When I arrived at the Baton Rouge airport on Sept. 13, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, I assumed it might be difficult to get interviews or listen to the harrowing stories of evacuees. I hadn’t known that being entrusted with other people’s grief would become both a burden and a privilege.

For four days I trekked around Louisiana and Mississippi attempting to piece together the madness left in the trail of a natural disaster and governments’ bumbling responses. I learned quickly that while it was first instinct to gape at the mountains of splintered wood and the boats piled on top of one another on solid ground, Katrina was about devastated people. Livelihoods had been destroyed and futures had become ominous.

I was sent to cover one angle of the aftermath: the Korean community made up mostly of small business owners who had poured their life savings into dry cleaners and storefronts now ruined. The cultural needs of this ethnic community were not being met or talked about in the mainstream media, so it was satisfying to be able to bring their stories to light. Their immigrant tales of perseverance and then tremendous loss were heartbreaking, and I felt strongly about running it as our cover story last month.

But being forgotten was the theme for everyone who was personally affected by Katrina, which made it conflicting to seek out Koreans, especially when it was the plight of other evacuees that was overwhelming. I wanted to vocalize for the Korean community, but not lose sight of the fact that this disaster was decidedly about those who were poor and black.

Most Koreans lived in the suburb of Metairie, but the majority of evacuees lived in public housing built in the divots of New Orleans: the first places to flood after the levees broke.

Driving through New Orleans, I was disheartened to see how poor neighborhoods had been beaten down even more while the upper crust had shiny cars in their driveways and only minor roof damage. Katrina had not been an equalizing force, especially when the fortunate lived on higher ground and in sturdier houses. The poor side of town had just gotten poorer.

And it was clear that in the way that poverty begets poverty, residents in places like the lower Ninth Ward never had a chance. The slow response to Katrina had been in part based on the false assumption that people in these areas had cars to evacuate in, money to take with them and safe places to go.

Later, I read a quote in Newsweek from Illinois Sen. Barack Obama that succinctly summarized the way I felt. “I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren’t just abandoned during the hurricane,” he said. “They were abandoned long ago — to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.”

It was after pulling over to stop at a local restaurant that was serving free food that I saw how those from meager beginnings could still believe in their future. There I met the five black members of the kitchen crew who had lost their homes but protected their white-owned restaurant from looters, and were now working with the promise that they would be paid in full later.