It was America, unhinged

New Orleans

Shortly after arriving in New Orleans in March 2006, I took a wrong turn and headed over a bridge into the city's Lower 9th Ward, which was still largely deserted after being devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

A knot tightened in my stomach. I had unintentionally broken my self-imposed rule of not traveling into an unfamiliar area late at night.

Suddenly, something darted in front of my car. A small dog, I thought. It turned out to be a rat. Another one followed shortly afterward.

Then I saw him -- someone standing on the sidewalk ahead of me.

My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. Trapped on one side by a levee wall, there was nowhere to go but forward.

I couldn't drive fast for fear of puncturing a tire. What remained of the buckled road was littered with nail-studded wood, glass shards and spikes from the ruins of destroyed homes.

The figure didn't move. Could he be armed?

As I approached, I saw that my potential assailant was some kind of post or stump.

Why was I so nervous?

I stand over 6 feet tall, a strong black woman from London who is not easily intimidated. My career as a journalist had put me on the front line of conflicts in Eritrea and Liberia. I had been roughed up at a rally in the Democratic Republic of Congo for supposedly resembling a Banyamulenge, a member of an ethnic group then embroiled in Congo's civil conflict. I had walked side by side with gun-toting militia members in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and I survived a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad.

I hadn't imagined phantoms there. I knew of the risks and had expected danger.

But this was America, and as a Briton by birth, I had a somewhat idealistic view of America the Great. By now, six months after Katrina, there should have been lights in windows, people strolling the sidewalks, the murmur of voices, music wafting from front porches.

Instead, there was the kind of ominous silence that envelops a city under siege until the crackle of gunfire punctures the peace.

The unnatural silence, the nothingness, scared me.

Over my 14 months covering the rebuilding of New Orleans, the city repeatedly brought to mind images and people I had seen in more desperate parts of the developing world.

It was not unusual for the lights to go out, streets to flood, and water pressure in New Orleans neighborhoods to drop to a trickle when it rained. The problem was prevalent at the so-called luxury apartment where I lived, which also served as the Los Angeles Times bureau in the Mid-City area.