The front door bore the tell-tale marks of Hurricane Katrina: a huge red “X” with “NOPD” (New Orleans Police Department), “9-25” (the day the house was checked) and a “0,” meaning no bodies were found inside. That was the way John Beller found his home when he visited New Orleans just two months after Hurricane Katrina hit the city. Some houses, of course, had numbers on their doors. Ashley and John Beller were lucky — they escaped the horrors of Katrina but their home was not spared. Since then, their lives have been in an upheaval, almost as turbulent as the storm itself. \

Ashley is now an English as a Second Language instructor at the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville, where she began in February but went to work full-time this fall. John, a graduate student at Tulane University in New Orleans, now works with his father, Sam Beller, at the Bank of Cave City. The ESL role is new to Ashley. In New Orleans she taught Advanced Placement English at Mount Carmel Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school. “It was a very different job,” she said with a laugh. She was also the English Department coordinator, meaning she made sure all 16 English teachers were teaching the same curriculum.

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