New Orleans City Business has coverage of the NPACH sponsored Tsunami - Hurricane exchange visit:

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, said Viola Washington.
One year after Hurricane Katrina, her community was not supposed to be a ghost town. Yet when she walks out the front door of her Gentilly home, she is surrounded by abandoned houses and barren sidewalks.

. . . With recovery moving so slowly here, Washington and a delegation of community leaders traveled to Thailand three weeks ago to study how Third World fishermen along the coast of the Indian Ocean rebuilt their villages in the wake of the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 350,000 people and destroyed 2.5 million homes.

The level of recovery from the tsunami has far outpaced what has taken place in New Orleans. When a delegation of Indonesian residents visited the Crescent City in June, they were stunned that 10 months after the storm parts of New Orleans still looked as if they were hit by a bomb, said Brad Paul, executive director of the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness in the Lower Garden District.

“They were amazed at the lack of progress in these neighborhoods a year out,” Paul said. “They looked around and said, ‘How is this possible that in a country so wealthy you could have this type of devastation and lack of progress?’