When I first heard about Hurricane Katrina I was a junior in high school just getting used to what they say is the most important year in my high school career. Being so far away from the scene of the incident would cause you to believe that I had no Idea what was happening but I did due to the fact that many of my family members live here and are from here making New Orleans a big part of my life as well. When I first heard the hurricane was coming I was wondering about the people and my family members that lived there and when I heard the name of the hurricane I was rather surprised in the irony within its name. Just the Christmas before the disaster my cousin, Katrina, died of leukemia at the age of 33. She was a very kind and fun person who I believe was taken too young yet God does have plans that may not fit into the ones we make for ourselves. Once my family heard this they all immediately started saying that Katrina would leave a massive mark upon the people, the city, and the entire country. Katrina came to prove the point that the state of certain government built structures, the levees, and government instated programs FEMA were not built correctly and needed changing. Once the hurricane hit a nightmare basically came to life. My uncle, who is an emergency doctor, was stuck in a hospital, which had flooded, but had to remain there to help out the city, my cousin was displaced to Los Angeles, and my grandma’s cousin had to be air lifted out of his home due to the fact that he did not evacuate. Many other family members were scattered across the south because their houses were in the areas that flooded. Now at this time in my life I am beginning to look into colleges I may be interested in and also getting ready to take my SAT. My parents, well basically my whole family attended and graduated Xavier University so naturally their dream was for me to attend as well but the dismal state of the city did factor into my decision making me really not want to attend. So for not being directly hit by Hurricane Katrina it did seem to change many things in my life.
Having been in the class for only two days so far I think it will be a very thought provoking yet interesting course. When put in a religion class I automatically think of ways to keep myself awake but this class seems to make many interesting points often comparing the bible and its events to more current events happening in the world. This contemporary spin on a very old subject seems like it would be a very interesting. I expect to be challenged to think of the bible in a different way, maybe to understand it more because it is a very hard, often times confusing text. Hopefully going through this course I might be able to understand it better. This does not happen to be the reason why I am taking this course, however. I ended up in this course, honestly, because it fulfills my theology credits and I am thinking it might have been the only available class to fit my schedule. That does not mean that I will not make the most of my time spent in this class, I intend to get as much out of the class as I can.
My thoughts about the bible tend to be that it is a very big, often complex book to read and sometimes understand. I was brought up in the catholic school system causing me to have taken a religion course as far back as I can remember. As well as being catholic myself, taking all these courses and growing up around the bible have helped with my growth and slight understanding of the bible. This of course does not mean that I fully understand the bible. I still get confused and lost sometimes within the stories and names. That’s why I am hoping this different approach to the bible might help me clear up the confusion that overwhelms me.
I would love to one day either go into emergency medicine or sports medicine. Honestly at this point it appears that I do not know what I want to do with my life. I have narrowed down my decision to medicine at least but the field in which I prefer to specialize in has not caught my full attention yet. As a freshman though I believe that not knowing exactly what I want to do with my life is normal and often encouraged because that way I am able to experience all that is out there instead of spearheading into a single thing that later on in life may not be what I really want to do. I think religion plays a major part in life and in any profession because it deals with community and family showing that nothing is done without the help of others. In medicine many times the physician is called to work with many other physicians to diagnose a patient, or maybe even on one patient many different specialized doctors are required to get what is needed done. Like religion all these people have one common connection their belief, knowledge, and faith in medicine.
The course commitments seem to be fairly straightforward and common courtesy practices so they should not be hard to follow. 586 BCE is a key event in the bible because this was when the most holy of cities, Jerusalem, was destroyed by the Babylonians. They did not only destroy the city but torture the inhabitants making it one of the most horrible stories of genocide ever told. Lamentations is the story of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE authored by Jeremiah. The people were tortured and killed and this once thriving city was left desolate and dreary. The events in Lamentations were much more gruesome making the comparison between the events of Katrina and the events in 586 BCE almost impossible but within any disaster there are similarities to be observed. In this case like Jerusalem, New Orleans was left a desolate city having no inhabitants due to the flooding and mass evacuation. The once thriving, notorious city that never sleeps was barren and quiet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Week 01: Background. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.