Francisco and I arrived in New Orleans a week ago, the plan being to get to know the city a bit before he started volunteering with Culinary Corps and before I began writing about the Corps' work. The Culinary Corps is a group of professional chefs who volunteer their skills to participate in community building efforts, particularly in areas that are recovering from natural disasters.

On our first night here, I wrote about walking the streets of New Orleans. "It's easy enough," I wrote, "to think that everything is normal."

But then we took the disaster tour.

Day one of the Culinary Corps included an orientation and a guided van ride through the Lower and Upper Ninth Wards, the neighborhoods which were decimated when the levees broke. Ashley Graham, the Louisiana director of Share Our Strength, pointed out that the floodplain just outside the levee wall had once been dotted with houses. Now, I noticed, you could just see concrete foundations barely visible in the tall grass and weeds. 

Ashley explained what no news story had mentioned: family roots in the Ninth Ward are set deep. Many residents are long-time homeowners; many houses are homes to people who aren't just neighbors--they're kin. Though making a home in the floodplain of the gargantuan Lake Pontchartrain seems unimaginable to many people who don't live in hurricane-prone areas, the long history of the Ninth Ward--not to mention economic constraints--made it hard for people to leave.

Those who did leave, though, lost almost everything, coming home to houses "tattooed" with spray paint, indicating the date of search, the unit that performed the search, the number of dead people inside, and any major health threats, the most common being TFW: toxic flood water. Services in this community were largely non-existent and are still struggling to reopen their doors.

The Ninth Ward residents who came back are trying to sand off the tattoos or paint over them, are building new homes on the raw concrete slabs, or are living in the formaldehyde-ridden FEMA trailers that have become the latest post-Katrina trauma. Freshly renovated homes sparkle next to homes with broken windows, where clothes hang in abandoned closets and mosquitoes breed in bathtubs filled with scummy water. It's hard to imagine how difficult it must be to come back here... and just as hard to imagine not coming back at all.

The tour is sobering, of course, not the least reason being that the devastation still visible here in the Ninth Ward, almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, reminds us how inadequate our government was--and still is-- in responding to communities in such profound need. Yet Ashley leaves us with some stories that affirm how amazing we can be with one another. In late 2006, executives from the shoe company, Timberland, decided to support New Orleans by holding their semi-annual meeting in the city. Touring the Ninth Ward, one employee asked community members what they needed most. A man replied that winter was closing in, and many residents had no coats or shoes. The employee silently took off his shoes and placed them on the ground. His colleagues did the same, and the Timberland employees boarded their bus and returned to their hotel in their socks.

It's what we came here for, too: to ask "How can we help?," and then, without talk, to step up and just do the work.