As a UN Peacekeeping Operations Officer who has taken part in UN missions in war-ravaged Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, Deborah Owens has seen her share of devastation. So when she said that New Orleans "had a war zone feeling to it,” when she served there in October as a Red Cross volunteer, she spoke from hard experience. It was, nevertheless, she said, a deeply satisfying two weeks.

This was Deborah's third time volunteering for the Red Cross. She"d served in New York State, in 1998 after a severe ice storm, and in Manhattan in the weeks following 9/11. “When Katrina hit,” she said, “I felt that I needed to go and do something.”

Her first week in New Orleans, Deborah was assigned to staffing. This entailed determining the number of volunteers in the field, where they were, and how they were getting along. “I counted 16,013 souls,” she said. “I enjoyed it, but it’s not my greatest love; that’s government relations, which I went and did next.”

Deborah worked directly with New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and the city council, helping to run the reentry program into the lower 9th Ward, a neighborhood that sustained some of Katrina’s worst destruction.

The program allowed residents to view their former homes from commercial buses leased by the Mayor’s office. It was hoped that this would give people some measure of closure. Deborah felt that the effort was successful in that respect. “It’s one thing for someone to call you up and say you can’t live in your house.  It’s another to go see it for yourself,” she said.

Before the program could begin, “They had to literally bulldoze debris off of the streets to make them passable,” Deborah said, “as well as deal with downed power lines and wild dogs.” Conditions were too dangerous to allow residents to disembark from the buses. “A barge that came through the levee was still sitting in the Ward,” said Deborah. “It looked like a bomb went off there.”

People who took the tour included residents who had evacuated the city or been rescued from rooftops, and many people now living in Houston, who returned to New Orleans for this tour. Clergymen, counselors and Red Cross mental heath workers traveled on every bus.

Deborah said she didn’t feel it was appropriate that she ride the buses alongside residents grieving for lost homes and uprooted lives. But she knew she needed to see the devastation. So she traveled through the ward with a Red Cross photographer who had arrived right after Katrina hit, evacuated for Rita, and returned to continue documenting the destruction. “That way,” she said, “when someone said to me, 'It’s unbelievable,’ I could say ‘Yes, Ma’am, you’re right, it is.’”

“Unbelievable” was an adjective that could also be applied to the city as a whole. Deborah described a virtually deserted city, with glass still falling from hotel windows, broken streetlights, and street signs blown every which way. She said, “We told people, ‘Don’t start driving your first time in downtown New Orleans except during the day.’”

Yet even in the middle of this mind-boggling disaster, Deborah was able to find humor in the situation. “New Orleans people are just funny,” she declared. “I was standing on Canal Street waiting to go to see the Mayor, when six police cars came roaring down the street, lights flashing, sirens blazing. I turned to some local people standing next to me and asked what they thought the rush was about. They told me the police had probably heard that Café Du Monde (it serves coffee and French doughnuts) had just reopened and were on their way there.”

As a Southerner herself (she hails from North Carolina), Deborah feels a kinship with The Big Easy, as New Orleans is often called. She said, “There’s a perverse part of me that says everyone else is leaving New Orleans; I should be moving there.” She added, “I would love to volunteer there again. After the first of the year, I will see if the UN will loan me to the Red Cross for two months.”