Relocated students return to New Orleans

They evacuated homes. Left their colleges. Said goodbye to friends.\nAnd now they're back.\nMore than four months after Hurricane Katrina roared through the Gulf Coast region, tearing apart cities and causing billions of dollars in damages, students from many New Orleans universities will regain some sense of normalcy next week when they return to classes at their home institutions. \nFor the students who relocated to IU following Katrina, the homecoming has been a time of new experiences and memories. \nTulane University senior Sarah Moser, an exercise and sports science major who stayed at Teter Quad, was one of 45 students who enrolled at IU after Katrina. She returned to New Orleans on Saturday to find a city understandably different than the one she left. The stores and restaurants around her neighborhood now close earlier, for instance, and stop lights and streets can be inoperable or closed at times, making her commute to school 10 to 15 minutes longer, she said. \nAt her apartment, located a few blocks from Tulane's campus in the Uptown area of town, she said her roommates arrived to find a refrigerator rotting with perishables, but no other major damage. The refrigerator, covered with maggots and sour meats, eggs and other products, was replaced by a landlord, she said. \nIn all, she said her neighborhood escaped the kind of damage she initially expected. She noted that the campus looks much the same as she remembers, with more internal changes, such as recent cuts in staffing and even whole majors and academic programs, than external. \n"A lot of my peers are just kind of irritated because we were told previously that Tulane was going to stay the same when we got back," she said. "We're supposed to have a big meeting with the president, but I think a lot of people right now are just disgruntled with the situation."\nMoser said her major is going to be cut, but she is still going to be able to graduate in her program and on time after taking exercise and science classes here at IU. \n"I don't think I could have had an easier transition at IU," she said. "I think if I weren't a senior, I would have considered transferring." \nSenior Scott Fetters, a business law and management major at Tulane who studied at IU in the fall and stayed at Teter Quad, said conditions in New Orleans were worse than he had initially expected, with power outages in some areas and ghost town-like conditions a few blocks from his neighborhood. \nFollowing the storm, he lost his job at the Howl at the Moon bar in the French Quarter, and his favorite restaurant, a family-owned Mediterranean spot, closed indefinitely. \n"I expected it to be pretty much (back) to normal," he said. "It was kind of worse than I had hoped and imagined because you go down some of the streets and there's just no businesses open." \nBut he said there are bright spots, especially with low levels of crime in the city and students eager to get together once classes start Jan. 17. \n"Morale is actually really high. Everyone's just so happy to see each other and make up for last semester," he said. "Everyone's pretty excited"