07:07 PM EST on Thursday, December 1, 2005

Special to projo.com

This morning I stood and watched as about 2,000 people entered the Ninth Ward in New Orleans for the first

time on their own since Hurricane Katrina hit. For the first time they were able to enter what was left

of their homes and try to pick through the pieces of what might be left of their former lives. Only to

discover that was impossible.

There were spectators, of course, myself in a red vest among them. But we were on the outside of these

hundreds of final discoveries.

I didn’t walk with them down mud-caked streets or hold their hands as they entered the unsteady rubble.

That was left to the mental health workers who would open the conversation by offering a cold bottle of

water and end it often with an arm around someone in tears.

What I did was watch as a community limped toward rediscovering itself. The first two hours of the day

were as beautiful as the last two were somber. Shouts of recognition rang out under a white tent where

every organization that has been managing this devastation sat willing to assist. The greatest

assistance, though, seemed to come from the embrace of a neighbor lost for the last 90 days.

“I’ve traveled 1,500 miles for this,” one man said as he hung his arm out the window of a Ford Taurus to

accept an apple from a volunteer.

“How’s your momma doing?” another asked an old friend, and I noted a hint of hesitation before the

question mark, as if this query had caused pain before, yet had to be made.

“She’s good; she’s right over there” was the reply that relieved us all of the burden of sympathy, for

that moment at least.

As we all waited while the television cameras and photographers followed these families into what had been

left in haste or departed from a helicopter, a man began to sing.

This was the first moment since the hurricane hit on Aug. 29 that I have paused long enough to feel enough

to cry.

“I sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free. His eye is on the sparrow so I know He’s watching

me.”

There was no camera as he sang this, standing in line with 100 other people in the between moments before

the loss became concrete. It was an 80-year-old voice I am certain had sung in church choirs and at

bedsides, but never with a biomedical respirator mask slid up to the forehead of its owner.

That song and the tears I finally found after three months of informing everyone of the disaster, of

warning everyone of pending devastation, of pleading with everyone to engage in the recovery, it was that

song that carried me through the afternoon of blank stares upon the return. Of empty rented U-Haul trucks

churning out of the checkpoint, vacant of the memories some had hoped to carry away.

I drove out past the levee that had broken there, now quietly holding back a lake I couldn’t see across.

I ached at the photographs it had drowned and the ceilings so many had lain under that now sunk with the

weight of mold.

I returned from this day when New Orleans’ Ninth Ward was opened with my soul a little more open. Open to

the real impact of a disaster from which I am proud my work has afforded me the chance to provide some bit

of reprieve.

Angie Henderson Moncada is the director of communications at the American Red Cross Rhode Island Chapter.

She is deployed on a Hurricane Katrina relief assignment in New Orleans.