Vietnamese Lose All, This Time to Katrina

In the fishing villages strung along the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans, the storm did not discriminate by history — but it found, in the Vietnamese community there, people who had already lost everything once.

The families of Village de L'Est and the smaller settlements down the bayou came to the Gulf in the years after Saigon fell, Catholic refugees resettled by the church to a climate that felt like home. They learned the water, bought boats, built churches bigger than their houses, and in thirty years made a coast of their own.

Katrina took the boats, the houses, the church roofs and the docks — and scattered a community that had spent three decades proving it could not be scattered.

What is striking, in the shelter conversations and the early returns, is how fast the refugees-turned-shrimpers are talking about going back. They have done this before. "We left our country once," one elderly fisherman told a relief worker. "We will not leave our village twice."

There is a lesson in them for the debate now unfolding over whether, and what, to rebuild. The Vietnamese of the Gulf Coast did not wait for a master plan. They rebuilt because the water was where the work was and the church was where the community was — the same reasons the Cajuns, the Croatians and every other fishing culture on that coast will rebuild whether Washington helps or not.

That is not an argument against federal help. It is an argument for getting the help right: repair the docks and the boats and the cold-storage plants that are the economy of these places, not just the houses. Rebuild the church, and the community will rebuild itself around it.

America's last great wave of refugees just lost everything again. They are already planning to get it back. The least a government can do is keep up.