Assignment Three – Jessica Ewing

Lexington, Kentucky. A city not considered too big but also not too small. A college town. I've had the (un)fortunate pleasure of being able to call this city my home for the entirety of my life.

Sure, Lexington may be an "okay" city. It's certainly not the worst place in the world, in terms of crime or poverty or government corruption. At the same time, it's definitely not the best. Lexington, all in all, scores pretty mediocre across the board in terms of cities.

Well, okay. Maybe I'm just biased. Maybe I'm just tired of being stuck here. Maybe I just crave travel and the ability to learn about new cultures and discover new experiences across the world, and I create this negative view of my hometown as an excuse to give me further reason to get out of here. In any case, I want to travel the world. I always have, ever since I was little.

The farthest I think I've ever been from home was the week-long mission trip I took to New Orleans, Louisiana, over this past summer. It's not outside of the country, unfortunately, but the experience was still very different from anything I've ever seen here.

Most of the week was spent in the Ninth Ward, the district of New Orleans that was hit most devastatingly by Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, though I did spend the first day in the French Quarter. I remember the first thing I noticed when I arrived was the lasting destruction still left on so many of the buildings there, even in the French Quarter, the tourist district of the city. It's been 12 years since that hurricane plowed through, and yet there were still significant chunks of the city that just...weren't there anymore.

Entering the Ninth Ward only furthered this feeling. Entire plots of land in neighborhoods were just empty, where a house or a store once stood was now nothing but grass and the concrete rectangle of a driveway.

I talked with several local residents of the area, some who had moved there in the last decade, and some who had grown up there, fascinated in their stories and experiences. What they'd gone through, and what they learned themselves from living there.

I learned that through all the devastation, through the lasting effects of the hurricane, the people there had grown together. There was an unfamiliar sense of camaraderie among everyone there in the district, one I never see back here at home. People who didn't even know each other found familiarity. It was amazing. It's always said that at the end of the day, we're all just people on the same team, just trying to make our ways in the world, but to see it before my eyes was something that culturally I'd never witnessed.