Living with her grandmother near Canal Street, a few blocks from the French Quarter, the brunt of Hurricane Katrina came and went without a problem. It was when the levees broke that the flood waters rose and Fulton’s whirlwind of moving from place to place and struggling to survive began.

“It was around 2 a.m. when the water started coming into our house. We piled everything important on tables and chairs and went next door to our neighbors with 10 other people from the neighborhood,” she said. “We thought the water would last a day and then go back down, so we weren’t very worried.”

The next morning, they fled the neighbor’s home because it too was taking on water. They headed to her great aunt’s house in the Magnolia Projects because it was on higher ground. But again, the water followed. A motorboat came and rescued them, dropping them on a bridge where buses were scheduled to pick them up, which never came. That led to three trying days in the much-reported squalor of the Superdome. From there, it was on a bus to Dallas, where she stayed with other family until her aunt who lives in Gardenia brought her to California with little more than the clothes on her back. Maxine Lowe, a mail clerk in CSUDH’s Mail Services, who is also a friend of Fulton’s aunt, helped her navigate the process of starting at CSUDH. After this exhausting journey in which everything Fulton had known was turned on its head, she stepped foot on the Carson campus just a week after classes started.

“Everything was there: my school, my church, my friends, my house,” she says matter of factly, without a hint of feeling sorry for herself. “I felt like I had the perfect life, but I didn’t realize it until afterward. It made me realize that you don’t miss something until it’s gone.”

Many students head off to college and face a difficult transition of living away from home for the first time. Fulton had always lived with her family back in New Orleans so she says she had not dealt with these challenges, but when she arrived at CSUDH, she moved into the dorms with four other women her age. Coupled with the realization that her former life was gone, it was a hard transition that made her feel desperately alone, yearning for her old life that she could not have. After a month, though, she broke out of her shell by getting involved with a Christian organization on campus called More Than Conquerors. She met people who became friends, and soon, the Southern California weather didn’t seem so bad.

“It’s like spring all year long here,” she says. “That wasn’t a bad thing when I called my brother who was freezing in New York on Christmas Day.”

Now heavy into her second semester of political science courses, she’s also become a student assistant in CBAPP’s Office of the Dean.

Like so many, Katrina scattered her friends and family all over the country. She finds time to talk to some on the phone, but what she truly hopes for is the day where she can say hello to them in person, back in her hometown.

“I guess what all of this did was that it made me realize that I’m growing up, that I can’t be a kid forever,” she says. “It’s not a bad realization, but it is a hard one. I now realize that I would have had to come to that realization at some point in my life in New Orleans, but this made me realize it sooner.”

She is grateful for the ability to continue her studies without a break at CSUDH, but more than anything, she pines for her former life and looks forward to the day when she can resume it. She hopes to return to Dillard next fall. Yet just like the perfect life she lost, there undoubtedly will be fond memories she is unknowingly forging now that she will hold forever from her time at CSUDH.