Starting Over

Like many of the houses back in the old working-class neighborhood of Gentilly, Robert Jones' former place is under renovation. It has a coat of fresh brown paint on the outside, and newspapers cover the front-porch windows, a sign that painting is under way inside as well. The porch's wooden planks are buckling a little where they meet the shotgun house, a typical, narrow design in New Orleans, in which the rooms are lined up almost directly behind one another.

Jones' old house looks in relatively good shape overall. There's no sign of the brown water line that ringed the house back in February, the last time he visited New Orleans, and the parts of trees that fell and blew onto the roof are gone, too. In front of the house, it's an entirely different story, however. This stretch of Clematis Street – torn up and with sand everywhere – is unusable, a major contributor to the area's largely abandoned state. Like the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast evacuees who fled their homes last year, the basic infrastructure of parts of Gentilly, along with many other neighborhoods throughout the city, has to be completely rebuilt.

Jones, an evacuee of both Katrina and Rita (see "Katrina's Aftermath: Housing Uncertainty Lingers," June 30), is taking the rebuilding of his life in stride. To him, the whole evacuation experience is simply another leg of life's journey, an outlook that served him particularly well in Katrina's immediate aftermath. During his stay in a shelter in Baton Rouge, he would tell some of the more anxious evacuees around him, "Be patient. In time it's going to work itself out."

He practiced what he preached, and life is indeed starting to work itself out. He found a job doing custodial work at the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless a few weeks ago through one of the local offices of the state's WorkSource program (www.worksourceaustin.com). As he put it, "It's an honest day's pay for an honest day's work." He likes his apartment complex, has found a couple of local churches he feels at home with, and has found a new best friend – a puppy named Bear, whom he got six or seven months ago from a woman who was giving a litter away on a corner.

"Sometimes good things come through disasters," said Jones, alluding to Katrina, but also to the rough life he lived intermittently in New Orleans, which included a crack cocaine addiction several years ago that led to temporary homelessness. "I'm being allowed to build a foundation, to keep going forward," he said. "Right now, things are looking good."