| Ms. Elzey was welcomed home on May 13th, 2010!
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Homeowner Bio
Amelia Elzey would love more than anything to be home. After four years moving from St. Francisville, La., to Houston, Texas, to coming home to New Orleans and staying with relatives, Amelia says she desperately misses the comforts of her own home.
“I would love to take a nice a hot bath, get in my own bed, and just be home,” she says. “You just don’t know what it’s like not to have a home.”
Amelia says she is so grateful to the relatives who have invited her to stay with them as she waits for her house to be rebuilt. But there’s not a lot of space, she often moves from relative to relative and the cramped conditions are wearing on her. Digging through boxes just to get dressed in the morning is a constant reminder of what she has lost.
“It seems like every day is a struggle for me,” Amelia says.
Amelia, who raised her son, Jerry, 30, with her husband in Gentilly, worked at the criminal district court in New Orleans before the storm.
Her husband passed away several years before Katrina, but her son was nearby and her granddaughter, Clinique, and her niece spent a lot of time playing at her home.
“Life was beautiful before Katrina,” Amelia says. “It was peaceful. I was just working, going to church, coming home… living. And here comes the storm and it just tore my life apart. It shredded it.”
Amelia and her husband had purchased their home about five years before Katrina. A native New Orleanian who had weathered many storms, Amelia didn’t expect the catastrophic flooding that occurred after Katrina. Still, she and her family heeded warnings and evacuated to St. Francisville, La. At first, it seemed like New Orleans had dodged a bullet. The storm passed, and Amelia and her family were ready to head back home.
“We were watching television and they said we couldn’t go back, that you weren’t even allowed in the city, that’s when it started to sink in,” Amelia says. “That really put me in a state of shock.”
Amelia eventually went back to the city to assess the damages on her house. Her neighbors told her that the water had risen above the roof. The damage was complete, destroying everything in the house.
The family then relocated to Houston. They thought it would be temporarily, but it turned into two years. Amelia says Houston was much different than New Orleans, but she barely noticed.
“When you’ve suffered a great loss like that – I mean I lost everything except my family, everything I had in my home – I was depressed and I wasn’t really focusing on Houston as a place,” she says. “It was just somewhere to survive until you get back home.”
She was finally able to move back to Gentilly in February 2008. Amelia had received insurance money, which had to be used to pay off her mortgage, as well as money from Road Home. Although it wasn’t enough to completely rebuild, she hired a contractor to begin the work.
But the contractor only did some of the work he promised to and then took off with the lump sum Amelia had paid him.
“He took just about every dime I had,” Amelia says. “That was another blow, just a devastating hit. It took me to a whole other level.”
Without the funds to rebuild, Amelia felt like she had nowhere else to turn.
“I just thought, ‘How am I going to do it? How am I going to get my home done?” she says. “I felt really hopeless.”
She saw a news segment describing different organizations that helped people rebuild their homes. That’s when she called the St. Bernard Project. Later, when she found out that her home would be rebuilt by SBP, she says a weight lifted off her shoulders.
“It’s like if there was a big old brick weighing down on you and someone takes it off,” she says. “I felt like I could breathe again.”
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Under Construction
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Darrell Betha, Mereaux, LA
David Lagrange, Arabi, LA
David Melerine, St Bernard, LA
Deborah Vita, Violet, LA
Debra Brown, Gentilly, LA
Delia Doty, Chalmette, LA
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Joyce Guient, New Orleans, LA
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Sabrina Pacaccio, Violet, LA
Shane & Tina Meshell, Meraux, LA
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Theresa McLuckey, Chalmette, LA
Vanessa Havers, St. Bernard, LA
Velma Lewis, New Orleans, LA
Willie Major, Violet, LA
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