Oprah: So what has haunted you most about your experiences [in New Orleans]?

Anderson: The people who died—our countrymen, our neighbors, who were left for weeks and weeks and weeks to rot in the streets. I can't get over the people I saw who drowned in their living rooms and who were left there for days and days because there weren't refrigerated trucks to pick them up in. … I saw a woman floating in her backyard a few feet away from a box of MREs (meals ready to eat) and around a corner there was a man laying on top of a car for two weeks at least.

I've worked in Rwanda on the genocide. I've worked elsewhere in Africa, and I've seen people die and left and dissolve into nothingness into the ground. I never thought I would see it in the streets of the United States of America.