A year ago yesterday, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the city of New Orleans, killing 1,800 and making 800,000 more homeless.

And with insurance settlements still in dispute, no master rebuilding plan from the city and federal grants only beginning to flow to residents, any meaningful reconstruction efforts seem distant if not hopeless.

Only half the city has electricity, and a third of the city’s hospitals are up and running. Violent crime is on the rise. And though all the levees are patched, it’s not clear if they can weather another storm, or if the city plans to strengthen them.

As residents held jazz-band funeral processions and placed wreaths on levees at commemorative ceremonies yesterday, President Bush urged Americans to make the city whole again.

“The challenge is not only to help rebuild, but the challenge is to help restore the soul,” he said.

Southern Methodist University’s handful of students from New Orleans expressed similar opinions in a round of interviews about their experiences since the storm hit.

Sophomore Evie Howard was born and raised in New Orleans. “People need to realize that New Orleans is still there,” she said. “Maybe if they come back it’ll get a little more of its old life in it,” said Howard.

The rebuilding process has been slow by all accounts, but SMU senior Victoria Sheard said that certain areas have been fixed up more quickly than others.

“They just patched up really quickly the parts where tourists go, like the French Quarter and the Garden District,” she said, “Nothing has really been done about the debris except for in the nicer areas.”

Howard agreed, “Some parts are getting better, but in some places it looks like the hurricane hit yesterday,” she said. “Buildings are completely destroyed, and there’s no one there to pick up the pieces,” added Howard.

Less than half of New Orleans’ population has returned home, and SMU students are no exception.

Senior journalism major and New Orleans native Casey Ferrand said that her family bought a house in Ruston, La., a couple of months ago.

“My little brother is a sophomore in high school in Ruston, and my parents want to stay there until he graduates,” she said.

After that, they’ll reevaluate the status of the city before thinking about returning.

Her family’s East New Orleans home was a block away from a levee, she said, so there was only a foot and a half of standing water when her family returned a month or so after the hurricane hit.

“But by the time we went back, there was 4 feet of mold,” she said. “We had to gut the house and lost all of our furniture.”

Sheard’s family also decided to move, but they relocated to Dallas. Sheard’s parents were among the 25,000 refugees who fled to Dallas during the ordeal.

“They always came up here [when there were storms], so I booked them a hotel,” she said. This time, though, “the first time they went back was late October.”

Howard’s family is staying, but challenges are still surfacing.

“Now we’re noticing water leaks from our roof. A year’s gone by and we’re just noticing what’s happening,” she said.

Ferrand and Howard said they didn’t go back until several months after the storm hit, but the damage was still surprising.

Howard said she delayed her return for as long as possible. During Fall Break, “I didn’t have the strength to go back so I didn’t – when I drove back for Christmas I had to pull over and stop because I was hyperventilating,” she said.

Ferrand said she wasn’t even sure if her neighborhood would be rebuilt.

“It was a suburb and not really well developed, so I guess they don’t feel it’s that important,” she said.

But for all of those displaced residents, options are limited.

“People are arguing that ‘we don’t want these people in our neighborhood with trailers,’ but they don’t have anywhere to stay,” said Sheard.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told the city yesterday that, “If government can’t get you your check on time, it says you need to do something. It says your neighbors need to come together and all you need to do is cook a pot of red beans and they’ll bring over the hammers and the nails.”

But many Americans took issue with the way both Nagin and President Bush have handled the disaster. In an AP-Ipsos poll, two-thirds of Americans still disapprove of Bush’s handling of Katrina. Bush said, “I take full responsibility for the federal government’s response.”

But Sheard says that Nagin may have hurt New Orleans financially with his remarks.

“He made some bad statements [after the storm], and I know he’s upset, but after those remarks, it made so many people angry,” she said. “Upset or not, true or not, that turned off a lot of pockets,” said Sheard.

SMU raised more than $50,000 last year to help relief efforts, but Sheard says the school focused more on refugee students who transferred here than on its own students.

“Other than sending out an e-mail,” she said, the school didn’t offer much in the way of services.

Howard disagreed, saying faculty members were understanding when she took a week off from school and that SMU offered her discounted tuition because of potential financial losses from Katrina. (Howard declined to take it, saying that others needed it more than she did.)

Despite repeated promises from President Bush during his dozen visits to the Gulf Coast in the last year, students are hesitant about returning.

“The city’s not the same,” said Howard. “Everyone talking to everyone else — that’s slightly died. I’m trying to decide if I should go back and be a part of rebuilding that or try to make it somewhere else on my own.”

Ferrand, on the other hand, said there was little doubt in her mind that she would eventually return to her hometown.

“I’d like to get a job in northern Louisiana to be close to my family,” she said, “but eventually I do want to go back. It’s my home, and I love it.”