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 NEW ORLEANS (AP) - They said she was too frail. That the mold growing on the warped walls of her flooded house would make her ill. That she shouldn't bother since her mottled, mud-filled home would likely be bulldozed anyway. But Willie Lee Barnes, who recently turned 94, didn't listen.
Standing outside her flooded house in the Louisiana sun, she clasped her rosary in her frail hands and prayed. "Lord," she said, "I'm not asking that you climb the mountain for me. I'm only asking that you give me the strength to do it myself."
Strapping on a dust mask, she grabbed a shovel and with all her force, began pounding the deformed walls of her living room until they came off, falling to the floor like the rinds of a desiccated orange. She filled buckets with the broken drywall, which her son ferried outside. Bucket by bucket and week after passing week, she kept at it, resting occasionally on a stool, the only piece of furniture in her house to survive the flooding. Flanked by a worn statue of the Virgin Mary, hers is now one of the few houses that's been gutted in the city's most destroyed neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward.
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