Tree frogs and roaches are now living where Tufts junior Rebecca Abbott's house once stood before it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
"No one in the neighborhood has moved back," said Abbott, who used to live in the Lakeview area of New Orleans, LA. "It's like a ghost town."
Abbott said her family, now living in a New Orleans apartment after some time living with a Georgia relative, hasn't decided if they will return to the area they called home.
Abbot's story shows how displacement and disorder are still grim realities for families living with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, even after over a year of reconstruction and recovery.
Abbott was one of many New Orleans residents aided by a delegation of 40 Tufts students sent to help in the relief effort. Yet, before Abbott went home over spring break to deconstruct the battered shell of her house, which was not in livable condition, she felt Tufts hadn't offered her much assistance.
"They were taking a lot of students from Tulane, but they weren't really helping out the students [at Tufts] from New Orleans," she said. "It's a pretty big consensus with my friends [from hurricane-devastated areas] that we felt forgotten."
"But when I reached out, I got a lot of help," she said.
Abbott contacted the Tufts Democrats before her trip home. The group had plans to work in New Orleans during the break with an organization called Helping Other People Everywhere (HOPE), and made arrangements to meet Abbott and help her gut her house.
"We took everything from the house and then started taking down the walls," Abbott said.
Inside the house, water levels had risen as high as five feet, causing the floors to warp so much that many of the doors could not be opened, she said.
Nate Grubman, who served last year as the secretary of the Tufts Democrats, participated in the trip.
"It's amazing to see people living like that in America," he said. "It's sad and makes you question the government's priorities."
Freshman Madeline Buras, another resident of Lakeview, has sad memories from when she visited her home after the storm.
"[The] first time I saw my house was Thanksgiving, and it was a shock," she said. "[There was] all this mold on the walls. It looked like no one had lived there for a hundred years."
Her family rented and moved into a livable house on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but doesn't know if they will try to move back into their home.
Not all Tufts students from the region were hit as hard as Abbott and Buras.
Freshman Olivia Sturm moved back into her house in Uptown, New Orleans, which is at a higher elevation than Lakeview, last December. She had to relocate to Houston for three months.
"I walked into my house and everything seemed normal, but my den was literally covered by bottles of water because we couldn't use the water from the pipes," she said.
Both Buras and Sturm were attending Franklin High School, located in Lakeview, when Katrina hit. The school got a lot of media attention because it was one of the few high schools that was able to re-open.
"The school got three feet of water, so the first floor was ruined," Sturm said. "Thankfully, our classrooms were on the second and third floors," she said.
Abbott, as well as Buras and Sturm, sense that Tufts has, to an extent, forgotten the devastation Katrina wrought last year.
"Coming up here has been an eye-opener, because when I introduce myself from New Orleans, people just say 'oh cool.' They don't even ask about the hurricane," Abbott said.
According to the students, the city itself is still very much struggling. Workers are in short supply, resulting in what Sturm calls "weird Katrina store hours," and crime is still very high.
"The national guard is still there...because crime has risen. It hasn't gone down like people thought," Buras said. "I think it's important that people know that there is a lot of work to be done."
