Girl, you make me feel like a model!

This is Danielle, the night clerk at the Prytania Park Hotel. As I was checking in, I asked her what she's heard about the storm in the northeast, and that led to her telling me her Katrina story. She lost everything. Everything. She was living with her grandma when the storm hit, and they all had to start all over, but they're fine now, thanks. "You want to take my picture? Well, sure." And then, "Girl, you make me feel like a model, I'm gonna have to call my daughter and tell her we had a guest snapping pictures of me just like I was a model."

I knew I was in New Orleans when I climbed into the taxi and the 69-year-old African-American woman driver asked me, "Where you goin, dawlin?"

On the way into town, she told me her Katrina story. She owned her own home in New Orleans East, and the whole neighborhood was completely under water. "We had got out the day before it hit. We went up to Jackson, Mississippi and stayed in a hotel for the first two nights, and then when we heard our whole neighborhood was under water, we went over to Natchez, to some family members of a friend of mine, and they took us in for a couple of weeks while we tried to make sense of it all. Then we rented us a place in Natchez, because FEMA was slow, you know. I mean they were REAL slow. Years it took. I'm tellin you, darlin. Years. But we rebuilt, and now I got my house, and it's in better shape than it was to start with, and I got new furniture. So in a way, in the long run, it was a blessing. You could look at it that way. There's always several ways to look at anything that comes to you, and me, I like to look at it the brightest way possible.

"Now my mama, she died angry. Cause she lost her house in the storm, and one of these young bloods from the neighborhood, we knew him since he was born, we watched him take his first steps, what do you think he did? He claimed he lived at my mama's address, and he got FEMA to pay him $10,000, so by the time her claim got in, they told her they had already paid it, to this young man. And she told them, 'I know that boy, but he didn't live in my house. He was a neighbor boy.' But they told her he got the $10,000, so she'd have to chase after him. And they gave her something like $4000, and she said she was gonna file charges against him, she wanted to prosecute him to the full extent, and she wasn't thinking about his family, she was thinking about her $10,000! And she talked to him, and he just laughed it off, told her to her face, 'Well, it's gone now. Sorry about that.' And I think that's part of what killed her."

The driver's name is Diane. I had been thinking I would ask if I could take a picture of her, but as we got to the hotel she told me I was her last fare of the day, and she was tired. Her feet were hurting. So I didn't ask her for a picture. I give you Danielle instead. But they are both so wonderful I have tears of joy in my eyes just from talking with them.

Oh yes, I am back in New Orleans. Smiling, happy, and tired. No comments tonight, but I'll leave my comments on just in case you want to talk among yourselves about these wonderful women of New Orleans.