[BRIEF NOTE] Aid, just a bit too late

[rfmcdonald]

Adam Nossiter's article in the Saturday edition of The New York Times, "France Reconnects to an Old Acquaintance, la Nouvelle Orléans", examines how the historical ties uniting France and New Orleans have been played upon to deliver aid.

Help has been both concrete and symbolic. French companies have given $18.5 million in aid. The government has donated 20 tons of emergency supplies. French military divers have helped clear waterways. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is pledging $180,000 to help French-oriented schools in Louisiana, and the city of Clermont-Ferrand alone has given $54,000 to the battered schools of New Orleans. The benefit concerts in France will help displaced Louisiana musicians get back on their feet. "Jazz in New Orleans - that's what the world loves," Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres told the reporters.

Many of the details in this aid initiative remain to be worked out. The French, for example, are pledging to help rebuild the historic Tremé neighborhood, a seedbed of Creole culture, but their role is not yet entirely clear. Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres said France stood ready to help for "everything that has to do with memory, so that we can reconstitute memory."

This recent burst of French interest doesn't change the fact that Francophone Louisiana is still dying. Don't believe me? Take a look at this Associated Press article.

Southern Louisiana endures, and New Orleans is champing to rebuild, but their unique flavor is bound to fade if the French Louisianans don't return.

That community faces "probably the greatest catastrophe" in its history, said David Cheramie, who directs the state's Council for the Development of French.

"We can rebuild the levees, we can rebuild the buildings," he said. "But are the families going to come back?"

When Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, many Creoles and other Francophones were forced into flight to places like Houston and Atlanta and shelters around the country.

Many took refuge with friends and relatives to the west, in the state's Cajun heartland. Less than a month later, Hurricane Rita ruined homes there, drowned livestock and forced another human exodus northward.

"It is a blow," says Barry Ancelet, a Cajun professor specializing in language and folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. "A lot of those people are not going to come back."

Can a group of minority cultures, already highly assimilated, already quite poor, survive the devastation of their shared homeland? Likely, but likely not for much longer.