Lessons from New Orleans

Julia Lieblich turned her experience in New Orleans into a teachable moment for the students in her journalism class at Loyola University Chicago.

After years of traveling as a journalist, I went to New Orleans as a journalism teacher. When Times-Picayune city editor David Meeks gave me a tour of the devastated neighborhoods, I made mental notes about what I would say to my students more than a year and a half after the levees broke.

“What should I tell them?” I asked David, as we drove through the Lower 9th Ward.

“Tell them it’s like Berlin after the war.”

What I did tell my students at Loyola University Chicago -– many of whom had already volunteered in New Orleans –- was the story of the Times-Picayune journalists and the Dart Society's own Natalie Pompilio, who stayed in the city to report the story. They read reporter Brian Thevenot’s vivid account of those first days in American Journalism Review (ajr.org). And I told them about how David paddled two miles in a kayak to save his dog. (As David says, pet stories sell.)

The students responded enthusiastically:

“I found the determination of these people to get a newspaper out to their people and the world to be the most beautiful story of all, especially since these reporters were not obligated to stay, and the story obviously took a toll on them,” Karen Homsi wrote in a reaction paper. “I just hope I find something I am as passionate about.”

Wrote student Ashley Kaufman: “Instead of sitting at home and wishing there was something we could do, it’s important to remember people like Thevenot and Meeks and take the initiative.”

Many of us in the Dart Society have been struck by the generosity of David, Natalie, T-P photographer John McCusker and many others who have been willing to tell their stories again and again to let people know that this was a man-made disaster and that it will be years before houses are rebuilt and psyches healed.

John even offered to speak to my students. Ashley Williamson, a student in my human rights reporting class, interviewed him on the telephone about the lack of parity in mental health coverage. He talked to her about losing his home and seeing the wreckage -– and his subsequent depression and battle with insurance companies.

“After getting treatment for PTSD and medication for depression, McCusker began to feel better,” she wrote. “Then the unimaginable happened. He found he wasn’t covered.”

The photographer who had covered the early days of Katrina was denied the care he needed to survive.

“McCusker slipped into his uninsured depression,” she wrote. And Ashley learned a lesson about life after the storm.

-- Julia Lieblich