When I was a young girl, New Orleans was a place of magic and mayhem. Mardi Gras beads seemed to grow on the oak trees whose roots cracked the sidewalks on St. Charles Avenue. Throughout the city, the wonderful smell of boiled crawfish permeated the air and on warm afternoons, the juice of a Plum St. snowball hit the spot as it made my fingers deliciously sticky. When the Rebirth Brass Band played “Casanova,” trumpets and drumbeats made me feel alive. That was the magic.

The mayhem came from daily reports of murders, government corruption, children deprived the right to an education, and hurricanes that caused even the bravest solider boy to hang his head in fear. No one ever dreamed that a Hurricane Katrina would be nature’s magic trick that turned my city into unending mayhem.

New Orleans is recovering from Katrina – but slowly. Now, four and a half years later, we are being tested again – this time by a BP oil spill. Sometimes I am convinced that someone or some secret government agency is trying to wipe New Orleans off the map of the United States.

Our coast line is sinking and our wetlands are deteriorating. Our levee system is still damaged. And the recent oil spill is slowly creeping into my beloved Lake Pontchartrain. The flooding during Hurricane Katrina proved just how far below sea level we actually are.

My mother knew this even before Katrina. In fact, she used to use a cereal bowl to describe where we lived – the bowl was the coast and we were the cereal left in the bottom of the bowl sinking slowly and slowly away from America.

Today too many families are stuck at the bottom of the cereal bowl – still displaced by the devastation of Katrina. Where housing projects created to provide shelter for those most in need were demolished, new ones never reopened. Unemployment and the recession further challenges families who can’t afford to rebuild their homes or pay down their mortgages.

Lack of funding to New Orleans has rendered many businesses bankrupt. And, don’t forget the psychological effects left by Katrina. They run deep – especially for people in my neighborhood of Eastern New Orleans where healthcare services, nearly five years later, are slim to non-existent. The nearest hospital is 15 to 20 minutes away. If ever I get sick, I’m going to hope I’m in the Uptown area of the city.

While we have elected a new mayor, counting on him to bring the change we need, politics has run amuck at City Hall. Crime is at an all time high and rising even higher on the weekends.

Despite all this, there are days when I overlook such things as the blight and dilapidated houses on my grandmother’s street and I stand up for the craziness. But some days I wish that God had placed me somewhere else – somewhere where life wasn’t so complicated.

Certainly people across the country stepped in to help after Katrina. But we still need America to keep an eye out for us. We can’t allow our beloved city to drift “out of sight, out of mind” – even though media and the federal government may not focus on our hardships anymore.

Sure it’s been helpful that HBO has a hit TV show, “Treme” and that the boys in Black and Gold won this year’s Super Bowl. But everything is not all peaches and cream here. Things are more like a bananas fosters – sweet at times but then flames erupt and they are hard to control – with the political scandals, the rising crime rate, and BP executives saying the wrong things at the wrong times.

What we need is for people to continue to spend their spring breaks volunteering to rebuild a house or helping to educate the children of New Orleans. Google us every once in a while and check on how things are going with the rebuilding efforts and the oil spill developments. Catch a flight down for things other than Mardi Gras and eat at places that are not downtown, like one of my favorites, Deanie’s by the lakefront or Lil' Dizzy's on Esplanade Avenue.

My city still needs your help. She is a work in progress and without the care and attention of the government and our country’s citizens, our progress will become irrelevant and it will end. That would be a travesty because no one wants to see New Orleans at the bottom of the cereal bowl.

Angelique Dyer is a mass communication junior at Loyola University. She can be reached at addyer@loyno.edu .