One year after Hurricane Katrina, a Tulane-turned-West Virginia University student said evacuating New Orleans has taught her lessons in accepting change and facing her problems.
Just days before the hurricane made landfall, Carli Williams, then a freshman, was on her way to move into her residence hall when she was instructed to put her belongings in her dorm room and leave.
People said it was a normal thing to get evacuated for a few days at the beginning of the school year,she said, referring to frequent storms near the Gulf Coast.My mom and I moved my things in and left New Orleans immediately. Luckily we had driven down to see how long the trip was because there were no flights out of the city.
At that point, the interstate was open in both directions. Williams and her mother drove her new roommate to Birmingham, Ala., so she could fly home to Boston.
Williams headed back to West Virginia to wait out the storm and attend classes at WVU on a temporary basis.
Before long, Katrina struck, and as word of the devastation spread, Williams decided to stay at WVU at the urging of her parents.
Today the sophomore from Charleston is renting a house in downtown Morgantown with two of her friends from high school. She is majoring in biology and hopes to someday go to medical school and become a doctor.
Williams has only been back to New Orleans onceto retrieve her belongings two months after the devastation. Returning was bittersweet.
That was the first weekend in November,she recalled.We flew in and out the same day. I did walk around uptown, around campus, and it was a mess. Trash was everywhere. Houses had writing on them. It was really sad. Everything was deserted.
Its weird to watch the news now because a year ago, I was sitting here in Morgantown in a friends dorm room wondering what I was going to do,she said.As the week went on, I kept getting more and more bad news about my first school year. Katrina has helped me learn to accept change and showed me how to deal with problems.
Williams said friends in Morgantown eased her transition to WVU , and she has kept in touch with the student who was supposed to be her roommate at Tulane.
She went back in the spring, and from what I can tell, she loves it,she said.
Williams added,I hope New Orleans can return to normal. I only visited the city twice, and I loved itthe diversity, the people, the food all had an impact on me in the short time I was there. I wouldnt mind living in a city like New Orleans later on or maybe even going to medical school there. I definitely would like a chance to have the experience.
Williams was among tens of thousands of college students displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Other students who temporarily transferred to WVU from schools in the Gulf Coast region were from Xavier, University of New Orleans and Kessler Air Force Base Academy.