When Jean-Godefroy Bidima boarded a plane in Paris on August 30, the words of a flight attendant turned his world upside down.
After glancing at his travel itinerary, the flight attendant sympathetically told Bidima — a professor in Tulane University's French department who had been attending a conference in Paris — that he would not be able to reach his final destination, New Orleans, because that city's airport was closed.
Astonished and confused, Bidima hurried off the plane and retrieved his luggage, then dashed outside the airport to find a newspaper kiosk. It wasn't long before he spied the headline "La Nouvelle Orleans dans l'Eau." Since this could either have meant "New Orleans in water" or "New Orleans under water," Bidima was unsure whether the city was flooded or just experiencing heavy rain.
Both interpretations filled him with dread.
"My reaction to both possibilities was 'In the name of my ancestors! [M]y poor books and the only photograph I have of my parents,' " Bidima said in an email.
Having spent only one year at Tulane after previously teaching in France, Bidima was in the process of shipping his belongings to Louisiana — which meant that 165 boxes full of his books, papers and other valuable possessions lay vulnerable in the basement of his New Orleans apartment building as Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city.
To his horror, he later discovered that many of those boxes might have been damaged or destroyed.
In the wake of the devastation, however, Bidima has found a new home. Along with 17 other professors displaced from Gulf Coast schools, he is spending the semester at Princeton while Tulane's campus recovers from the storm.
The Katrina fellows
Bidima — who learned of the opportunity from his friend Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at the University — was one of 18 professors from the hurricane-ravaged region who applied to become visiting fellows. The University was able to accommodate all of them, Assistant Dean of the Faculty Lin Ferrand said.
The fellows represent a wide range of disciplines, including comparative literature, Near Eastern studies, chemistry, public affairs, mechanical and aerospace engineering, electrical engineering and Slavic languages.
Other schools, including Harvard and Cornell, launched similar programs.
Princeton's "Katrina fellows," whose applications were reviewed by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, submitted references and curricula vitae after receiving nominations from current University faculty.
Many turned to Princeton because of ties to the University or the region through friends, family members and colleagues.
Like the 24 displaced Gulf Coast students the University is hosting this semester, many of the professors — who hail from Dillard University, Tulane and the University of New Orleans — are being offered free University housing in various locations across campus.
Others are living off campus, and a few are staying in the homes of full-time Princeton faculty members, Ferrand said. In addition, they have received office space, computer access and use of the University's research facilities.
Anthony Cummings GS '80, a music professor from Tulane, said he is delighted with the resources available to him at the University.
"I've spent time in Firestone, which has items Tulane doesn't have," he said.
Saving a life's work
Cummings, who evacuated his home near the Tulane campus the day before Katrina struck, will soon publish a paper on the early origins of jazz — a genre he became interested in after living in New Orleans. He also is writing a paper about European classical music, which he hopes to complete during his stay at the University.
When he evacuated New Orleans, the manuscript for the latter work narrowly avoided destruction by Katrina, Cummings said.
"One of the last things I did before I left the house was to look at [the laptop computer on which the manuscript was saved] and say, 'I really should take that,' " he said.
Donna Patterson, a history professor from Dillard University who evacuated to Houston the day before the storm, was not so fortunate. Though most of her documents remained safely in her home twenty miles west of New Orleans, which was not damaged as badly as the city itself, a CD containing important photographs and written work remained in her office at Dillard — which Hurricane Katrina flooded with three to four feet of water.
Though Patterson hoped to forage for the CD when she returned to New Orleans two weeks ago, she said she was not allowed to enter the building due to safety concerns.
"The campus is one hundred years old, and branches from some old oak trees fell during the storm, and [cleanup workers] had taken them and put them in front of the driveway" leading to her office building, she said. "So I couldn't even sneak in."
Patterson, who is living off-campus with her three-year-old daughter while her husband temporarily remains in Louisiana, said she hopes to continue working on the material she did manage to save. The lost CD contained information for a presentation on female pharmacy owners, she said, but she is also doing research on traditional Cuban medicine and plans to continue that project at the University.
A Community affair
The professors interviewed expressed a desire to assist University students and faculty in whatever way they could.
"I'm interested in doing anything Princeton asks me to do," Cummings said, adding that he plans to meet with the Tulane students at the University and offer them his assistance. Since Tulane will most likely reopen on Jan. 17, before the visiting undergraduates will have completed their final exams here, Cummings said he could help by administering those finals in New Orleans.
Meanwhile, Bidima — who is being hosted by the University's Center for Human Values and has an office in the philosophy building on the same floor as Appiah — said he plans to assist his friend by undertaking a French translation of Appiah's book, "In My Father's House." Additionally, he plans to work on a book of his own and edit another.
Patterson, Cummings and Bidima said they plan to return to their home campuses as soon as possible, but are enjoying their stay at Princeton so far.
Cummings said he feels especially comfortable because of his previous experience at the University.
"It's like coming home," he said. "It's so good in the midst of the uncertainty in my life, with Katrina, to come back to a place I love so much. It's good for the soul, so to speak."
Coping with loss
Patterson, Cummings and Bidima said Katrina left a painful mark on their memories.
Cummings said the damage to New Orleans's distinctive character, particularly its vibrant jazz scene, was particularly upsetting to him.
"For the first couple weeks after the hurricane, I was in a dream state," Cummings said. "How could this be happening to my city?"
Bidima expressed similar sentiments, saying the potential loss of his personal papers and books has hit him especially hard.
"You can imagine what I feel at this time," he said. "Will I be able to replace these losses? A book read, underlined, marked and commented on is a part of personal memory."
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