Katrina Remembered - Is It Time to Look for New Opportunities?

Five years ago today my wife and I were in south Florida after driving 15 hours through the night to escape Katrina. We arrived at our vacation cottage and turned on the tv to hear that "New Orleans had dodged the bullet."  We shrugged and went to sleep figuring we would take a 6 hour nap and drive back to New Orleans when we woke up. But when we woke up our world and our attitudes about life began to change forever.
A month later I snuck back into New Orleans to inspect the 2 flooded sites that had been the International School of Louisiana and with a marvelous group of parents and staff prepared to plead with the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to let us reopen. Why the pleading was necessary I will never understand. Such is politics, I suppose.

Today (as we do pretty much every Sunday) my wife and I wrote in our "book" our most memorable sensations of the previous week. Then we made a list of the 5 Katrina caused opportunities that we embraced and found pleasure in.
Here is the list:
1. The best educational experience of our lives being part of ISL as it sprang back to life in trailers alongside a New Orleans' airport runway.
2. Learning to love trailer living.
3. Tearing our flooded house down to the basics and putting it back just how we like it.
4. Acquaintances who became great friends.
5. Evolving an attitude of fragile strength in which tears will quickly and shamelessly flow everytime we hear Bruce Sprinsteen's "My City in Ruins", but knowing we can endure endless Katrinas and continue to look for opportunities in the challenges.

A picture of a bridge over the river in the  Honduran town where we now work was in the San Pedro Sula Sunday paper today. The area is in "Red Alert" for possible flooding. I walked to the bridge in the picture and stood looking at the water rising against the sheet metal barriers protecting the banks. There were about 50 of us discussing if the water was rising or falling and how much rain was expected in the next week. It was a weirdly Katrina-like moment. Like when you would be standing in line at the grocery store after the storm,and you and the person next to you would start telling your evacuation stories as if you had known each other all your lives. Then along came a guy pushing a cart of cotton candy up the bridge - an opportunist in the face of the approaching challenges.