid for by the City of New Orleans to monitor the area and help tourists and they've been hard at work since Katrina. She told them how we'd come to volunteer and to spend money and they asked her to tell people to come and visit, and that they didn't have to volunteer. They said one tourist told them that her friends thought New Orleans was still under water. Because of all the media imagery of a flooded New Orleans, and the lack of updates on how things really are in New Orleans, it's truly become a city forgotten, forsaken.

Yesterday we went to the Louisiana Children's Museum to help volunteer in the art room and my mom read books at story time. The children's museum has been up and running since June, and has had a good amount of visitors, better than the aquarium down the road. The only thing they haven't gotten up and running is the museum gift shop, and that's only because they haven't found anyone who wants to move to New Orleans to run it. Joanne, who does art education at the museum, moved to New Orleans after Katrina to work at the museum, having previously lived in California. She wanted to help New Orleans in some way.

Most of the people I met have been people who lived in New Orleans their whole life and just had to come back after Katrina, because it's home, because they wanted to rebuild, and because they just felt a strong connection to the city that care forgot. T-shirts in the tourist trap stores echo the bitterness of some residents: Make Levees, Not War; FEMA evacutation plan - run fucker run; FEMA Fix Everything? My Ass!