Oxfam America Blog

Natalie Bergeron, a lifelong bayou resident, has been delivering mail down in Cocodrie, Louisiana, for 30 years. She knows just about everybody in the water-logged town, which was battered by wind from Hurricane Gustav and then swamped by the storm surge from Hurricane Ike. And what she knows about them—and plenty of others along the road from Bourg through Chauvin and into Cocodrie—is worrying her.

“Not only do we have poor people trying to live, we’ve lost four factories in Chauvin. One was a huge shrimp processing factory. Gustav tore it apart,” she said over the phone as she ate her lunch. It was 2 p.m., and the first occasion she’d found that day for a meal break. Things have been busy at Bayou Grace, the community services organization in Chauvin where Bergeron works, since the storms swept through, knocking out water and power supplies. Bayou Grace is one of the local organizations Oxfam America partners with.

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The atmosphere in the Gumbo Shop, a long-established restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter, was celebratory. And so it should be. The city, so traumatized by Hurricane Katrina three years ago had, despite dire predictions, been spared the wrath of Hurricane Gustav, which had veered westward before making landfall. The whole city had evacuated, but now people were coming back, and getting on with their lives again.

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