Peggy Severe

"I'm not complaining though. I've got a trailer right outside my house."

She stayed in New Orleans during Katrina. Six hours after the storm had passed through, her family was cooking dinner and cleaning up around the house, when water started to come in under the doorway. Soon enough they were forced to abandon their home. They floated down the street to a neighbor's place while industrial-sized dumpsters floated by. They waited out the flood in the second story of a friend's house.

She didn't have flood insurance, because her house was not in a flood zone. She explained to her insurance company that it was "man's water, not God's water" but they didn't see her point.

She talks about the culture of New Orleans; how everything is a celebration. "You lose your job, and you call up a bunch of friends and say 'Hey - Come over to night, I lost my job and I'm having a repass,' and you all get together and cook and drink." In a few days, the mayor of New Orleans will throw a party to celebrate the anniversary of Katrina. She says "some people wouldn't understand that, but if you're from New Orleans - you know."

One year after Katrina, she is living in a FEMA trailer next to her partially gutted home. She tears up as she shows me all the work that still needs to be done, but regardless, insists that we not rush to work on her house, while there are people out there who haven't been so lucky as to get a trailer. "Some people don't have nowhere to stay at all."