Shawan Jordan and Debbie Edmond were both driven from their Uptown neighborhood in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and both ended up in Denver.
There, their stories diverge.
Both women were at a reunion Monday of about 100 evacuees at the Lowry campus of the Colorado Community College System – but they are heading in different directions.
Jordan plans to return to New Orleans this week.
Edmond has found a new home. She is a member of Aurora’s Restoration Christian Fellowship church and is having a house built.
In the wake of Katrina, Jordan, her husband and three children came to Denver on a Greyhound bus. Their New Orleans apartment had been destroyed.
“I had never been here, never seen a mountain before,” Jordan said.
Edmond had been plucked off her roof by helicopter and taken to the airport, where she boarded a plane, not knowing where she was headed.
It wasn’t until she and her husband, brother and two nieces were airborne that they learned they were Colorado-bound.
Like Jordan, Edmond had never been to the Rocky Mountains.
Edmond said she was afraid. There was nothing she could do about it. “We didn’t have no choice,” she said.
Monday – at the reunion organized by the Colorado Coalition of Faith – the fear and uncertainty of the past year were gone.
All around Jordan and Edmond, lively gospel music boomed through the Lowry gym and plates were piled with seafood, sausage gumbo, fried chicken and red beans and rice.
“When I came here, I was welcomed. I was helped,” Jordan said. Still, she said, “It was a hard year.”
Coloradans are kind, but they don’t say “good morning” or “good evening” when they pass on the street, Jordan said. “You say that to people, and they look at you like you’re crazy.”
Jordan becomes teary-eyed at the thought of returning home. Her family has already left for New Orleans, and after making moving arrangements, she’ll be off too.
The return will be “very emotional,” she said. “Every time I think about it, I get emotional.”
Edmond, on the other hand, was won over by Denver.
“When I got here, the way people treated me … it was much better than home,” she said.
Through the nonprofit organization Habitat for Humanity, she is having a home built and hopes to move in by March.
“So I’m not going anywhere now,” said Edmond.
In the past year, more than 10,000 residents of the gulf region have come through Colorado, said Rhonda Bentz, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Community College System. How many of them remained or returned home is unknown, she said.
Gov. Bill Owens, who participated in Monday’s ceremony, said he is proud of the way Coloradans helped evacuees.
“The faith community, nonprofits … everybody set aside what differences they had to help,” he said. “If they choose to stay, we welcome them.”
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-820-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
