In and around New Orleans, there is a whole army of faceless names like Rosita Thomas, whose wrecked house on Piety street was marked this spring as a public nuisance and blighted property.

Did she even see the sign? Did she make her April 23rd hearing? (And did the person hanging the sign take into account that Thomas didn't cause the blight, the levee break did?)

Where is Rosita Thomas now, and does she ever think of her little house on Piety?

You could go to New Orleans and never get your questions answered. A group from the Greater Hartford campus of University of Connecticut (with one Eastern student) volunteered with Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans in late May. Thomas Craemer, assistant professor of public policy, went as a faculty sponsor.

They planned to build three-bedroom houses in the Upper Ninth Ward, in the eastern part of the city. Many of the UConn group are public policy grad students. Some of them had already studied the conundrum that is the Crescent City, but that was from afar. The post-Katrina Gulf Coast is a perfect storm of weather, shoddy levees and governmental miscues.

And a visit there is pregnant with teachable moments. A city is decimated, and leaders don't seem to know what to do about it. Rebuild? Rebuild into what? The new New Orleans can never be the same New Orleans, but would you want it to be? And where do you begin, asks Ryan Tully,a graduate student who helped coordinate the trip.

The Connecticut volunteers saw a shocking lack of government resources - save for canned water from FEMA - but beehives of volunteers. As they started work - recycling a foundation into a patio, taking turns at a jackhammer - they kept hearing horror stories about the nearby Lower Ninth.

So on their day off, they went exploring, and found shockingly little going on in the Lower Ninth, save for a community organization called Common Ground Collective.

The Lower Ninth was hit hardest during the levee break, and subsequent competing policies haven't helped much, said Craemer. People there are working without city water or electricity. Residents have had little luck getting those much-hated FEMA trailers. They're hated, but they're something. Without homes to call their own, Lower Ninth residents have scattered.

Student Tina Harrington took a picture for her blog of a sign that said, in part, "Tourist, shame on you."

"They get so angry if you drive through like you are on a tour bus," she said. "If you stop, they are so friendly, they want people to know what's going on with them. They will tell you their story. Everyone was still broken in the Lower Ninth."

Craemer counted trailers, and found that the whiter the neighbors, the more official help they appeared to have received. Craemer's background is political psychology with a focus on American race relations. Even without that background, the inequity "kind of hits you over the head," he said. He and the students decided they'd start gathering data. They'll present their findings at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 4 in the second floor auditorium of the school's library on UConn's West Hartford campus on Asylum Avenue.

Group members expressed their dismay, but Craemer, a German immigrant, finds the lack of official activity - and the notion that the area can and should be abandoned - troubling.

"When Kennedy announced this nation would travel to the moon, people didn't think it was impossible," he said. "That's what attracted me to this country, its can-do spirit. `There's a problem, let's solve it.'" No one talked about abandoning New York after the terrorist attacks. No one would think of leaving behind Venice or the Netherlands.