Kalei Collins:  

LaFayette will always be near and dear to my heart. I live in New Orleans and my parents live in Bay St. Louis, Ms. When we evacuated for Hurricane Katrina we ended up in LaFayette. My oldest son had just graduated from AIT and was immediately deployed back to Louisiana for his first assignment as a Louisiana National Guard. My husband works at a nuclear plant and was in a lock down at the plant. So, I packed up my other two children, our dogs and a three day supply of cloths and headed to Ms. to connnect with my parents. Little did we know that it would be a month before we would return back to our homes. My home in New Orleans weathered the storm very well, but mom and dad lost most of everything they had accumulated over the last 50 years of marriage. Although the structure of their home survived, the contents did not as they had 23 feet of water. Luckily there single story home is 15 feet up off of the ground on stilts, so they only had 8 feet of water in their house. But the hurt would go deeper as we heard from friends and loved ones who had either lost their homes to flooding, or worse, had no home to go back to at all, as all that r...Expand for more