rfmcdonald | [LINK] Two Emergent Diasporas (Reply)

From the Washington Post, Dan Morse and Paul Duggan's "Away From Chaos, Evacuees Now Must Redefine 'Home'":

Overall, it is estimated that a million Gulf Coast residents were displaced by the storm, nearly half of them from New Orleans, where virtually all of the 450,000 inhabitants have been evacuated.

[Kelly] Warner[, spokesperson for the Salvation Army in Texas] said she has talked with scores of evacuees being sheltered at the Astrodome, and many of them have told her that they are determined to return to Louisiana someday. But many others are not. She said they view the evacuation as a door to fresh start, as "a second chance."

"A lot of them didn't see much opportunity in New Orleans," Warner said, "and now they see a chance to make a new life here or somewhere else."

She added: "Then there are a lot of people who are saying, 'I think I might want to go back, but I can't wait a year. I need to find a job and make a life.' They want to make a life wherever they are. . . . They may be adamant about going back, but they're also adamant that they need to pull their lives back together."

Relief workers in Houston said that those most determined to return are reluctant to accept offers of shelter in distant states and cities. But many who are less eager to reestablish their roots are open to accepting temporary shelter in places much farther away, they said.

From The New York Times, Michael Kamper and Marc Lacey's "For Mali Villagers, France Is a Workplace and Lifeline":

This remote village in northwestern Mali does not have the art museums, cafes and trendy shopping of Paris. But it does have a half-dozen public wells, a health clinic and birthing clinic, stately mosques and scores of concrete houses with electricity.

Somankidi and villages like it in Mali's Kaye region send their young to Paris in a tradition that goes back nearly six decades, to when Mali was a French colony and Malians were welcomed in France as laborers.

The long ties between France and its former colonies in Africa are shakier these days, and the mood here is fraught after several fires in crowded Paris apartment buildings and hotels in the last few months killed nearly 50 African immigrants. A majority of the dead were children, and many had come from Mali.

After the fires, the French authorities began evicting Africans from substandard housing units, a move that did not sit well in Somankidi.

"We can't prove it, but everyone here knows the fires were criminal acts," Fodie Tounkara, a village elder, said in early September. "They are putting pressure on us to leave."

In this country of nearly 12.3 million people where more than 70 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, many Somankidi residents are better off than the norm. Every extended family, elders say, has at least one relative sending earnings home from France.

Those remittances, estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, exceed the total amount that the French government gives Mali in aid, Malian officials say. More than 120,000 Malians are estimated to be in France, most of them illegally.