Topic: The Truth About New Orleans: An Update So We Do Not Forget

New Orleans has always been a complex city, and despite its most common nickname (one never used by locals, who know better), it's never been easy. Never has its ingrained dichotomy been more evident than now, the weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina. On one hand, there is the French Quarter, brightly lit up and noisy, night after night. On the other hand, there is Claiborne Avenue, and most of New Orleans East, and most distressingly, the Lower Ninth Ward, from which comes so much of what made this city vital and unique, street after street after street of bare concrete slabs, of ruined houses that landed on other ruined houses, of cars tossed every which way, and at night, all of it plunged into darkness.

(source: www.frommers.com/Dec. 8, 2005; by Mary Herczog)

Guest: Kera Moseley, Ph.D.

Dr. Kera Moseley currently serves as the President/CEO of Moseley Research Consulting Inc., a female minority owned and operated consulting firm located in New Orleans, Louisiana. Established in 1995, MRC Inc. provides a full array of nonprofit technical assistance services to public and governmental health and social service nonprofit agencies. She holds a Masters and Doctoral degree from Tulane University, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and has over 20 years of public health experience locally, nationally and internationally. She served for three years as a US Peace Corps Health Volunteer in Sierra Leone, West Africa, working with several governmental and community nonprofits, as well as WHO/GPA and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health in establishing the first comprehensive HIV/AIDS program for the country in 1990. Her work was selected and named as a “Top 10 Congressional Highlight” and presented to the United States Congress in 1991. In 1993, she organized the first global conference to address HIV/AIDS in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. She has served as lead research investigator on over two-dozen original research and evaluation projects on public health topics ranging from infectious and chronic diseases to substance use and mental health. Several of her studies and evaluations have focused on high-risk behaviors and hard to reach populations. She has been lead author on over two-dozen original publications and reports, and has presented her work at several conferences locally, nationally and internationally.