This week has been so much fun so far! Certain places in the city look a lot different than they did two years ago. My favorite thing to do during my first trip to New Orleans was to listen to the stories of the people who survived Katrina. We got to hear one of those stories yesterday and I wanted to share it with all of you. We met this guy called Dingo . (Wearing red in the picture above) He works with the youth in a section of the city as a part of Castle Rock church's ministry to the people of New Orleans. Dingo became a Christian because he was influenced by the other Christians that he played basketball with at Castle Rock. He was seventeen when the storm hit the city. As usual when hurricanes hit this area, he and his family bunkered down in their house, lit candles, and told stories of years past. he was in high school at the time and after the initial storm hit he went back to school. He heard out on the streets that the levy had broken. Being seventeen years old, he didn't really understand the implications of this. He went home and told his mom what he had heard. Dingo's mom said that they needed to go to his aunt's house a couple blocks away. Dingo told us that the water didn't break the levy dramatically like you see on tv and in movies all the time. He said that only pieces of the levy broke and that the water rose very gradually. His mom got drunk at her sister's during that time and told him that she wanted to go home. He walked her home through water that was five feet high at the time. He couldn't stay there with her and he couldn't get her to leave the house so he and his aunt and sister went to the Superdome. He described some of the conditions of that to us but if I go into that now this will end up being too long. They then were shipped off to Texas where they expected to be housed in an apartment or something. Instead they were put into conditions even worse and more cramped than the Superdome was. Fortunately, they had enough money with them that they were able to stay in a hotel until they could get out of the state. To make things short (sorry!) all three of them returned home and he was reunited with his mom. He was not able to graduate from high school due to circumstances that I can't go into now. However, he applied to a Bible college in California and was able to go because his pastor, because of God's help, found the money for him to go.
There is a lot more to Dingo's story so I will try to get someone else to write about it at some point. We all really appreciate all of your support and prayers and are looking forward to coming home and sharing our abundance of stories of this trip with you. Thanks!!
- Erin Porter