My name is Leigh Carroll Fenner. I am a native of Uptown New Orleans. Currently living in Brooklyn.
I don't have words to describe how I am feeling about what is flashing across my tv. Nearly my whole family is safe. My mom made it out and my brother and father were already away on a trip out of the country. My despair lies with a woman who helped raise me. Alcena Brown. She in fact helped raise my mother from when she was 5 (my mom is now 61). Alcena began doing ironing after school at age 15. My cousin last spoke with Alcena on Sunday when she refused to let my other cousin pick up her and her sisters and take them to a hotel. omWe don't know where she is. As funny as it might sound to some of you but Alcena is practically the matriarch of our family. She is very wise and definitely knows all the family secrets of which I'm sure I know very little. This woman I feel is our glue.
She is the common threadthat keeps our sometimes rocky extended family together.
I don't know how to pray hard enough for this woman to be alive. And I am fighting back thoughts that I will never see her again. She is supposed to see me get married and I've always imagined her being apart of my children's lives.
I am doing all I can from here to try and locate her in a shelter but it is difficult because there is no centralized list of any kind of the survivors. And if she went to the Superdome with her sisters one of which has MS, I can only hope she has she been able to survive what is going on there.
I resent the implication from some of our government that New Orleanians should have known better to build in that kind of environment. Hawii is on a volcano. California is a shaker. We all live in areas that are vulnerable.
New Orleans can and must be saved, and I pray that I find my Alcena.
