NEW ORLEANS – It looks better. It really does. No longer do you see cars on top of houses, boats marooned in the middle of the street, piles and piles of personal possessions – a teddy bear here, a child’s slipper there, poignantly reminding you that real people lived here. The vast devastated area of New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard looks tidy now, almost pretty. In land so fertile that wooden fence posts often sprout shoots, a grey-green covering of grasses and reeds quickly filled the space where homes once stood, some of them for generations.

It’s eerily quiet still. Where music blared out of bars or traffic whizzed past shopping malls, now birdcalls mix with the occasional hammer as the only sounds for miles. On some streets, one or two intrepid homeowners have rebuilt, their houses standing as islands in the boarded up, broken down sea around them. Driving past shuttered schools, padlocked post offices and sealed-up stores, it seems impossible that it’s been almost two years since the winds of Katrina followed by the waters of the levee breaks wrecked whole sections of this wonderful old city that is Cokie’s hometown.