After Hurricane Katrina, I thought that I would never have to go through evacuating and the possibility of not returning to my house, my school, or my friends again. Thankfully after Katrina, my house was somehow spared from the disastrous conditions of flooding.

An oak tree fell just a few feet from my house; we were spared from a tornado around our area and were lucky that we did not get any water in our house.

However, my school, Mount Carmel Academy in New Orleans, was not so lucky or fortunate.

Mount Carmel ended up with about 12-14 feet of water causing it to close until at least after Christmas.

I attended E. D. White High School for the rest of my sophomore year. I had to get used to a new environment with new people.

Hearing my friends that were back at Mount Carmel talk about their sophomore year began to become hard. I felt like I was missing out on a part of my life that I would never get back.

Some of my friends completely lost their houses to the point where the only thing that was left was a concrete slab or the stairs that lead up to their houses.

Some of them I still have not seen since the last day of school before Katrina hit.

Going through it once was stressful enough but here comes time number two – Gustav.

With the West Bank, my home city, projected to flood and be under water just like New Orleans only two years before, I began to wonder what my life would be like on Wednesday morning when the storm was long gone. Would I have a place to call home or a school to go to?

Gustav was projected to hit the Houma/Thibodaux area with storm surges on the West Bank anywhere from nine feet to 16 feet.

My house is right next to the Harvey Canal, and the levee was projected to break and storm surges of at least nine feet were supposed to flood Marrero, the city I live in.

After packing up my valuables from both my dorm at Nicholls and my house in New Orleans, myself and 21 members of my family evacuated to Folsom, Louisiana.

My two uncles, who own The Rose Garden Center, a place that provides gardening and pet needs, brought the animals from their store and put them in a barn in the back.

Like Katrina, Gustav had me questioning the outcome. With the storm hitting both my home and my school, all I could do was pray that everything would turn out to be undamaged.

Left with no power or any way of knowing what the storm was doing, all I could do was pray.

I did not want to lose the friends I had just made at my new school nor worry about where I would live if Gustav were to damage my two residing areas.

I awoke Wednesday morning to see the debris the storm had left where I stayed in Folsom, which is far away from both Thibodaux and New Orleans.

I must say I was surprised there was more wind damage than water damage.

I re-entered the city Wednesday afternoon to find my neighbors’ tree uprooted and leaning on their house and my house untouched.

A friend and I went to go pick up MREs; the highlight of my day. That is a phrase that only southern Gulf States can use after being hit by yet another hurricane.

With a feeling of relief over me, I still was not out of the woods with my school. With power still out at my house, I did not know how Nicholls fared except the information I received from the text messages my cousin and friends who live in Thibodaux sent me.

I came back to campus Tuesday afternoon with a new sense of relief to know that, while not untouched, the campus was still standing and another school year was spared from having to start over somewhere new.