I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to find pictures of my time in New Orleans. Some tangible way of confirming into my own mind that I was actually there, and while I see corners of the city that are familiar to me, I know it is simply not the same place. But the people are the same. I see their faces daily on the news and in the paper. I actually was in New Orleans for only a week, but it was perhaps one of the single most life-changing events of my life, because within that city is something different than any other place in the world.

For me it was walking down the narrow allies of the French Quarter, the open-air cafes where live jazz seeped into your food and into your bloodstream and became a part of you. Then, transversely it was walking through some of the worst poverty I’d ever experience on American soil.

The fact of the matter is, close to 28% of the people in New Orleans and the surrounding areas are living below the standard of poverty. It was bad when I was there. House after house, with notices in the window that the home was no longer inhabitable because it was no longer structurally sound or a had become a health hazard, and house after house siezed by the bank, families turned out into the street with no further options but to move on, which in most cases meant moving in with their neighbors. And the school I worked in, surrounded by a razor wire fence and a sign that stated “This is a weapon-free school.” A single working toilet for 500 students? It sounds ludocris, and then you see that that working toilet is a breeding ground for maggots and other disease-bearing parasites. The text books hadn’t been updated since the late eighties, and the children who were left with rotten teeth, were also left with gaps in their education that meant the cycle of poverty was meant to continue. Their eyes are the same, gaunt yet vibrant– living reminders of a living, breathing city of have and have-nots.

I feel great loss, as an American, for the city of New Orleans– a place of great contrast, humid-heat, and the birthplace for the reawakening of spirits in peri, great American literature, jazz music. But what will be left when the water sheds away? I want to be there. I want to bail buckets of water on my own to give the cobbled-streets the air again… But so much death? To see the American Soldiers landing on American soil in such a manner– it is a mark of my generation. But one thing is certain in my mind. The hellish trademarks of this experience will never leave the city. It will be a scar. The children of New Orleans, both young and old, who have found shelter in other cities will likely never return to New Orleans.

And perhaps in this, there is a cleansing. But in this, there is also the death of something legendary that I was lucky enough to see before its fall. But there is a spiritual reckoning to this situation that few people have figured into the costs of rebuilding (if it happens) or moving the city. New Orleans itself is a spirit. If anything, it is a spirit destined to haunt.