Elaine Butler--St Bernard Project -- Help Rebuild New Orleans

Elaine Butler

Elaine Butler describes life before the storm as beautiful and pleasant. She lived happily with her two brothers in a house that they owned in Violet in St. Bernard Parish. Living together brought them closer, she said, and Hurricane Katrina ripped them apart.

Though Elaine, 66, and most of her family, including her two sisters, left for Atlanta before Katrina struck, her brothers stayed behind and both of them drowned in the floodwaters. The place she called home was ravaged by more than 20 feet of water.

“Everything was destroyed. I didn’t save nothing,” Butler said. “Pictures of my mother, my brothers all went. Clothes, everything went.”

Elaine didn’t return to St. Bernard for almost three years. She bounced around from Atlanta to Bossier City, Louisiana and finally back to St. Bernard once the rest of her family decided to return home.

“It was devastating to see how things were. It just upset me,” Butler said. “Thank God I got through it all.”

She followed her family back to St. Bernard because it is where she’s lived her whole life, and it holds the roots and history of her family. Her move back, however, was not a smooth one.

Though Elaine and her sisters legally owned the house she was living in when her brothers died, Elaine was turned down from the Road Home Program after someone else claimed her address. She was put in a trailer in a parking lot, and then moved to a trailer in the Mary Ann Trailer Park in Violet. Eventually, she was forced out of her trailer and had to find an apartment elsewhere in the area. The only one she could find, however, was upstairs, making it extremely difficult for her arthritic knees to make the trek up the stairs to bed or to the shower.

The former housekeeper’s health problems now prevent her from working, and though Social Security and Disability income help her live, it’s not enough to make her house livable.

What Elaine wants most is to go home. With the St. Bernard Project, she will. Construction has started on her house, and once it is completed she will move back in with her 68 year-old sister, Willie Mae Butler.

“We loved that house. It was so nice,” Butler said. “There’s no place like home.”

January 9, 2009

Welcome Home!

SBP recently welcomed home:

Amelia Elzey, Gentilly, LA
Lisa Heberling, Arabi, LA
Royce & Veron Treaudo, New Orleans, LA
Shelita Harrell, New Orleans East, LA

Read more about our other completed homes.

Under Construction

Some of our homes currently under Construction

Barbara Williams, New Orleans, LA
Brenda Dupre-Williams, Lower 9th
Chana King, Violet, LA
Clarence and Diane Victorian, New Orleans East, LA
Cologero Caillouet, Chalmette, LA
Darren Anderson, Violet, LA
Darryn Carreras, Chalmette, LA
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
Donald & Tonya Topey, Violet, LA
Donnell Barthelemy, Violet, LA
Donnie Panarello, Chalmette, LA
Evelyn Solis, Chalmette, LA
Gerry Bierria, New Orleans, LA
Glenda Ceaser, Violet, LA
Jennifer Lanier, Violet, LA
Joycelyn and Lawrence Stokes, St. Bernard, LA
Joyce Guient, New Orleans, LA
Juan Toledo, Arabi, LA
Keith Florane, Chalmette, LA
Kenneth Burrell, Arabi, LA
Kenneth Dorsey, Lower 9th
Kwame & Dominique Adansi-Bona, Gentilly, LA
Mathilda & August Miller, Chalmette, LA
Mona Lisa Payne, New Orleans, LA
Ralph Dipadova, Chalmette, LA
Rebecca Holmes, St. Bernard, LA
Regina Beal, Violet, LA
Rhonda Krantz, St. Bernard, LA
Ricky Diecidue, Meraux, LA
Robert & Amy Barlow, Meraux, LA
Roosevelt Houston, Lower 9th
Sabrina Pacaccio, Violet, LA
Shane & Tina Meshell, Meraux, LA
Sharen Williams, Arabi, LA
Theresa McLuckey, Chalmette, LA
Vanessa Havers, St. Bernard, LA
Velma Lewis, New Orleans, LA
Willie Major, Violet, LA