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CHARMAINE NEVILLE: NEW ORLEANS EVACUEE -- TRANSCRIPT |
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by Charmaine Neville
Get your hands off her shoulders -- you're holding her down! (Transcribed from the video at WAFB9, Baton Rouge, LA, by Tara Carreon, american-buddha.com) "I was in my house when everything first started. I live by the high water in the 9th Ward in New Orleans. When the hurricane came, it blew all of the left side of my house, the north side off, and the water was coming in my house in torrents. I had my neighbor, an elderly man who's my neighbor and myself in the house, with our dogs and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water. But the water was coming in too fast, so we ended up having to leave the house. We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar and I burst the door open on the roof of the school to help people, to get them up on the roof of the school. Later on we found a flat boat and we went around in the neighborhood in the flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school. We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people. But then, things started getting really bad. By the second day, the people that were there, that we were feeding and everything, we had no more food, no water. We had nothing, and other people were coming into our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters go across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us, "Hi," and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any food, any water, nothing. Alligators were eating people, they had all kinds of stuff in the water, they had babies floating in the water, we had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people, people that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals, and from the old folks' homes. I tried to get the police to help us but I realized, we rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the 5th district police station. The guy who was driving the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to different places where they could be saved. We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing them but they never would stop and help us.
"The helicopters would hover over us and tell us, "Hi," and that would be all." Finally, it got to be too much. I just took all of the people I could, I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs, and I rolled them from down there in the 9th ward to the French Quarter, and I went back and I got more people. There were groups of us, you know, there were about 24 of us. And we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French Quarter, because we heard that there were phones in the French Quarter, and that there wasn't any water, and they were right, there were phones, but we couldn't get to them. I found some police officers, I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there, by guys who had come [CENSORED BY WAFB9] neighborhood where we were that were helping us to save people, but other men, and they came and they started raping women, and [CENSORED BY WAFB9] and they started killing, and I don't know who these people were. I'm not going to tell you I know who they were because I don't. But what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened. People are trying to say that we stayed because we wanted to be rioting, and we wanted to do this, and we didn't have resources to get out. WE HAD NO WAY TO LEAVE! When they gave the evacuation order, if we could have left, we would have left. There are still thousands and thousands and thousands of people trapped in the homes in the downtown area.
When we finally did get -- in the
9th Ward, and not just in my neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods in
the 9th Ward, there are a lot of people who are still trapped down there.
Old people, young people, babies, pregnant women. I mean, nobody's helping
them. And I want people to realize that we did not stay in that city so we
could steal and loot and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost
their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't
stop. And we'd do SOS on the flashlights, we tried everything. And it came
to a point, it really did come to a point, where these young men were so
frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren't trying to hit the
helicopters, they figured maybe they weren't seeing, maybe if they hear
this gunfire, they would stop then. But that didn't help us. Nothing like
that helped us. |
