Stacey Bruno

Don’t take anything for granted. Stay in school. Be nice to one another and talk to your neighbors.

Stacey Bruno

My name is Stacey Bruno. I moved to New Orleans when I was four years old. I have a husband and two children. I have one sister and she has four kids.

Right before the storm, everybody was watching the news. People thought Katrina wasn’t going to be that big. The night before the storm my sister called me up on the phone. She was getting scared and said, “I think we should leave!” It was a restless night. It was raining. Late that evening there was a commercial on T.V. where this guy said, “Make the right decision.” I took it as a message to leave.

Later that day, at 7 o’clock, we began evacuating. We packed the bare minimum, including a little clothing and one toy per child. Before we left, the kids kissed their toys goodbye. When they went back to their room they said, “We’ll be back.”

My husband, children and I went to pick up my sister. Everybody got in the car. We had to leave through Slidell, Louisiana. It normally takes 30 minutes to drive, but it now took us three hours. The kids are panicking. The storm is eight hours away. We needed to find shelter. When we got to Meridian, Mississippi, there were no hotel vacancies. We started heading to Birmingham. While driving through the storm into Alabama the trees were all coming down. The wind is whipping us around.

We stayed in Birmingham in a hotel that charged us $100 dollars a night. The same hotel room would normally cost $55 dollars.

While watching the news, the kids are crying and don’t know what’s going on. They ask, “Will we see our friends again?” We have family members who stayed in the city. We tried to find out if they are okay. Have they lost their lives?

We called my parents in Minnesota and decided to go to Minnesota to live through this time. It took us 23 hours to get up here. That was a hard ride. Once we got here there was an immediate news story on Channel 11. As I get out of the car I’m hooked up to a microphone. Mr. Greg Lawrence from St. Louis Park heard the story. He kindly donated a house to us to live in for a year. His wife, Janet Lawrence, and their two kids presented us with the home, which is a big old blessing.

We’ve been getting tons of donations. They donated us a mini-van to get around. It snows up here, so people have been giving us quilts, blankets, hats and things. They even donated us bicycles. There’s a beautiful park in the neighborhood. We found a church up here to go to. You have to give God praise!

We’ll be leaving back to New Orleans to see if there’s anything we can salvage. They don’t want kids to come down with us because of the mold. It’s going to be hard. There are so many different things we had to leave behind. We can’t bring everything back. To rent a U-Haul, it costs over $1,000.

It’s very sad. There are all of your life memories, which you can’t replace, like pictures. The pictures my kids drew for me I can’t get back. It’s very emotional.