HA ha...
Posted on 09/15/2005 5:41:57 PM PDT by Chi-townChief
Vanessa Stephenson knows what it's like to be treated like an animal.
The 26-year-old spent one horrible day in the New Orleans Superdome, ducking from gunfire and trudging through a ground caked with human waste and garbage.
"The whole ground smelled like a sewer," she said.
And that was the situation outside.
Inside, the sports arena was looted and mostly abandoned by the time Stephenson evacuated it over a week ago.
"When you walked in, you could smell the bathroom," she said.
She went into a bathroom, a towel over her face to block the stench. Still, her eyes watered from the fetid conditions, preventing her from using the facilities.
But as tough as she had it, many others were worse off.
After living in New Orleans for two years, Stephenson, now staying with her family in Park Forest, returned with stories of her experience surviving Hurricane Katrina and a new outlook on life.
"Material things are not important to me anymore," she said. "I'm happy to come back and be with my mom. I want to do things I used to never think of to show her I love her."
Stephenson heeded directions to evacuate New Orleans before the storm, but her car broke down on her way out of the city.
She grabbed a backpack with some clothes, books, a cell phone and toothbrush and took off to a friend's place for safety.
She stayed with Antoinette, widow of Ernie K-Doe, a well-known R&B musician, at Ernie K-Doe's Lounge, a historical landmark of sorts in New Orleans.
Antoinette had just opened a food bank and business, so food and water were plentiful, Stephenson said.
Neighbors located a boat, and Stephenson went with to be rescued.
Antoinette stayed behind to defend her husband's legacy, despite Stephenson's pleas.
She's not worried about Antoinette, though.
"Antoinette is alive, because she is a survivor, and she could take on the National Guard if she wanted to. Antoinette has an arsenal of weapons and she will use them," Stephenson said.
The people she is worried about are the thousands left behind who aren't getting much help from the government.
"We didn't have proper assistance, and we still need it," she said, criticizing the government for taking so long to send help.
"I think it's horrible the way they treated the population. I think it was a racial issue, and I'm not even black."
Stephenson wants people to be held accountable for the slow reaction to the devastation.
"I hope the country learns that the current administration needs to be put under the spotlight as much as the previous administration was for personal affairs," she said.
At the Superdome, the strongest pushed their way to the front of the line to get on buses to take them to safety.
There was no order, no medicine.
"It was like an abandoned building with a bunch of uncontrolled people," she said.
The "line" to get on buses and leave the Superdome was more like a mass of people.
"It was worse than cattle in the slaughterhouse. I felt I was in a Nazi Germany gas chamber, waiting to die," Stephenson said.
"Ninety-nine percent of the people were nice and civilized. There was a small percent already criminally minded," she said.
"People shot guns. We'd all be standing, and someone would yell, 'Get down! Someone has a gun!' and they'd shoot a couple times," she said.
Death was all around.
"A lot of babies and little children were dying, and elderly people with medical conditions, anyone with medical conditions," Stephenson said.
One woman had an oxygen tank and made her way to the front of the line with her two young sons.
The armed guards said she could leave to seek medical attention, but the boys would have to stay behind. The mother, refusing to abandon her sons, returned to her spot in the back of the line, Stephenson said.
People needed insulin, others fell into seizures and more succumbed to heat stroke, she said.
When Stephenson finally made it to the front of the line, she told the guards that there should be a separate line for the elderly, sick and women with children.
Some guards showed sympathy but were bound by orders on how to handle the crowd. Others stood, arms crossed, stone-faced behind sunglasses.
Stephenson took a bus to Houston, Texas, but was diverted to San Antonio, where she briefly stayed with an aunt, a colonel in the Air Force who was deployed in Iraq but was brought back to help with the hurricane relief effort.
Stephenson finally made her way back to the Chicago area where she grew up.
But the images haunt her.
A woman screamed for help for her two sick children. A woman in her 80s was faint and sweating. She hadn't had insulin in five days.
Stephenson gave all her water to infants having asthma attacks.
"I thought I wasn't going to make it out … whoever gives orders, I felt they were inciting a riot the way they were responding to the situation, and it would make people very angry," she said.
But there was a point at the Superdome when Stephenson knew she was going to survive the devastation.
"When I was in the Superdome, I was terrified most of the time, but there was one moment when a little baby looked at me and smiled, and I got this feeling inside me that I was going to make it," she said.
Now in the safety of her family's Park Forest home, Stephenson has nothing.
She has no car, no clothes for her petite size 0 frame, nothing.
"I just have nothing," she said. "I'm starting over."
In New Orleans, she studied music composition and education at the University of New Orleans. She recently registered for late classes at Prairie State College.
Despite the horrors she left behind, Stephenson plans to return to New Orleans.
Before she goes, she's going to enjoy her time in the Chicago area.
"I try to live like this could be my last day, and things that people say they're going to do tomorrow, I'm going to do today," she said.
Stephenson calls New Orleans home after living there for two years. She wants to go back as soon as possible, maybe within a month.
"The people of New Orleans are very resilient," she said. "This is all going to pass over, and we're going to go home and build our lives."
Vanessa Renderman may be reached at vrenderman@starnewspapers.com or (708) 802-8812.
Stephenson wants people to be held accountable for the slow reaction to the devastation.
"I hope the country learns that the current administration needs to be put under the spotlight as much as the previous administration was for personal affairs," she said.
You have to wonder: I would bet that either this babe is on someone's payroll reciting the words fed to her or the reporter prods her into saying something nasty.
Faster than Hugo
Faster than Ivan
What part of Blanco and Nagin do people not understand???
ONE MORE PING
Or she knows enough about America today that there might be a book/movie deal lurking in the shadows like the speaking deal DitchWitch Cindy just secured.
You are, of course, talking about your state and local administrations, correct? After all, they're the ones who screwed up and let you down. You do realize that, don't you?
Well, they say you can't be too rich or too thin.
Is anyone else watching this Steaming Pile of Bias on ABC. There's a reason I don't watch TV anymore. It's pinning everything on the Feds. No Mention of the Nagin Bus debacle. Blanco's blocking the Red Cross. Her failure to use the National Guard, etc, etc, etc. Disgusting!
Only in a Liberal paper.
What does this have to do with anything?
This entire article is so poorly written, and the dumb girl has a hard time with grammar.
Bless her heart, she's so stoopid.
How DARE she blame President Bush for the fact that other people acted like animals! How DARE she compare him to Bill Clinton in that way! How DARE she think that the federal government owes her everything! This is beyond mega barf. I am ashamed of the human race these days!
H E L L O????? Vanessa??????? IF you had EVACUATED the city like you were supposed to, you would NOT have had this experience. STOP with the pity party and the crockodile tears. NO sympathy from this poster.
I am ashamed of the stupid people. Not surprised, though.
There's only one explanation for this. Ernie-K-Doe did her and she'll never be the same again.
That part of the column is a little strange, isn't it? Rereading some of it makes you wonder if it's a phony story.
It's full of contradictions.
Half of it sounds like a bunch "me too" stuff, and the rest a game of "top this".
I'm sorry but if someone is this stupid to blame Bush and not the local governments first, then come off with the race crap they can drop dead for all I care.
I didn't give money for this cause simply because of people like her. I did NOT want to take the chance of any of my dollars going to some ungrateful jerk like her.
Since I haven't had a tax refund in 5 years and owe everytime, I figure, I share the burden of taxes that the government places, which allows them to throw money at events such as these.
If I knew that my money could go to some non-bit%er in Miss or Ala then I'd send it.
But I'll be d@^mned these people get anymore of my money. Take, take, take.
Yeah, like she had to go 10 days without a French manicure and there was no place to get a decent Double Latte man.
Note to self: Make sure to vote for this reporter when she gets nominated for the Jason Blair Award.
Anyone with an "R" next to their name will do!
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