Vickie Bell opens the door of her trailer, flicks on the light, fiddles with the remote control of her small television set and collapses into her easy chair. "This is my home," she sighs. Her look is half amused and half sad. "Welcome to New Orleans," she says, "post-Katrina."

Bell's "home" is a tiny mobile aluminium container, propped up in the driveway of her real home -- once an attractive, middle-class house on Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans. The house has been uninhabitable for a year now -- her neighborhood of Gentilly, not far from Lake Pontchartrain, was flooded completely after Hurricane Katrina swept over the city.

With almost 12 months having gone by since the disaster, the rest of the nation seems to have largely forgotten about Katrina. But for Vickie Bell, a single mother and preschool teacher, life continues to be "a nightmare." And it's a nightmare that features ever more capricious and disheartening hurdles. The Federal Emergency Agency (FEMA), for example, only issued Vickie Bell the key to her trailer at the beginning of this month -- even though it's been sitting in her front yard, locked, since early this year.

Not a cent of insurance payments

Such are the small and painful humiliations that people in New Orleans have to put up with -- humiliations whose origins are never quite clear. Less than half of the former inhabitants have returned and almost 50,000 households in greater New Orleans will be living in provisional homes when the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina arrives next week. They live in trailers parked on their destroyed property or in slum-like, shoddy container settlements at the edge of town.

The Big Easy, one year later, has a bizarre feel to it: Tourists have returned to the bars in the French Quarter and the villas in the Garden District have been freshly painted, but in the Lower Ninth Ward and in Lakeview, the foul-smelling heaps of rubble still haven't been cleared. And people like Vickie Ward are living in the equivalent of an overheated tin can.

Still, her house -- the identification mark sprayed onto the front by rescue workers can still be seen next to the house number, 3723 -- wasn't damaged as badly as others. The storm tore away part of the roof -- with a large, blue tarp now covering the hole. But shingles are expensive, and since the insurance company still hasn't paid a single cent -- and federal aid money has yet to arrive -- the house remains uninhabitable.

Bureaucratic obstacles

"So now we're celebrating the first anniversary of this wonderful flood," Bell says bitterly. With misguided cheerfulness, the city has announced fireworks, a jazz procession, a gospel concert, a masked ball and a comedy night at Harrah's Casino.

Meanwhile, several thousand families are merely struggling to get by, many of them crowded into an area no larger than 15 square meters (about 160 square feet). Vickie Bell is trying to make her emergency housing "halfway comfortable" by decorating it with plastic flowers and fancy pillows. But it's not an easy task: Whenever she turns on the lights, the air conditioning stops. When she turns on the air conditioning, the lights go out.

Like many others in New Orleans, Bell lost her job in the aftermath of Katrina. She's now working again part time. Indeed, it's probably a good thing that she's not working full time -- she needs at least one day a week just to deal with bureaucratic obstacles: the city, FEMA, the insurance company, the bank, the school board. She's had to invest in a fax machine: It stands on a rickety coffee table inside her trailer. She's one of the few people in the neighborhood whose phone connection is working. "I was just lucky," she says.

"No women, lots of drinking"

Scott Barron was luckier than others too. "This is like a war," he says. "I mean it. We feel like war veterans." The mortgage broker's home in the Clairborne neighborhood was "only" 1.3 meters (4.3 feet) underwater after the flood. Most of the neighborhood stood under twice as much water. "We lost everything on the ground floor," Barron says. Unshaven and with tired eyes, he has the kind of gallows humor one encounters frequently in post-Katrina New Orleans. "I mean all the good stuff, the valuable stuff. We still have all the junk from upstairs."

His wife and his three small children moved in with relatives after the storm. He, though, shacked up in a trailer in front of his house and started fixing up his home by himself. "Rely on the state and you'll get nowhere," he says. The months after Katrina were tough, Barron says, with New Orleans turning into a kind of frontier town: "No women, lots of cowboys, lots of drinking."

While the basement is still nothing but a bare skeleton of studs, Barron has more or less fixed up the ground floor and the family has moved back in. They even have electricity, even if the connection isn't entirely legal -- they've run a cable to a nearby transformer.

Indeed, helping yourself about the only way to make much progress in the city. Barron is the president of a neighborhood association that has started to slowly make the neighborhood inhabitable again. The children have painted new street signs by hand and attached them to the twisted power poles -- construction workers from out of town kept getting lost.

Journalists, keep out

City and FEMA officials, meanwhile, seem to be aware that conditions in the Big Easy are an embarrassment: Residents of the fenced-off container parks have been forbidden from speaking with journalists. When reporters recently defied the prohibition and ventured into the provisional settlements anyway, residents described the conditions there as "horrible." Private security guards promptly threw out the uninvited guests.