It’s the first day of school–one of my very favorite days of the year. I got up early, polished my apple, and hopped on the Surly to meet this season’s new recruits. Three classes and a burrito later and I was back on the bike heading downtown for a stop at the gym, which today was just an excuse to lounge in the steam room. I took LaSalle rather than Freret in a vain effort to miss school pick up time traffic. (Why everyone needs to be dropped off and picked up in their own private SUVs, I’ll never understand. School buses? Bikes? Walking? We need real, safe options, people.) I stopped to snap a picture of this sign advertising Our Recovery in Progress at Evans Playground. We are coming up on the fifth anniversary of the levees breaking and the city flooding. Our recovery is still in progress, for sure. I wonder if people who don’t live in New Orleans think everything’s fine at this point. It’s not. Much has been done to rebuild, absolutely. Even in the few years I’ve been here I have seen innumerable changes. But then there are signs like this, promising rebuilding, swallowed up in the green again. I’m not sure about the status of this particular playground–behind the fence looked to be a nice field–but I was struck by the sign precisely because we should not forget, even as the green grows around us, that we are most assuredly not finished, not even close.
What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today 
Kate, Unfortunately the PR people of NOLA are on tv saying everthing is fine and better than before Katrina.
Hopefully some day New Orleans will be better.
Re: buses? bikes? walking – a certain charter school with a Freret St campus doesn’t offer transportation to its students, which brings us to a whole other argument about pernicious inequity. And since any kid living anywhere in the city can apply to any public school now, lots of them come from too far away to walk. Most of the public schools ARE still obliged to bus kids to school and back, though, and the “choice system” has made these transportation costs unsupportably high. Or so the Cowen Institute people say. Good call on not being finished yet.
Can you recommend an organization I can send a donation to? I want to help New Orleans.
Hi, David! That is a wonderful question. There are so many places to give, all focusing on different aspects of New Orleans recovery. You might want to check out some snapshots of successful local nonprofits at http://www.gnof.org/the-second-line/nonprofit-spotlight/ to see if there’s one that strikes your fancy. If you are interested in supporting the movement for proper levees, http://levees.org/ is a great place to give. Do other readers have personal faves?