I have begun reading the five books in The Neighborhood Story Project to review at the new Voices of New Orleans site and I am mightily impressed by what I've seen so far. The project was devised for a group of high school students at John McDonogh Senior High in New Orleans as a chance for them to explore and understand their neighborhoods through photographs, interviews and a lot of healthy self-examination. These are kids who come from struggling families - they are poor, they live in the Projects, they don't have a lot of social or economic power. Basically these kids come from the places where we saw people on roof tops, they and their neighbors were the ones wading through that water hoping to reach higher ground.

These are the people from the Superdome, the Convention Center and the I10 overpasses. And these are the stories of who they were Before.

I realized last night that in reading these books I am taking a walk inside a time capsule, because none of these neighborhoods are the same anymore; some of them don't even exist. I wondered if the stores were open, if they were gone, and I have already been so taken with some of these people, I can't imagine what might have happened to them, or if they made it at all. I realized that for all of our watching and fund raising and dinner table conversations, the average American does not have a fucking clue what happened down there. We don't know and we don't seem to want to know. We don't mind seeing their faces, we can feel sorry for those faces, but do we really want to know what was lost? I'm not talking about the cultural losses, the financial losses, even the deaths. I'm talking about neighborhoods - communities - homes.

I'm talking about looking through a book and knowing that every face you see has lost all or part of their homes.

It's amazing and heartbreaking and even surreal, all at the same time. And I've never experienced anything like this while reading a book; I've never even come close.

I'm trying to contact the folks behind the Project and hopefully some of the authors. The plan is to run a series of interviews and reviews centered around these five books at the Voices site starting sometime next month. I'm sure they will be very interesting conversations and I'm looking forward to learning more from the group who put together such an impressive project.

Have you thought about New Orleans today? Maybe it's time you did.