I didn’t really know about it until some of our teachers stopped coming to school. Then my classmates started talking about where they were going for evacuations and things like that. And I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t really know nothing about it. One of my classmates, this boy, he was saying he was going to Texas. Others were saying they were going to California. And some of them were just like me–clueless. They didn’t know where they were going. My mom wasn’t really talking to me about it. She talked to my uncle, my aunts, and my grandmother, but not to me. I was just listening. The next day, they told us not to come to school, and that’s when it really knocked me in the head. So when I came home from school I just asked my mom, what are we going to do for Hurricane Katrina, because it’s like, a big one.

Later that same day, we were at my grandmother’s apartment watching the news. She stayed off Crowder Boulevard. It was me, my older sister, my brother, my mom, my uncle and my other grandmother. We were all in that apartment talking about what we were going to do, and nobody really knew. Because my mom was saying that she had to go to work. She was a phlebotomist at Methodist Hospital. They take your blood and send it off to see if you have any sickness or disease or anything like that. She was required to show up for work. They said all the hospital workers had to come to work. On the news they were saying that this one could be a big hurricane, and that we had to evacuate immediately. It was an emergency alert. So we were like, we can’t just evacuate and leave mom here.

That Saturday is when they said it was going to be a category five hurricane. Mayor Ray Nagin was on TV, and he was talking about how this one could really damage New Orleans and stuff, unless it turns around. He said we might get the eye of the storm, and I didn’t know what to think. I was just thinking, I really don’t want to go through this right now, but it’s happening, and I can’t really do nothing about it. So I just wasn’t worried about it. I was just going along with whatever happened.

I wanted to leave but I couldn’t. My great grandmother had taken my sister to Atlanta. I wanted to stay with my mom so I didn’t go, plus they didn’t have enough room in the car for me because all those other people were going. And at the time I was okay because I was going to be with my mom and my other family members so it wasn’t bothering me that much. Me and my sister are pretty close and I was crying a little bit when she left for Atlanta, but I had to get over it.

That Saturday evening, we were just waiting on the adults to make a decision. My mom had to go to work at Methodist Hospital. She could bring family members into the hospital with her, so my mom brought in all of our family members who didn’t evacuate. It was my uncle, his three children, my grandmother, my grandfather, my aunt, her two children, me, my brother, and my stepdad. We all went with my mom when she went to work. My uncle’s wife had to work also, so she had to stay at her job and we said we’d meet up with her after whatever happened. Methodist Hospital is in New Orleans East, off Read Boulevard. When we left for the hospital, it was sunny outside. I didn’t really believe a storm was coming.

We brought about five days worth of clothes with us, and my mom told me I could bring one toy, so I brought my Dora the Explorer doll. I love Dora. Her hair grows, so I was playing with her hair to keep me occupied and so I wouldn’t get on the adults’ nerves. When we first got to the hospital, we were on the first floor, because they had to get everyone situated with their rooms. So we went into our room and put our things down. It wasn’t really a room. It was like an extra space in the hospital where we could sleep. And they gave us covers and things like that. I was really trying not to think about anything so I wouldn’t be scared or nervous.

The hospital was big. It had like five or six floors and it had a rooftop and a chapel. The first day we could watch TV. We saw how the storm came through Florida and how it was getting close to New Orleans. At that time I was feeling sad, but I really wasn’t keeping my mind on it too much. I was worried about my sister and them because I knew they were on the road. We played most of the time until they served us dinner in the cafeteria. Then we went to sleep.

Sunday morning we ate breakfast in the cafeteria. It was like seven o’clock in the morning and I could really see what was happening outside because the cafeteria was on the first floor. At that time I was really tired because I didn’t get a good sleep. I had to sleep on the floor. I did notice that things were getting bad outside, but I wasn’t really thinking. I was sitting right by the window until they told me I had to move away from the window. The storm was coming through. It was raining and stuff was blowing. It was gray outside. Things were flying around, like it really wasn’t debris, but you could see how it was starting to form. And water was on the ground. So they started sandbagging the doors on the first floor, and they moved some of us to the second floor and some of us to the fourth floor. There wasn’t enough room for everybody to fit on the second floor. I was on the fourth floor with my mom, my stepdad, my cousin and my brother. We went to the second floor to see my uncle and to play with the babies. We recorded them with the camera phone, and my cousin, he had a Nintendo game so we played with that until the batteries ran out.

My mom was working and she was pretty much gone the whole time. Her supervisor kept asking my stepdad, my uncle, and my grandpa to do a lot of things to help out. They brought our lunch to our rooms. We had a half of a sandwich, an orange, and some water. The babies were doing good. The doctors were bringing them formula and diapers. Sunday night wasn’t really that bad. You could hear things roaring, and stuff blowing against the windows and the walls. We were just waiting it out. Nobody was panicking. I slept okay Sunday night.

On Monday morning, big things started happening. They brought us our half sandwich, orange and water. On the second floor, there was a humongous window that goes across the whole floor, and that just shattered. We heard it on the fourth floor. It went Ka-bow! That’s when they moved everybody who was on the second floor to the fourth floor. We were all bunched up in one room but we were in the hallway too. Then the storm really started coming and the windows started breaking on the fourth floor. Stuff was flying in on us. I really got scared when a cat flew through the window. We were in the hallway and wood was flying in, and then the cat flew in. It was black. It just flew through the window and landed in the water on the floor. It just went, “Meow! Meow! Meow!” And then it died.

After all that happened, the storm passed through and it was sunny. And that’s what I didn’t understand because it was about an hour or so later and it just became sunny. The sun was out and everything. We still had electricity because we were on a generator. We didn’t have air conditioner so it was really hot.

The levees must have broke on Monday, because by Tuesday morning, they were loading people onto helicopters. They were getting all the really sick people out. The lights went out because both generators had broken. The people on oxygen and other machines were dying without electricity so they started flying them out by helicopter. My mom was telling my grandmother all of this and I was listening because I wanted to know. I heard first that they were getting the pregnant women out on helicopters and taking them to other hospitals. Then I heard they were putting the dead people on the helicopters. The people on oxygen and other life support were dying right after each other, so they loaded them on helicopters and took them somewhere.

At that time I was thinking mostly about the dead people. The men had to take out these loads of dead people on carrying things like the things in a hotel that you put all your stuff on when you go to your room. They were taking dead people out on those and taking them up to the roof where the helicopters were. My uncle and my grandpa had to go help load dead people onto the carrying things. I tried not to think about it. There were actually two roofs, one where the helicopters landed and one off of the fourth floor. Everybody had cell phones so the doctors and other people were trying to get a cell phone signal on the roof. Some of them got a signal and were able to call out. We called my great grandmother and my sister to see where they were.

From the roof all I could see was green water. And I could see cars floating. The water was almost to the second floor. It was flowing and I could see the cars flowing. I saw lots of cars. I was like, I can’t believe this. It shocked my mind. At one point I thought I was dreaming. But then I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I just had to stay calm because I didn’t know what else I would have to go through. My mom was not panicking. She was calm most of the time, and that’s what kept me calm.

Tuesday night was just a regular night for me. My brother was playing with my cousin who’s a boy, and I was playing with my girl cousin and playing with the babies. My uncle had two blow-up mattresses that he brought with him to the hospital, and we were lying on one of them. We slept in the hallway.

On Wednesday morning, that’s when all the water started flowing in. It got past the second floor and we were thinking it was almost covering the third floor, and getting near us on the fourth. When I looked outside I could see the water rising, rising, and rising. There were army trucks and boats outside in the water. They were trying to get everybody to move up and up as the water moved up and up. I really couldn’t think about it, because I didn’t want to panic, and I didn’t want to cry. Something told me, don’t cry. Half of me wanted to, but I just couldn’t.

I feared for my life when the water came. We moved to the roof and we were playing games and stuff like that. The women were helping my mom out. The men were helping out the army men once the water started flowing in. They gave us army food for our next meal. It’s the food that you make in a pack, and it just heats up by itself. We had to share and I was sharing with my cousin. We had teriyaki something. It was kind of good, but it wasn’t really something I would normally eat. It was something I had to eat. My mom had red beans for her army food so I was eating off of hers. The army men gave my uncle snack foods for us. I think the helicopter brought in a lot of snack food and since my uncle was out there helping, he just grabbed a lot of snacks for us.

By Thursday morning, the toilets weren’t working, so we had to use the bathroom in a bag. A toxic waste bag. We had tissue. To brush our teeth and wash our faces we had to use bottled water. One gallon would wash a lot of people, so we had towels and we just washed off and put on different underwear. I was mostly thinking, I can’t believe this is happening. But then I was trying not to think. I just went along with the flow.

There was a man walking around outside. The army people tried to get him because he was going crazy or something. He was looking for his cat. And they were trying to help him. They told him he could stay in the hospital, but he didn’t want to stay. He wanted to do whatever he had to do to find his cat. So he just walked off and they had to let him go, because they were trying to help him, but he didn’t want to be helped.

There were a lot of people on the fourth floor. We were stretched in a large circle. One half of the hallway was our family and the other half was the families of other hospital staff. The adults were talking about what they were going to try to do. When I went to sleep that Thursday night, I said my prayers like I did every night. They would make all the children say their prayers first, then the adults would say their prayers.

Friday morning, they held a church mass in the chapel on the roof. Most people were taking it hard, and they were crying and stuff like that. I wasn’t crying. I was just praying that it would be over with. We were wondering why nobody had come to rescue us. It was getting to be lunchtime so we ate.

Later that evening, that’s when everything started happening. The helicopters came and that’s when they really started to help us. We were trying to figure out which ones of us were going to get on which helicopters and we were trying not to be split up.

The helicopter was big. It was just hovering over the roof. Everything was blowing, and I couldn’t really walk nowhere because when I was walking to the helicopter, there was a whole line of tables, twelve tables, with dead people on them. They were covered in blankets. The only thing I could see was their feet and their arms. They didn’t really look like dead people to me. They looked like regular people, but I was trying not to look at them as I got on the helicopter.

I was scared to get on the helicopter. It was blue. The captain was giving us instructions as we were getting on. He said they couldn’t really land it, and that we had to be really careful when we got on. There were three guys from the helicopter on the roof with us and they helped us get on. I had never seen a helicopter that close up before. I was thinking I hope I’ll be able to see my family again because we were split up.

They helped us get on and then they told us where to sit to balance it out. It was scary, but I had said my prayers so all I could do was leave it in God’s hands. Plus I had my Dora. I kept her with me everywhere I went. I had never been on a plane or a helicopter. We weren’t strapped in or anything. I was sitting on the floor. My grandmother was with me. She had the three-month-old baby in her hands. She was sitting on a little seat. Because they had like a little seat that four people could sit on and she was sitting up there with my aunt and her other baby. My grandpa, me, and my cousin was sitting on the floor with people from another family. My mom wasn’t with me. She was with the other group. That made me feel sad, because we were going in different directions, and we didn’t know where we were going. And my mom kept asking before we got on the helicopter, “Where are we going? Are we going to be able to meet up with our family members?” Nobody could answer, because they didn’t know.

The men on the helicopter were really nice. They were mostly cracking jokes for the children so we could feel okay. They were saying stuff like, “Hold on tight, because we might fall into the water,” but then they would laugh. They were trying to make it fun for us so we wouldn’t feel sad. Me and my cousin were just playing. It felt so good to be in the air and out of the hospital. When the helicopter took off, it just flowed. We had a couple of twists and turns but then we just flowed. We were up really high. I couldn’t see anything because they wouldn’t let us look down. I was just trying to get out of there because I didn’t want to see any more dead bodies. When we first got on the helicopter the blades were twirling so they had people holding down the blankets on the dead people. I wasn’t trying to see any more of that. Besides we were sitting on the floor, and the window was so high. I was trying to peek and see, but I couldn’t.

The weather was clear. It was like a regular night, but there was water on the ground. It was dark, but there was light in the helicopter. Me and my cousin, we were like, “This flows so nice, we could stay on here forever.” But then we had to get off of it. We landed at the Kenner Airport, and there were buses coming and other helicopters, so we had to get off really, really fast.

We saw more dead bodies when we walked into the airport. They were covered up. There were also lots of cots filled with old people, and they looked like they were really hurting. They must have been saved from the hospitals because they were just lying there talking and moaning. I really wasn’t trying to look at it but it was everywhere. We got to a corner and we just made ourselves a spot right there. I was panicking because my grandmother is a diabetic and she didn’t know what she was going to eat. Then she found a little microwavable thing so she ate that. We just sat there until it was time to go to sleep.

My grandma saw lots of friends from work. And one lady had just come from the Superdome. She was like one out of a million people who got on a bus to come to the airport from the Superdome with her daughter. And she was telling us how it was in the Superdome, how it was so horrible. She was saying how people were raping little girls and how you really didn’t have anything to eat in there. She said there was a leak in the roof and that she feared for her daughter’s safety. She thought somebody was going to rape her or something. She said she had to lie to get on the bus to the airport. She has asthma so she started wheezing and stuff like that, trying to make it seem like she was really having an asthma attack. That’s how they let her get on the bus with her daughter.

I had to sleep with what they gave us, these little sheet things. My grandfather made a little bed for us. He had cardboard for both me and my cousin, and he took his jeans and a lot of those cover things and he put them on the cardboard so we could be comfortable. And we slept on that with a blanket he took from the hospital. He let us cover up with that. My grandmother, my grandfather and his daughter didn’t even sleep, but the children did.

The morning was okay, but we were still trying to find my mommy. In the morning we had something to eat and they were giving away donuts and milk and orange juice and stuff like that. So me and my brother got two donuts and orange juice and my grandmother got muffins. It was okay, until we got in a line for something. It was a long line. They must have been giving people airline tickets or something. The line was downstairs all the way upstairs. We were in that line when we saw my mommy, and we were able to hug and stuff. They were coming from another airport in the East. They decided not to stay there because the policemen had guns, so they got on the next helicopter to come to the Kenner airport and we just happened to see them.

My grandmother and grandfather told my mom what was going on so we got back in line. My stepdad at that time knew a lot of people who worked at the airport. He started seeing his friends who worked at the airport. They were letting us skip, and we were just moving on up and it was going so fast that we were already up there. It was time for us to get on a plane, and we flew to San Antonio. I slept through the whole thing. When I woke up we were landing. Well, when we first got on the plane they took all our luggage and stuff and put it in trash bags. We didn’t know which stuff was ours, but I knew which stuff was ours because I still had my Dora. They gave us a bag to put all our stuff in so I said, I’m going to know which one is mine because I had my Dora in there. So when we landed I got my Dora out and we got on a bus.

It was daytime on a Sunday. They brought us somewhere on the bus. We didn’t want to stay there because they locked us in there and we couldn’t go anywhere. So when we got there, my mom was like “We’re not staying here because we just finished being locked up in a hospital.” There were cabs all around there so we got in a minivan cab. My uncle had money and all of his credit cards, and we told the man to take us to the nearest hotel. We got two hotel rooms, right next door to each other. My aunty rented a van and we got something to eat and we just stayed there that night until that morning. It felt good to take a real bath and to eat something kind of decent. We ate KFC, and boy did we chow down on that food! We were watching the news and they were talking about the hurricane and how people were scattered all over the place.

That morning we had to wake up early. I have an aunt in Dallas so we drove all the way to Dallas. But before we went to Dallas we had gone to a supermarket, and the supermarket was so nice to us. We told them we were from Hurricane Katrina and they brought us to the top of the store and they fed us anything we wanted. All the children got anything out of the store we wanted. We got food, we got to watch movies, and after that we got back in the car and rode to Dallas. My stepdad used to live in Dallas so he knew everywhere to go. When we got to Dallas, my grandmother and grandfather rented a hotel room and the rest of us stayed at my aunt’s house. And after that, everything just started happening, like my aunt was getting mad that we were staying there so we left. We found an apartment in Dallas. I don’t think we paid for the apartments. We got three. So right after that my uncle was still trying to get in touch with his wife so after that she met us in Dallas.

We stayed in Dallas for a year. I started school there. Not immediately. The school was right down the street. They treated us special. And right after me, there were other children who came after the hurricane and we became friends with them. The school was nice. The teachers were so nice to us especially Mr. Dixon. He was like the school coordinator and he was so nice. He was good friends with my mom and my uncle. For my mom and my uncle’s birthday he took us to eat at one of the finest restaurants in Dallas. And he did a lot for other families. For Mardi Gras, the whole school had to make floats and they had a whole parade and it was just like Mardi Gras, but in Dallas. The high school students had problems because the Texas children didn’t like our cousins and the other kids who evacuated from Katrina. And there were a lot of fights going on. I didn’t really have problems because everybody really liked me. But my cousins couldn’t walk home by themselves because they didn’t know who would come after them.

When I think about Katrina, I think about seeing the dead bodies. When I watched the movie When the Levees Broke, and I saw the dead bodies and stuff like that, I couldn’t fall asleep. When I finally did fall asleep, I would wake up, and I would see the same dead bodies I saw in the movie. Then I couldn’t get back to sleep again. I also think about having to be brave for my little brother. He would come to me crying and sad, and I would tell him, it’s going to be okay.