Every member of my family was displaced by Katrina.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When Katrina hit, my family lost everything - their homes, jobs, friends - and then it was a ripple effect, as so many others attached to them were affected. I had to come up with $12,000 per month to take care of everyone.
After Katrina, no one was the same. People, relatives, they were dying one after another.
The reality of Katrina didn't really strike me until the first time I flew up in a helicopter and saw areas of the city that I had ridden my bicycle as a youth being fully flooded.
I am very aware that there are many of you who have friends and loved ones in the areas affected by this storm who have been displaced or who have not yet been accounted for.
There are more than 300,000 families in the Gulf region that lost their homes and are waiting for peace of mind. The hurricane exposed the sad reality of poverty in America. We saw, in all its horrific detail, the vulnerabilities of living in inadequate housing and the heartbreak of losing one's home.
My last trip to New Orleans was for the fifth anniversary of Katrina, and I had the awesome opportunity to bring my family down. We all worked on a house together and met some of the families.
A good two years after Hurricane Katrina I remember feeling so devastated and so ignorant that there was so much damage still left. I felt like here I was an American and this is an American city and the government hasn't done enough and people haven't given back enough. Everyone forgot and the city was lying in waste.
I've been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.
What happened after Katrina is that people were stirred to action; there were an enormous number of contributions by people trying to make a difference. But then we forget. We've forgotten Katrina victims, we've forgotten the face of poverty.
We have thousands of patients and family members who are dealing with dual devastation, cancer and the hurricane.
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