Postman Wayne Treaudo is finally back on the job, just in time for the one-year anniversary of hurricane Katrina, which devastated the US Gulf Coast region on August 29, 2005.
People's expectations have become modest in New Orleans. The few residents Treaudo encounters greet him as they would a long-lost friend.
Before last year, this mecca of jazz stood for greats like Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Fats Domino or the Marsalis brothers, for the raucous fest that is Mardi Gras, for Gumbo and Jambalaya, and other delights for the palate and soul.
But those who ponder New Orleans today have a new system of time reckoning: before Katrina and after Katrina.
Treaudo is reminded of that fact every day on the job: 20,000 people lived in the Lower Ninth Ward before Katrina. Just over 1,000 people have returned, and most of them live in mobile homes.
Treaudo trudges daily past the rubble and empty houses on his beat, filled with moldy decaying furniture and infested with rats the flood left in its wake. In other parts of this hardest hit quarter there is nothing at all: no electricity, no running water - everything is dead.
Years before Katrina's 280-kilometre-an-hour winds pounded the city, experts warned that the levees of the city, much of which lies below sea level, could not withstand a Category 3 storm of this nature.
Yet New Orleans was still woefully unprepared as Katrina grew off the Gulf Coast, at one time reaching Category 5 before it made landfall.
In the aftermath, numerous investigations and many turns of the blame game revealed that US authorities failed at every level.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin called too late for the city to evacuate, and then failed to provide transport for the city's poor who depend on busses. Thousands in the Lower Ninth Ward and even outlying districts like St Bernard were left behind, calling for help from their rooftops. Many of them drowned, including 1,577 people in the state of Louisiana alone.
The city's stadium - the Superdome - became a make-shift shelter and a symbol of the scandal. Thousands gathered there without water, food, police power and enough toilets.
Washington, and at the forefront the government's disaster management agency FEMA, seemed helpless, although cable broadcasters had no problem reaching the statdium and broadcasting the chaos around the world. CNN brought in a top Africa reporter, Kenyan Jeff Koinange, for his deep experience with refugee crises.
The numbers horrified: Katrina killed more than 1,800 people in Louisiana and Mississippi, most of them in New Orleans - over 80 per cent of which was under water on August 30. Altogether, 350,000 homes were destroyed or damaged and at least 1.3 million people left homeless.
Following the shame of inaction came the promises of reconstruction.
'There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again,' President George W Bush assured as Congress quickly approved emergency funds.
That was then. Now, 12 months later, this city remains light years from re-entering a normal existence.
Yes, Mardi Gras came along in February on schedule, and so did the Jazz festival, accompanied by residents with a proud and brave swagger proclaiming 'we're back,' while tourists once again filled Bourbon Street.
But there are other pictures and figures that tell the real story.
Only about half of New Orleans' population of 450,000 has returned since, and many are wealthy and white, drastically altering the demographics of a city that used to be two-thirds black.
After Katrina, even more than before, money decides who gets to live in a flood-secure quarter of the city. Just over 60 of the city's 125 public schools will open for the new school year this September. Only half of the school buses are in operation and only three of 11 hospitals are once again taking patients. Mobile homes occupy many public spaces.
More than 8 million kilogrammes of debris have been removed from the city, yet the rubble is still metres-high in many areas. Bodies occasionally emerge during the clean-up work in empty houses.
In those areas where there is no infrastructure left or rebuilt, people are not rebuilding, and those are the areas in which most black residents lived before Katrina.
'New Orleans may rise again,' says Rodney Tulley, in front of the rubble that was once his house in the Lower Ninth Ward.
'Only question is: Which New Orleans?'
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