A Student's Promise to New Orleans:
We'll Be Back to Make it Even Better
Enrique Quevedo     [Photo]

It seems like yesterday that I was moving into my freshman-year dorm at Loyola University in New Orleans, meeting my roommate for the first time, studying, pledging for a fraternity and — you can be sure — partying.

But wasn't it just yesterday that I also was moving into my sophomore year apartment?

Did a year go by that fast?

Or was it just yesterday that my roommate was waking me, shouting that Hurricane Katrina was hitting the city hard and we had to evacuate?

In fact, it has been three months since we fled New Orleans. Having to run for our lives caused me to look back on how I changed while living there, and how the city and its people helped me along that path.

New Orleans became my home away from home. Everything seemed to fall into place for me. Unlike Miami where I grew up, no one in New Orleans was so concerned about their looks, their car, or their "connections" at the latest and supposedly greatest South Beach Club.

Instead, I found great comfort in their honesty and straightforwardness, their capacity to interact with others with respect and be more responsible and mature.

Since leaving New Orleans, I have seen unending CNN footage of a once-alive city becoming the nation's newest large lake.

Is it true, as news commentators argued, that everything I had come to love in my new city might disappear forever?

Perhaps the city's future is not so in doubt as they think. I will move back in January, and together with everyone else coming home, we'll lend the needed helping hand to pull New Orleans back and make it even better.

(Enrique Quevedo, 21, attends Loyola University New Orleans. He is a reporting intern at Hispanic Link News Service while attending fall semester at American University in Washington. D.C. He may be reached by e-mail at efquevedo@bellsouth.net)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
12/04/05
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