Healing Slowly But Steadily

By LINDSAY PETERSON lpeterson@tampatrib.com

Published: Dec 19, 2005

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is part of an occasional series following four families uprooted by Hurricane Katrina who are trying to build new lives in the Tampa Bay area. Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834.

TAMPA - Arion Landry looks away when she thinks about home, as if she's picturing her family's blue-and-white house in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, before the Mississippi River moved in.

"It was the best house we've ever had," Arion says, in her whispery 13-year-old's voice.

Her new home is a white cinder-block apartment in a Tampa public housing complex, though she stays often with her grandmother in Town 'N Country. Dwan Landry, 29, worries about her daughter.

Losing it all after Hurricane Katrina was hard on her oldest child, a girl with a quiet, watchful manner. "My boys are kids," Dwan says. "But she's more sensitive."

For days after the family arrived in Tampa, after a desperate escape from their flooding city, Arion barely ate. One afternoon, Dwan got a call from the girl's middle school. She wanted her mother. When Dwan arrived, Arion wrapped her arms around her waist and held her like she never wanted to let go.

Dwan was on the verge of a breakdown herself. It had been less than two weeks since flooding from the collapsed New Orleans levees had forced Dwan and her four children into a seven-hour walk to safety.

They pushed through water up to their knees, waists and higher, trying to get to a midtown medical center where Dwan's sister-in-law worked. Dwan and Arion alternated carrying Dwan's youngest, 6-year-old Tyrone. They all made it.

Eventually, Dwan's sister brought them to Tampa, where she and her mother have lived for five years.

Getting Settled

Right away, Dwan enrolled her three boys, Tyrone, Devonte, 8, and D'Jonh, 10, and Arion in the schools near her mother and sister's Town 'N Country house. That was her one comfort as she ran a gantlet of nonprofit and governmental agencies to find health care, clothes, furniture and a home.

She met a lot of generous and helpful people, she says. "They really helped us."

She struggled, though, to find a home she could afford in a secure neighborhood. One afternoon soon after arriving, she sat at her sister's kitchen table, her hands over her face.

"I just want this to be over," she said. "They tell me to call this person and that person and some other person and nobody can tell me anything."

Those were Arion's worst days, too. She couldn't stand what people were saying about New Orleans, that it was flooded and destroyed, and no one would ever live there again. It was the only place she knew.

She clung to the idea that it was all just a weird joke, she said recently over a family dinner. "I thought they were going to tell us that it never really happened and we could all go back."

In the meantime, her mother moved the family into a unit at the housing project North Boulevard Homes in West Tampa. It was the best she could afford on her income.

"I've never lived in a project before," she said. "But I have to look at it from a different aspect. I'm not in a position to turn nothing down.

"I'm just trying to stay calm and keep myself intact. I'm trying to stay settled for my kids."

She doesn't know whom to trust there, she said. She doesn't let her children go outside.

They all talk about the blue-and-white house on Feliciana Street. Dwan says it was a miracle to her when she found it about a year ago for $475 a month.

"There was no hanging, no dudes hanging on the corners. People looked out for each other," Dwan said.

But the house sat on such low ground, it began to fill with water almost as soon as Katrina hit, on Aug. 29. So did the other houses in the neighborhood, now a mud-caked, molding ghost town.

"I know we can't get our life back. It's gone," Dwan said. "New Orleans was our home, and we lost that. We're in a whole other place now, and we're just going to have to live with that."

Accepting Reality

It's not all bad. The children are near their grandmother, Gwen.

"I don't ever want them to go back," Gwen Landry said, especially now that her family members from New Orleans are scattered.

And the children like their schools, which Dwan says are much better than what they had in New Orleans. D'Jonh has been named student of the month at Town and Country Elementary School twice because of his hard work and good behavior.

Devonte, the quietest of Dwan's children, said he likes his math teacher. Tyrone is the most curious, Dwan said. "He's always asking questions. He wants to know everything."

Tampa is already home to the three boys.

It may never be to Arion.

"Sometimes I wake up and I think it was a joke, that it never happened," she said. Then the reality sets in, along with a sad feeling.

She wishes there was a certain place, a city or something, where all the people from New Orleans could go to be together.

What she wants most of all, though, is to have the New Orleans she remembers.

"I think they should build New Orleans back," but this time make it stronger, with better schools, she said. They should fix it so people can come back and be together "and families can be families again."