They lost homes, neighbors and cherished communities to Hurricane Katrina. Some are uprooted, far... In their own words: Hurric

They lost homes, neighbors and cherished communities to Hurricane Katrina. Some are uprooted, far from the only place they ever knew. Others have returned to the cities they love, to pick up the pieces and start over.

They will gather this Thanksgiving Day with family and friends to reflect back and look forward. But when tragedy scars the soul, what is left to be thankful for?

Blessings, it turns out. Big and small ones. A beloved city that is crippled but stands. Strangers who gave of themselves and became heroes, then friends. School, once a drag, now appreciated. A new life whose future had been uncertain.

Just about everyone who's anyone in the restaurant business in New Orleans knows Raymond "Pops" Thomas. He started as an apprentice cook at the famed Roosevelt Hotel, back when blacks needed permission from the boss to walk into the French Quarter after dark. As a chef, he spent a decade at Brennan's Restaurant, 12 years at Commander's Palace. He's still a food consultant at Acme Oyster House, where most afternoons he could be found chatting up the cooks, relishing life in the city he's called home since he was a boy. That is, until Katrina.

Since the storm, he's been living with his son outside of Los Angeles. Pops is grateful that his shotgun house back in New Orleans suffered only minor damage. And, of course, he's thankful for the roof over his head, for the care of his son and daughter-in-law. But he keeps thinking about going home.

"I'm thankful that I did live there a long time before all this happened. ... I'm thankful just for being in the city of New Orleans. ... I'm thankful that during the time that I was a young man that I was able to survive all the ... tribulation we had to go through. I'm just thankful for God just giving me life as it is ..."

"The storm, it's just sort of one of those things that God give me. And I was just thankful that I wasn't in the catastrophe that the people in the Ninth Ward was in. I was just above the water level ... the only thing that we got was just the wind and the rain."

"I'm just a New Orleans man. I'm just not a California person, you know? .... They say I'm too independent, but that's the way it is. ... When I'm in New Orleans, I have a place to go. I have two or three peers that I can go talk to. I walk around the corner. But here, you can't walk anywhere here. You have to have a car, and I can't drive. ... I can't get used to the climate. I can't get used to the food. ... There're these — watcha call it? — vegetarians. No salt. No pepper."

"New Orleans is all I know, it's all I know. ... I don't have no intention of going back home until after the first of the year, one way or another. ... But if I live, I'm going back home. I've been treated like a king, please believe me. ... I'm here, and I enjoy what I have to be with them, but I just want to be home."

"The folks stood with us and helped us stand up when we were down, and I'm just grateful for the United States of America and all the people who made our plight a part of their lives."

A self-described "Air Force brat," Allen Calliham never really had a hometown. Then, in early 2004, he moved to Waveland, Miss., to care for his elderly parents. When his father passed away and then his mother, in May, he inherited their place — the house that had become home. A few months later, Katrina washed away nearly everything inside.

Calliham saved some family photos, his grandmother's handmade quilts, his mother's paintings — but he figured the house itself was unsalvageable. Then one day a church group from New Hampshire showed up to carry ruined furniture and wallboard away. Their kindness gave him strength. He has $10,000 in insurance and government aid, and needs at least $50,000 to rebuild, but he's going to try.

Last Thanksgiving was a somber affair, coming two months after his father's death. But he, brother Gary and their mom watched the Dallas Cowboys as they always had. This year, Calliham and his brother won't have their folks, or Mom's punch with lime sherbet and ginger ale. But they'll watch their Cowboys, like always.

"The biggest thing I'm thankful for is that my brother and our friends and our fellow Wavelanders survived Katrina, and that we didn't lose as many of our neighbors as we feared we had."

"I'm thankful for my family and the help they've given me — my Aunt Chris, Aunt Adaline, Uncle David, Karen and her mom and dad, and the rest of the family. I'm thankful for my friends who ... sent me care packages — clothing and shoes."

"I'm thankful for the people who came from far away to help us: the Amish from Pennsylvania; Manchester Christian Church from New Hampshire saved my house; REMA (Rainbow Emergency Management Assembly), who came and stayed and fed the town; the Red Cross; the Baptists from Georgia; the Adventists; the National Guard; the great people from Florida. All the people who came and made it possible for us to survive."

He's spent a lifetime serving others, as a waiter at some of the world's finest dining establishments. George V in Paris. Louis XVI in New Orleans. And now Irene's Cuisine, a French Quarter favorite. Customers in the know don't reserve a table, they reserve an attendant: The always warm and gracious John Parry. He never imagined that his customers and boss, friends old and new, would one day attend to his needs.

On dialysis and recovering from a hernia operation, Parry was trapped by floodwaters in his apartment after Katrina struck. Finally rescued by boat, he was sent to a shelter in Baton Rouge, where kindly doctors and nurses administered care, arranged delivery of dialysis equipment to a friend's house in Florida, even reserved plane tickets for the trip.

When Parry returned to New Orleans in October and found his home in ruins, his boss, Irene DiPietro, offered up the key to her French Quarter apartment; customers came by with cash or clothes. Now Parry's back at work.

"The first thing I notice, the warmth in the people. ... Clotheswise, you name it. Moneywise. Food. You have no idea the generosity of people, and how it has come out in this horrible time."

"I never believed, in a million years, the generosity of my customers. ... They call in every day and they leave their telephone numbers and they find out my address and all of a sudden I get a mail from them."

"We have a little restaurant round the corner ... and we go there sometimes during the lunch and have a hamburger or something. And, you know, I find people that I know in there and all of a sudden I ask for the check ... and they say, ‘Oh, no. The check has been taken care of by so and so, and so and so.' And it goes on forever."

"Dr. Hebert in Baton Rouge. ... There was Michelle, the social worker. Sam, one of the nurses. Another one, her husband that drove me to the dialysis center and back. These people, I don't know how they had the strength to be there all the time the way they did. ... They changed my dialysis bandages, my hernia bandages."

Christa Ervin remembers a time when the kids at Long Beach High joked how great it would be if a storm destroyed their school, so they wouldn't have to go to class. Now, post-Katrina, the high school is one of the few local structures still intact; students elsewhere are attending classes in trailers.

On Nov. 5, in a dress she bought this summer, the Long Beach senior attended her last homecoming dance — a Hollywood-themed extravaganza organized by a group of Pennsylvania students who raised more than $30,000 to put on the dance, and then traveled to Mississippi with donated gowns, a deejay and door prizes. Senior year is supposed to be about graduating, getting out of school. But Christa's just happy to be back.

"To tell you the truth, we would hope for a hurricane to blow our school away. ... And I'm very thankful that my school is still there. These kids ... that are going in trailers, I know I couldn't imagine doing it. It would be hard ...."

"You just don't think about stuff like that, because most hurricanes never do anything. ... I was so ready to start school and see everybody, just to know that everybody's OK."

"I really didn't think another school, or other students, would come down here and help us. I didn't even think to think of anything like that. For somebody to come down and get all that food and all the decorations we had. ... I don't know if we would've had one (a homecoming dance) if they wouldn't have come down here and done it for us. ... I think a lot more people went this year than any other years."

"I had my dress from the summertime. ... It was a black halter top and on the sides it was longer than the front and the back. But it was a shorter dress. It came, like, past my knees a little bit ... and in the middle it kind of went in a ‘V' and then it had diamonds in the front going down."

Darlene Poole walked away from her old life with nothing but a plastic container stuffed with clothes, identification cards and family photos. The former Orleans Parish sheriff's deputy didn't know she'd be heading to Illinois until she and other evacuees boarded a plane. While some family members went to Houston, she ended up sheltered in a vacant building at the Elgin Mental Health Center, northwest of Chicago.

Volunteers offered a comforting shoulder, practical tips and extraordinary generosity. Poole is now friends with a couple who've provided six months' free rent in an apartment above their home. Another benefactor gave her the keys to a 1998 Toyota Corolla for $1. Poole works with troubled kids and ex-felons, helping them get their lives on track as part of a community college program. She'll mark Thanksgiving with another evacuee she met after the storm, a man she affectionally calls "my little brother."

"There's a whole lot of things to be thankful for this year. I didn't lose any family members and I'm grateful for that. ... I'm not ... homeless. And I'm just really thankful for the kindness and generosity of the people here. ... Knowing that my family is safe, I'll be thankful for that. I'm just going to be more grateful than I've ever been before on a Thanksgiving."

"I miss the contact with my family. I can't just jump in the car and go over to my sister's or go over to my mom's house or visit my friends. It took me a long time to call where I live at ‘my place.' I don't say home. I just say my place."

"In New Orleans, it was like a nightmare. I couldn't believe it. It was just like I was in a daze. I was in a survival mode. I didn't think about what I was going through ... until I was actually here in Illinois and I was able to let my guard down and listen to the news and see all the devastation. .. I was just a wreck. ... But time, time and the kindness and generosity of people here has just helped me overcome."

A military wife, Teddi Hernandez never intended to build lasting ties in Gulfport, Miss. What was the point? Bonds would be broken when she and her husband, Carlos, moved on. Then Carlos, a Navy Seabee, deployed to Japan in June, and Hernandez found herself all alone when Katrina struck. Her friends are now a second family she leans on.

At the salon and spa where she works as a receptionist, co-workers and customers were so worried Hernandez would be by herself this Thanksgiving, dinner invitations came in a steady stream. She'll instead spend the holiday with her mother's family in Wyoming — with a new regard for the Mississippi friends she'll return home to.

"I've been down here without any family, and I'm pretty much by myself except for the people that I have at work that are close to me now and have really helped me out and helped me through the hurricane and the time that my husband's been gone. This Thanksgiving, I am extremely thankful to have the friends that I have down here. They're kind of like my extended family."

"Now, since we're down here with all the damage, we just all help each other out. (My friend who) lost her home, any time she needs to come over to my place, she's welcome. ... Some people's families lost everything, so pretty much we're just helping each other out by listening and talking, and if someone needs a place to stay or a few extra dollars, just helping each other out that way."

"And I also get to go home and see my grandparents this Thanksgiving. We thought it would be good, since we realized after the hurricane how important family is. You don't get to see each other and don't know if that one day you're never going to be able to see them again."

Their baby was due the day before Thanksgiving, but when Katrina struck, Kerry Battle and Kayantae Synigal fled the Ninth Ward of New Orleans for Lake Charles, La., where Synigal was hospitalized after she began dilating too soon. Determined not to bring his child home to a shelter, Battle got on the Internet in search of housing. On Sept. 22, the couple arrived in Fountain Hills, Ariz., with their 7-year-old daughter, Beonce.

A real estate agent, Tobi Hawley, offered them her furnished condominium rent-free. She put the couple in touch with her obstetrician, who took Synigal as a patient, no charge. She helped Battle enroll in real estate school. Church members donated food and clothing. A credit union offered up a Ford Expedition. Strangers-turned-friends gathered at the Kiwanis Club to throw a surprise baby shower.

The baby arrived on Oct. 15. Though born premature weighing only 4 pounds, 13 ounces, she is home now, healthy as can be. The proud parents named her Amira, short for "a miracle."

Battle: "Ah, man, our blessings? ... The fact that we had Amira and she's healthy. There's nothing wrong with her. She was premature, but she has no defects, no breathing problems, nothing of the sort. She's in perfect condition."

"We're blessed to have our own place, car, adopted family — the Hawleys. ... We're just blessed, all the way around. When we got off the plane I told ‘em, I said: ‘This is the first day of the rest of our lives.' ... We got off to a good start. We got off to a great start."

Synigal: "I'm just glad to be here. ... And to have my little one right here next to me. That's the most important thing — my family, you know, together. ... Everybody's just so, so nice and so giving and so loving. I mean, I've never seen a community just come together and help as much as they did."

"Tragedy turned into a whole, big ol' blessing for a lot of people, you know, changed their lives. They got a new start at something different, something new, something better. ..."

EDITOR'S NOTE — Contributing to this story were AP writers Sharon Cohen in Chicago, Vicki Smith in Morgantown, W.Va., and Tim Whitmire in Charlotte.

This is cache, read story here