Frontline Photo:Armed with a new sense of belonging, the Versailles Vietnamese returned just six weeks after Katrina to begin rebuilding. By January 2006, more than half the community had returned, and the rest of the City began to take notice.
YouTube says this Al-Jazeera video isn't available to embed, though the service claims it'll give easy access to Al Jazeera in English. That you have to click a link, though, doesn't change the value of the reporting -- go watch it, and it'll remind you -- again -- why the Bush administration hated Al Jazeera so much.
It will also show you one part of New Orleans' drowned Ninth Ward making a comeback in spite of, rather than helped by, the governments of the city, parish, state, and nation -- a community in far better shape than many.
Indeed, it wasn't just the hurricane they had to overcome: it was a toxic waste dump the City of New Orleans located in their neighborhood.
Frontline Photo: In early February 2006, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin signed an executive order permitting the dumping of Katrina debris at the landfill, located less than two miles from Versailles.
There's a PBS documentary for Independent Lens, "A Village Called Versailles," you should also see. A community of immigrants, many of whom had come to the US as refugees from the Vietnam War, simply didn't accept that their homes, their businesses, and their community weren't worth saving, points out NOLa's own Times-Picayune.
Perhaps this is the Village Called Versailles we should all respect, if not actively emulate, eh?
Rick Weil, "Father Vien with Recovery Plan." Katrina's Jewish Voices, Object #2196 (September 01 2009, 12:41 pm)
Refusing to give in, refusing to give up, refusing to be beaten. Read below the fold...
