Wet Bank Guide

Let me say that I'm grateful you find your way here to read what I have to say. Never the less, I also grateful I had the opportunity to tell my story to a wider audience, to perhaps convice a few more ex-pats or lingering and uncertain evacuees that its time to recommit to the city. Apparently our story seems interesting to people outside New Orleans, as I am also being interviewd by NPR and the Times-Picayune has taken an interest in myself and my fellow travelers on the long road home. If this blog and these stories lead even one more family back home, all the time I have invested here will have been worthwhile.

Sense of Duty Lures ‘Expats’
Back Home to New Orleans

By Ann M. Simmons, Times Staff Writer
August 9, 2006

NEW ORLEANS — When Mark Folse told his mother-in-law he had decided to move his family here shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, she handed him a magazine article about New Orleans’ gang problem.

“The understated text was, ‘This is where you’re taking my grandchildren?’ ” said Folse, 49, a New Orleans native then living in Fargo, N.D. …

“The more people who come back, who value the city for what it was and what it is, the more difficult it will be for them to wrest it from us,” Folse said.

Watching the catastrophe of Katrina unfold last August, “I felt an overwhelming need to come here and plant my flag and buy a house, and try and save New Orleans,” said Folse, who tests computer software for a national bank that lets him telecommute. “Admittedly it sounds grandiose and self-serving. But I felt I had to come here and be part of it.”

There rest is here


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