After spending the first semester of her freshman year at Bates College, Sarah Chandonnet returns to New Orleans.
LEWISTON – Four months after she moved in, Sarah Chandonnet will finally get to spend a night in her Tulane University dorm room.
“The campus looks good,” she said from her cell phone in New Orleans.
Chandonnet, a Lewiston native, arrived for her freshman year at the New Orleans college last August. She’d moved her belongings, met her roommate and gotten the key to her dorm.
Then officials told everyone to go home. Hurricane Katrina was coming.
Chandonnet, her mother and grandmother fled the city just before the storm swept through, devastating the region. They were safe, but Chandonnet’s college plans were shattered. The school closed for the fall semester.
Chandonnet, now 19, started her freshman year at Bates College. The Lewiston school had agreed to take students affected by the hurricane, tuition-free.
This week, Chandonnet and 6,700 other students – or 88 percent of undergraduates – returned to the New Orleans campus. For the first time, she got to see how the area had fared.
“It wasn’t like it used to be,” said Chandonnet, who had fallen in love with New Orleans while on vacation there a few years ago.
In a tour with her mother, she found the French Quarter quiet. Debris still littered some areas. There were fewer people.
On campus, the buildings looked fine. Chandonnet’s belongings, left behind in the evacuation, were accounted for, though she couldn’t locate a new laptop shipped to campus by the computer company. She was assigned the same dorm, the same room, the same roommate.
The pair met for five minutes before Katrina forced them to flee. They haven’t seen each other since.
Chandonnet, a pre-med student, got her class schedule. She planned to take calculus, Latin and writing. She will also take chemistry 2, continuing a course she started at Bates.
Chandonnet applied to Tulane because she because she loved with the city. She liked the campus, set in the heart of the Garden District, and the diversity the large school offered.
But Bates showed her the advantages of a small college close to home.
As she settled into New Orleans this week, Chandonnet seriously considered returning to Maine for her sophomore year.
She’ll try out Tulane first, though.
“I’m excited to be back,” she said.
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