NEW ORLEANS — Before President Bush arrived here this week, I was able to get over to the Lower Ninth Ward, one of areas that was hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina and has been one of the slowest to recover.

It is still a wasteland, over two years after the storm.

The Lower Ninth is not a large area. But it was once home to about 14,000 people, mostly poor blacks. Now, unofficial estimates say there are only a few hundred people living here, after multiple levee breaches during Katrina brought water pouring in from several directions.

Few of the residents here had flood insurance. Most houses that weren't knocked over by the storm have been bulldozed. There are a handful of new houses, and when I drove through yesterday, there were a few pockets of volunteers working to clear brush and cut grass.

There are apparently a few folks who claim to be the first person back to the area after Katrina. Mike Young is one of them, and he's got a pretty good story.

Mr. Young, 47, is one of the few residents to be up and running again, living in a refurbished home and making a living. He and his wife Barbara live in a home they had moved into five months before Katrina.

When I asked Mr. Young why he was one of the few who had been able to repair his home and appeared to be making a living, he said simply, "I know how to work."

Just before Katrina hit, Mr. Young told his wife and a few other relatives and neighbors that they had to evacuate, but that he himself would stay. He stood on their porch as Mrs. Young drove away and said, as a joke, "When you see me next, I'll be swimming."

After the storm hit, Mr. Young took one of his boats and drove around the area saving people who were stranded in or on top of their houses. He slept on the roof of a house nearby his own.

"I spent seven days on that roof. They thought I was dead," Mr. Young said.

After the waters receded, Mr. Young began clearing junk and doing odd job repairs. He said people would call from out of town and ask him to clean up or fix things at their houses.

But the junk-clearing market is drying up, Mr. Young said, so when I talked to him he had just returned from a parts shop and was working on repairing a riding lawnmower, because he is now going to focus his energies on cutting grass.

When I asked Mrs. Young why they were able to get back into their house, while their neighbors' houses were still wrecks, she said, "That’s something you'd have to ask my neighbors. We were just determined."

Mrs. Young said Mr. Young still has trouble sleeping because of bad dreams about the people he couldn't save, but that she is proud of him for what he did.

"God had work for him to do," Mrs. Young said. "When you're doing God's will he opens doors and makes a way."

Both of them said the recovery in the Lower Ninth has been too slow.

"They don't want to give nobody no money. We were the worst hit and we're the last to get money," Mr. Young said.

Louisiana's disbursement of federal funds for home repair and reconstruction has been hampered by bureaucracy and mismanagement, the current governor, Bobby Jindal, told me.

And many of the folks who lived here before are beginning to put down roots wherever they moved to. Many of them moved to Houston.

Different people I talked to this week said it will be 10 to 20 years before the area is back to normal, assuming effective flood walls are built that ensure Katrina-like flooding won't happen again.

— Jon Ward, White House correspondent, The Washington Times