Shoot

The

Wind

 

An

Eye-of-the-Storm-Witness

Account of Katrina & Rita

 

 

by CRISIS CORPS Volunteer

A. D. Thompson, RPCV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Horresco Referens

Lacrimae Rerun

 

“History is the truth that in the long run becomes a lie.  Whereas myth is a lie that in the long run becomes the truth.”  -Cocteau

 

“God provides the wind.  Man must raise the sail.” –Saint Augustine

 

“Night was close to her face.” –Nadine Gordimer

 

 

This book took me two days to write, two months to live, two months to avoid, two seconds to regret, two lifetimes to forget.

 

 

This book is horror, confession, myth, true crime, science fiction, gonzo journalism, fait divers, epic.  Read it.

 

P.S. All the names are fictitious, including mine and yours.  The places are as real as they come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an ancient goddess named Kali.  As she spins her tendrils expand, strings of fate, slender sharp tentacles tangle, reaching out to touch the world.  They stir the dark waters.  They mix it in the earth red and black and yellow and clutch at trees, throw in foul wet wood.  The very air they churn and electrify.  Strands whip out everywhere from the great eye that sees all and discriminates nothing.  One life it seizes and another it leaves alone- why?  It swells, rises and subsides, has its own fierce rhythms and heeds none other.  It is beautiful in a way; let’s tell the truth.  But only the liars say it cleanses.  It leaves behind chaos and fear and debris.  Pieces of everything it scatters to the six directions: photos, armchairs, plants, pliers,  children’s shoes, knives...  All lay in the dank mud afterwards.  Bugs breed.  Kali laughs.  Henceforth her new name shall be…

 

Katrina.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fade to Black.

 

Kzsgh;’hdgf shtkl hoi 0y6 08=1y36=98

POWER FALURE

 

I cannot write to you anymore. 

You must take over.

Where is everyone???

What is that noise noise?

What is this feeling rising rising rising?…

Do you read this by candle light now: feeble, flickering, smoky, smelling, measured out?

Snuff.

 

All dark.

Alone.

Alive?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Many of Us Will Go?

From COLUMBIA, SC

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

External Validity???

 

Sitting in class.  Masters of Social Work year two: Organizing, Fundraising, Research… In each class we pause to pay lip service to what Katrina means to our profession.  It exposes the inequities of our society, etc.  Too true.  So what shall we do?  “Okay, now to Chapter Four: External Validity.”  What the..?!

 

I called Red Cross right away.  Spotted the ad in the paper.  I do not own a TV.  I admit I  missed most of the images you all have in your heads from CNN.  I have my own to share.  But I read the news and listen to NPR and hear the call for HELP.  Deep in my bones I hear it somehow.  Sure we had raised money for Granada, the Tsunami, other disasters.  This one for some reason grabs me hardest.  I know I must go, damn the cost.

 

On Labor Day, more than a week after Katrina hit, I went to an all day training Red Cross held in the Auditorium of our State Department of Health Building Complex.  It was basic, an introduction to what is called Mass Care.  I looked around at the others- young, old, men, women, different races and ethnicities.  It was inspiring.

 

“How many of us will go?” someone asked.  There were three hundred of us. 

 

“All of you who are ready,” answered our facilitator, a veteran of many disasters, a local.  Many volunteers were once victims themselves.  He explains that Red Cross needs four thousand volunteers right away.  Most stay only two to three weeks and then must be replaced.  The time limit is real and to be respected.  They are still sending volunteers to New York City since 9/11 apparently.  This impresses us all into silence.  But the reality will be seen later.  Many were called up locally.  Few went to the Gulf Coast.

 

Our facilitator takes questions seriously, but has a sense of humor thankfully.  The jokes are not worth repeating but modeled an important skill in surviving disasters psychically.  The questions were sometimes amusing too, although earnest.  I did not laugh out loud as one accustomed to strange deployments myself.  I know there is no guessing which person will crack under the strain.  Those concerned about packing toiletries may end up being some of the most stable volunteers.  There is almost no telling.

 

The video is not too bad.  There are famous folk in it: the Baldwin from Backdraft for instance.  More importantly there are many real disaster scenes, not those seen on the news which are most dramatic, but simple ones about shelter, feeding, medical care and counseling.  They have alas all been erased in my mind now along with whatever feelings of apprehension or excitement I had then, eclipsed by the experiential reality to follow.

 

There is lingo to learn of course.  Some he explains.  Some he does not.  Our facilitator stops the video often for questions.  An ERV is an “emergency rescue vehicle”.  They are like a cross between an ambulance and an ice cream truck.  Teams of two drive the food to shelters and around routes where people (henceforth clients) await hot meals. He warns us to be careful backing them up: there have been fatalities.  There is a driving course.

 

Red Cross cars are not for your individual use, he warns us.  Do not take from the boxes of phone cards.  You are stealing the donated dollar.  Do not talk to the press.  There is someone designated to do that.  One volunteer told a local TV news crew they needed cereal or something and then they were swamped with it, whereas in fact they had other more urgent needs.  What made this advice so useful was that one detected a real life story behind each bit.  It is in this vein I hope to write this book, offering my own real experience and the real life stories people shared with me.  Otherwise one gets bogged down in a morass of editorializing and procedure as fetid and sticky as the sludge Katrina left on Gulf State streets and floors and everything else it touched.

 

*

 

“Here’s a name tag.  Fill it out.  Follow her…” to a card table behind a line of zombie like survivors.  Forms on the table.  That is all the introduction I get.  The thin, thin woman on walkie-talkie in khaki shorts with clipboard, severely pulled back frazzled red hair and pale wan unsmiling face is clearly the boss.  The larger older woman who conducts me through the maze of people, stations, halls and stairs is all a blur, as are almost all the other volunteers and the first few clients, cases, forms, cards…

 

On my way from my work at HABLA in an old elementary school on Pickins Street that the University uses as the Center for Child and Family Studies, I notice some commotion, police directing traffic. I only notice because I am irritated, tired after a shift interpreting Spanish for Social Services in the Center and I want to get home.  The center of the mess seems to be the Armory building with its triptych flagpole, a building I had barely noticed before.  Faded letting in the masonry reads: Navy and later I will jokingly call it the Old Navy as rows of cages upstairs now hold piles of donated clothes, shoes, and sundry.

 

Later that evening I get the call to go do case work for Red Cross at their Intake Center on Pickins Street.  Do I know the place?  My girlfriend runs me over there and ends up staying and volunteering herself, just as I had roped her into going to the training.  Red Cross however never successfully deployed her.  It becomes apparent later that the local chapter lost our paperwork for a while.  Carolina Cares is the newly formed organism formed to coordinate the effort.  Almost all local agencies are there in one spot for clients.  We end up in the end receiving thousands of evacuees from New Orleans. 

 

Note the layers and levels beginning to surface: Red Cross as distinct from Carolina Cares.  Later another dozen agencies come in to the mix.  We volunteers were often caught in the mess, so imagine how frustrated our tired clients must be.  And this is in only one of the affected states.  Then there is the federal level.  In Louisiana it is worse.

 

It must be said that I had not heretofore been impressed by social services in the state of South Carolina.  I worked with refugees and immigrants and found official reception very frosty compared to the usual warmth of Southern hospitality.  Imagine my surprise then to walk in the doors of this edifice, past the cops and smokers, and be greeted by a fruit arrangement.  Every client family had a “shepherd” (great idea, unfortunate choice of nomenclature) to take them around.  Many clients had flowers.  Kids had toys.

 

There were halls around a large central room.  To the left was Red Cross, Office for the Aging, a nursery.  In back were shower rooms.  In the main room were many casework computers.  Somewhere too were phones and computers for clients to contact loved ones and register for FEMA.  To the right was an information window, housing, a nurse’s station.  Upstairs they had places to apply for Medicaid, Family Independence (Welfare), Food Stamps, Social Security, Identification Cards.  The Red Cross “case work” room was in the back corner.  By the time they reached us they were exhausted.

 

Keep in mind I got the call that first day around five or six in the evening.  I was there past midnight processing clients.  We started again at eight the next morning.  What we offered them was a CAT card with cash on it, the amount depending on family size.

This was to tide them over cash wise until FEMA came through (good luck!) or other employment, sustenance, etc. was secured.  Sound simple?

 

In some ways it was.  I was thankful when Red Cross briefed us eventually that an example was made of a family of four.  Looking at them you see mom and two children.  On the paperwork you read father: deceased, dated yesterday.  If the mom insists they are still a family of four, that is to say she is not there yet accepting the situation, we were told to give her an award for a family of four. 

 

“Don’t make a big deal over it.”

 

That was the best advice I ever heard!  If only it were always so.  Other agencies too were waiving many usual requirements, expediting the process.  I am convinced the savings in time, burnout, training, etc. more than compensate for whatever duplications in benefits resulted.  But there were complications.  We were always waiting for more cards and then eventually they did run out.  After that we had to write Purchase Orders for specific stores.  Some stores limited us to certain locations or other things, therefore we wrote them all for BiLo (groceries) and Kmart (clothes) who were more flexible.

 

So that was the basic job.  We just needed to gather a little information on each client, write a few numbers in on their forms and send them on their way with their “shepherd” to their next stop or the hotel if they were lucky.  There was hot food in there somewhere too!  But I never got a break to go find it.  I sat, watched a case or two, grabbed a pen and started saying yes to the random people asking me if I were available.

 

*

 

“What kind of music do you like?”

 

I don’t remember how I got the conversation around to this.  Maybe I mentioned my own travels in Louisiana before.  Let the line grow.  I want to know.

 

“Jazz,” the man says.  I start to tell him about Mac’s on Main owned by jazzman Fatback and location of the best peach cobbler in town.  Fusion, Be-bop, no Dixieland though…

 

“I love peach cobbler!” the man smiles at last.  I could not stand the vacant stare.  Was it him or me?  He is missing a tooth, marked.  Louisiana is a poor state, no mistake.  I am missing a tooth myself and as a social worker I should know the system.  But unless you can get to Mexico for dentists and Canada for meds you cannot afford to wait to save a tooth.  Out it comes!  True too our clients are mostly Black- but beware assumptions!  In this way Columbia, SC is an accidental good match for many of these folks: we are majority African American with a slow pace of home-cooked, gospel-music life…

 

They class up the place though.  Minutes to grab their stuff and most men have hats on!

Gentlemen’s caps.  Kangols.  Now that’s style!

 

“I want to go,” his wife says.  She is falling asleep at the table, picking at the contents of a plastic box of cooling salty greens and fried chicken.  She has such bad bug bites all over her I tell her “shepherd” (from some church or another) to take her to the nurse while I finish with the husband.

 

“Do you have any injuries?”

 

“Dog bit me in the hotel I was staying in.  No, I didn’t go up to pet it.  It just come and bit me out of the blue.”

 

Dog bites were the most common upper body injury.  Most frequently though the cuts and scrapes were on legs, from wading through brackish water and bumping sharp debris.

 

I cannot remember more details.  I saw a few dozen more clients like that.

 

*

 

This character has a big old hat and not only that a walking stick.  But he is young, white.  They call him Wyatt Earp.  He talks loudly, volunteering lots of information, some of it what I need for the forms.  He has a serious grudge against his (ex-?) wife.

 

“What possessions do you have with you now?”

 

“What are your immediate needs?”

 

“What is the state of your home?”

 

They have almost nothing, one bag, some of their documents, some not, houses gone.

In the face of this it is not surprising to me that they would assert their personalities.

But some are silent.

 

*

 

One of the most distraught is a policewoman.  She sobs and cannot tell me much.  Her sister lives in Charlotte and has come down to get her.  This does not seem to please her.  Her sister talks a lot.  They are Black middle class.  In some ways they seem better off.

Eventually I guess the deeper problem.  The sister is overbearing yes.  But the real bond is with the horse.  She was mounted police.  Her horse stayed behind.

 

Red Cross told us all the work would be on computers.  There are no computers.  The real problem I was told is not getting the information IN (logistics, basics, demographics), it is getting the information OUT.  These people- people first, clients second- they have stories to tell and we have little time for them.  Now I find the story hard to tell myself.

 

*

 

My client is an older Black man, gaunt, dignified.  The scruffy white kid at the next table is with him somehow though you would never guess it.  Luckily the kid likes to talk and fills in many of the blanks in the old man’s story.  The old man cannot read.  He nods his assent.  He is aware, alert, wary perhaps, sharp for that, wise even.

 

They were neighbors perhaps.  They were forced to evacuate.  Almost all the evacuees in that planeload were forced to evacuate.  They were not told where they were going until they were in the air.  Some had family in Atlanta.  But some were from Nevada.  They went the wrong way!

 

“My house was undamaged until the army helicopter,” one client says.

 

Another client was given ten minutes to pack, “or you go out in cuffs” they said.

 

These two took a boat out.  When their boat ran out of gas they pushed it, chest deep in water and mud, until they came upon an abandoned car.  The old man was wiry.  I imagine he could push a boat farther than I could.  The kid was broken up.  He really wanted to confess.  They took that gas from the car.  Did that make them looters?

 

Not in my book.

 

*

 

I approached one skinny dread-locked fellow sitting for a long time in the corner by himself.  He stared at me blankly.  On instinct I spoke to him in Spanish.  Many of the Latinos in Louisiana I learned were Black Hondurans.  We chatted a while.  He kept the child while his newlywed wife did the papers.  Someone was giving her a hard time about identification.  She had a strong accent- Brooklyn I think, maybe Bronx.  Her license was from New York.  They had just married and moved to Louisiana which they did not like.

 

Of each client we asked their eventual plans.  They were just off a plane, arriving in a state they never bought a ticket to, who wanted them to stay and work, but a week ago they were in homes in Louisiana, some for generations, some like this couple in an apartment they would never get safety deposits back from.  They did not care where they went.  The children played and seemed the best adapted overall.  Overall most clients were calm and helpful, polite and appreciative.  Many said they would stay if they liked it.  This easy transient nature is not just existential; it is a feature of the working class who live form paycheck to paycheck anyway.

 

I had asked Red Cross if they needed Spanish caseworkers for the Hispanic evacuees.  No, really, there had not been a need, I was told.  I wonder how many Latinos sat in the corner silently with nobody helping them until they just went wandering away.  There was an Asian man I noticed across the room who nobody could talk to; he just used the few words of English he knew over and over.  They gave him a card with money on it.

 

*

 

Other complicated situations came up.  A man came looking for his “woman”.  She had not listed him on her family card.  We had sent her to a hotel already.  Someone asked me to handle it.  It was very possibly an oversight and reuniting families is always a priority with displaced persons.  On the other hand we could not know the nature of this man’s relationship to the woman or whether she wanted to be found by him.  We could not assume.  So I set about trying to discover the procedure only to find that there was none.  I went to housing to see if we could call the woman.  Unfortunately just as an I finished explaining the situation and as the understanding gentleman in that “office” was attempting to locate the lady, down comes the man with his caseworker, a teacher by trade, who decides the man had waited long enough, and though I ask them to wait comfortably upstairs she barks at me No! and so there I had to leave the man in housing to deal with a very touchy situation.  I attempted to explain to my “colleague” what was happening on the way back up the stairs but she was confusedly apologetic.

 

*

 

This should be the story of the evacuees, the victims and survivors, clients, residents, those affected firsthand.  But it cannot help also being the story of the volunteers.  Most were untrained, sold cell phones full time, a few social work students joined us, no professors although one had been at the Red Cross training complaining that more of us from the Program did not participate.  State workers were allowed two weeks leave automatically to serve.  Students like me lost all credit for the semester at least.

 

There were some excellent volunteers.  The large Black lady who brought us CAT cards and checked our forms was full of good humor.  She did not, I think, work in social work regularly, but took to it right away.  The next morning I was sitting next to a very young woman, slight of build, unimposing but not intimidated either.  I learned chatting that she worked in Africa in refugee camps all year and was here in the States on her vacation.

 

Some vacation!  Now that’s an addict, I thought.  Our Red Cross trainer had warned us of this.  The adrenalin would carry you a while, he said.  But beware the eventual burnout later!  The far-off look in this young woman’s face told me there was wisdom in this.  She looked not quite like the victims.  She was beyond vicarious trauma.  It had her life.

 

*

 

I continued volunteering there.  There were too many cases to recall.  There were politics too of course.  All in all I was proud of my city and the job we were doing.  But there were many who could serve here without leaving their families and jobs.  I knew I was one of the few available to GO in where we were needed most.  And strangely I needed to see it all up close.  Going home each day to my own cozy life felt oddly uncomfortable.

 

In the end it was not Red Cross that called me up.  It was not Americorps although they did put a call out to their alumni later.  It was the Peace Corps that called me.  I was registered for an arm called Crisis Corps that went into disaster areas around the world where volunteers had served and hit the ground running with language skills and local contacts.  They had never before deployed domestically.  We were told we would be making history.

 

There were many plans to be made certainly.  Medical was trickiest.  I made the mistake of listing a few conditions common among us in America (allergies, lethargies…) and received a call from the nurse holding up my ticket.  I managed to reassure her, I charmed the interviewer over the phone with stories from my Peace Corps days in the Sahara, and my various causes here at home.  I went to the Adventure Outfitter store and bought fancy pants and compass watch and fast-drying shoes and other gear trying to recapture lost youth.  Ironically we used to mock such well-geared volunteers back in my Peace Corps days clad in flip-flops and rice sack.  My e-ticket message arrived in my inbox.  In less than a day I was ready to go, despite cell phone antics, my returning calls to the wrong person in D.C., some stress in Kinkos, and other assorted frustrations.  I sent a mass message to all my profs and clients and various other obligations begging out of all ministrations and communications for the next month, my term of service, took leave of my sweet, sweet understanding girlfriend at the airport and boarded a plane for…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FEMISH!!!

ORLANDO, FL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are no suffering masses in this chapter.  There is not one single client!  Yet this will be the bitterest chapter of all, not despite the absence of the afflicted but exactly because of this fact.  It was all one big waste of time, effort, money, and spirit.  It was not tragic but criminal!  In order to offset this sour note I must bring in a comic element.

 

Todd was the first of my cohort I met.  It was already surreal stepping out in the Florida sunshine to catch the shuttle to my fancy hotel.  I was geared up for the swamp and here I walked into the lobby to learn about open bar and hot tub hours! 

 

“Meet at one this afternoon in the lobby to be briefed and sworn in,” my note said.

 

I skimmed the TV in my room for an hour or so, showered, dressed, waiting for a roommate who never came, then took myself down for the meeting.  News images of the devastation was all I saw, like any other American in the Midwest or Hawaii for that matter!  I wanted to hide in that room, ashamed at myself for all I was feeling, afraid.  The attempts at corruption had already begun.   Should I blame Peace Corps, a federal agency after all?  This was unprecedented everyone said, but unexpected- really?!  The plan was being written on the fly, off the hip.  We were teamed with FEMA.  The story broke on “useless” FEMA training as I underwent it- the endless sessions: sexual harassment and human resource procedures, which Act established what….

 

“While old ladies rot on the sidewalk!!!” 

 

One of the things I loved about Todd was his sense of righteous indignation.  He had suffered much himself and so thought he understood the impatience… 

 

“A son has to watch maggots eat his mother’s corpse!”

 

Admittedly these rants were not Todd’s funnier moments.  But macabre humor would come soon enough, and the whole surreality, one had to appreciate the irony of the situation.  There was nowhere to eat at the FEMA training center.  Todd called it “femish”. 

 

Many acronyms there were to learn.  Todd like to play with them.

 

“For Ever My Amour” is how he spelled FEMA!

 

He kept me sane those days learning that if one did not qualify for SBA one could still get ONA and that failing your FIT or income test was good because you were eligible for aid but could still be unqualified for an ENA award if house damage was answered “no” when client filled it in on the Web because say they were in a rental or they put damaged dwelling as their current location because they had returned since the mandatory evacuation.

 

From behind I saw a green polka dotted shirt and a wild mane of hair.  This is a Peace Corps, I guessed!  Todd also had earrings and sandals he soon kicked up on the table.  He had done Crisis Corps before.  In fact he had been deployed to Kenya faster than FEMA got him to Louisiana from Seattle where he worked as a contractor and lived in free union with a woman and her daughter.  He lived to kayac the sound at dawn.and had artistic sensibilities.  He had been medically evacuated from Kenya, fought to return, and then had been kicked out “kinda” for something involving a girl.  In Peace Corps he had an old school thermos in which glass botTodd he transported certain plant matter.  He had once been fired from a job for farting into the phone.

 

‘But it was at a friend, not a customer!” he protested.

 

“Dan, baby,” he took an immediate liking to me… Some called us twins!

 

Scary.

 

The rest were an unmotley crew I am sorry to say.  There was a quiet fellow who served in China, often got lost, and stayed on in Orlando as a trainer after we finally left.   The women were all fairly quiet, although I heard tell later that they got much more friendly around soldiers.  In their defense two of them had been studying at Tulane and were evacuees themselves and perhaps shell-shocked.  There was another silent type named Adam, an African American minister with a wife and baby girl he called often.  He had served in Latin America somewhere.  Then there were three interesting older fellows:

Paul was a retired nature lover who had run a non-profit, a steady man and wise, Jimmy was a devil’s advocate type (and clashed cartoonishly with Todd) proud of his skills in mediation.  Our fearless leader was Randal who was a lawyer “not a lobbyist” who had the glad-hand down and I loved.  Paul was bearded, Jimmy was thin, Randal was boyish.

They all dressed kinda J.Crew.  Adam had more gear than all of us put together.   The women, sorry again, were for me, I admit it, forgettable.

 

*

 

This would not be a Peace Corps reunion it soon became clear.

 

Sitting in the hot tub one evening after open bar, Todd and I could not entice some folks from the cohort before us to join us.  They were studying!  They had finished training but FEMA had yet to get them plane tickets to a Gulf State.  Sad.  Instead we had the company of a shady contractor who knew all about hurricanes, he told us.  We went to bed early.  Hotel breakfast was served until relatively late but we had to start training at seven in the a.m. for no apparent reason.  A Peace Corps trainer took us in a minivan as the Florida highways are not safe to walk.  This same trainer informed us of our per diem (which came to four thousand for the month- this was not even salary for FEMA!) and gave us forms to rent cars if any could be found, then made us swear the same oath we had made back in Peace Corps regular service- years ago for some, more recently for others.  It is the same oath our presidents swear, to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.  I had hated the first part serving in Africa, saying it in front of my hosts and new friends, but now ironically I liked the last part in America-although I am not sure the terror-mongers understand it the same as I do.

 

*

 

Disclaimer: I do not understand animal lovers. 

 

I was attacked by a dog as a boy.  But I do not dislike animals.  I want them to be free.  I will not argue this point here.  I argued it with Todd who fired an employee for not taking good care of Todd’s dog at a work site.  Todd has strong socialist tendencies generally.

What is important is that when vehemently defending various positions, drunk I admit, Todd told me I had taken it “past people’s comfort levels”.  A beautiful phrase that and it stayed with me in many ways throughout my time of service.

 

Before I left a manager at my bank who could not help me told me the saddest story she had seen.  Everyone has something to say about Katrina.  It was someone feeding a dog on a bridge.  The dog attacked the person.  She felt bad for the dog.

 

I do not mind people loving animals, although I believe they misunderstand even their own pets.  I do not even mind the reality of the situation: people will not leave their animals.  Many folks who die in disasters are social isolates: non-English speaking sometimes, elderly more often.  They stay with pets.  Pets left behind die most often.

It is part of people’s mourning.  But they are not allowed in Red Cross shelters- for many reasons.  I am sorry but I agree with this policy.  FEMA sent volunteers to animal shelters.  That is okay by me too.  It is only one aspect of this confusing society in a situation of disaster since Katrina and in many cases before.  Loneliness can kill.

 

*

 

FEMA makes me wax philosophical on many points.  Let us stick to the facts.  The FEMA complex was terrible.  We trained in a hot, noisy warehouse.  The trainers were condescending and confused.  There was coffee at least but it was somewhere in the maze.  To eat one had to make one’s way to the mall.  We had no car of course.

 

“Clap for your partner!” our trainer commands us, after one inanely easy exercise.

 

When we were finally allowed on the computers we were not allowed access to real cases and the few Oscar pulled up contradicted him.  They told us what our job was NOT and what we could not do.  They were wrong about our access later.   Oscar said not to use his name.  He would be sued.  I protested.  They could not get us plane tickets on time.

 

We learned about hazards like gas, fire, and clients.  Many numbers were thrown at us, codes and maximum amounts.  The recoup effort matched abatement but that was all done at the NPC, none of our business.  We were mere apologists for those decisions.

We had to be detectives.  No wait, that was not out job either.

 

No hard questions were allowed.  In the press they knew as much as we did.  At the end of training a long speech was made blaming all on the Homeland Security merger (the border cops in our midst wished to bring their guns).  Another problem was lack of “leads”- FEMA subdivided at every seventh person (asexually, one supposes), but seemed to have infinite levels of separation. The purpose?

 

FEMA was to protect people and property.  It became quickly apparent that they leaned heavily towards protecting property, not people.  “Safeguarding the taxpayer dollar” was a phrase Oscar used that often made me laugh.  FEMA feared one thing- duplication of benefits.  For that reason any renter or adult child living at home who made a separate claim on a same address or phone number was basically screwed.  But I did not know that yet!

 

Oscar did explain one reason someone could be denied benefits if their case looked good.   The county perhaps had not done what FEMA said construction-wise according to this or that flood area and thus all residents’ claims in that county were summarily denied! What to do?  Draft appeal letters?  We cannot tell them what to do or say, Oscar said.

 

Whatever can be said against what FEMA evily calls the VolAgs (other volunteer agencies like Salvation Army) -and there are legitimate problems even with Red Cross which has local chapters to their credit- FEMA is in another class of evil.  Everything they do sounds evil: FRAATS and NEMIS, etc. It soon became apparent that we were supposed to be canon fodder facing the mass of their disgruntled victims, first out of the boat, as it were. 

 

Femish, indeed.

 

*

 

There was one session of FEMA training we got to miss, but I regret it now.   I went to the mall for lunch.  The bus system to get back was terrible.  I ended up waiting a long time and talked to a young Haitian woman who was homesick, just graduated high school, looking for work to support her aging mother, hated the mall, broke, on the verge of tears.  I spoke to her in my African accented French.  We laughed about pepper sauce.

She thanked me when I got on my bus at last.  The people to help, I must remember, are everywhere.

 

I had been excused from the session since it had to do with billing FEMA, how to collect money, how much for car, hotel, per diem, salary, hazard pay, who knows what else.  Although none of this applied to me since we had our money up front and would not be issued government credit cards or seek reimbursement for expenses, still I wish I had been present to learn how much these beknighted heroes, these poor complaining displaced workers, these FEMA temps were making!  Safeguarding the taxpayer dollar- HA! HA!

 

*

 

We were booked on a plane at last- Adam, Randal, Todd, Jimmy, and I.  The women had later tickets.  Paul had already gone.  Some stayed in Orlando for weeks.  We were lucky to get going at last.  I could not have stood another day in the moral morass of FEMA-world as I called that horrific Orlando theme-park from Hell!  Of course the tickets were not right, there was no plane, no seats, etc.  Somehow it all got worked out.  Only poor Todd got left (although he beat us to Baton Rouge somehow!) … And then there were four.

We had hours to wait so naturally we were shuffled through security easily, our FEMA badges shining brightly, dearly bought.  Todd sweated the FEMA security check as he told me encounters he had had with federal park rangers.  In the nurse’s line at FEMA he told me about his native Hawaiian tattoo, a huge eye in a hand on his back.  My Celtic knot armband from Buenos Aires could not compare.

 

Now here we were in FEMA polo shirts (honeybee brand, I kid you not!) with FEMA baseball caps, all American.  Todd even buzz cut his hair.  We were changed already, ushered into the waiting gates.  Todd engaged poor Adam on some point of theology and would not let him go even in the john where Adam sat trapped in a stall doing his business as Todd stood just beside pontificating.  Later Todd and Jimmy began their squabbling.  I talked strategy with Randal for our Baton Rouge excursion but mainly stood apprehensive.  I will admit I felt important.  That is what frightened me.

 

I was glad we had been assigned to Louisiana.  I would not have minded being sent to Mississippi or Texas but admit I dreaded being sent to Arkansas or Oklahoma.  There you have it.  We all have our prejudices.

 

I do not remember anything from the plane ride.  Was there a special forces agent going to secure “targets of opportunity” or did I dream that.  Where would I even dream up such terms?  I prefer to remember nothing of the plane ride.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Savage Baptism

SLIDELL, LA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It must be said.  Much of Louisiana looked like it had been hit by a hurricane before Katrina came along.  God willing and the creek don’t rise, it will get better if they seize this opportunity…  Even the Capital City is gray and crumbling, although it has potential and history.  We would not see much of Baton Rouge except in our lost wanderings.  We had to make our own way to the JFO (Joint Field Office) for Louisiana FEMA had set up in an abandoned building called ironically the Renaissance Center.  The contact number we called never answered.  Jimmy got a rental car somehow from the airport after several of us tried and now at last after more than a week we felt ourselves full deployed.  We would be of service at last…

 

No!  The Renaissance Center was what we delicately call a cluster-fuck.  Blackwater “security” (mercenaries from Iraq who do not come cheap) kept us well sequestered in the JFO.  Each morning we reported to a staging area where an insecure minor boss named Debbie tried and failed to deploy us for the day.  Meanwhile we were left to wander this bustling shell of a place.  The organizational chart posted there is larger than many complexes!  One time I found a tucked away little room with name cards on the table.  Who made decisions here?  It was empty.  In training FEMA told us to “manage expectations”.  Did they mean us?  We were assets to them, “bodies”.  If you could not change a situation, they said, change the meaning.  How?

 

“You kids are so cute,” Debbie said to us, “we don’t want anything to happen to you.”

One morning Debbie asked us to meet at the eating tables where she never showed.  Later when she saw us she scolded us for not meeting her on time in another place!  Was it all a sick ruse?

 

*

 

Dividers had been put up everywhere.  Of course it was no trouble to see in to an area where military figures might be mulling around with maps, or a phone bank, or a row of laptops.  Broken escalators led to a second story.  There one eventually found a tunnel over to the other side of this massive place where the food was.  Behind this was a pallet path with pillows, bedding, cots.  Upstairs a giant empty room housed men and in one corner four showers had been set up.  It was dark but the warehouse rules on returns of merchandise could still be read.

 

FEMA staff complained about the food being cold.  We had coffee, egg sandwiches, full dinners.  They complained it was not free.  Heaven forbid the locals be allowed to have some business!  It became clear the whole vibe was disgruntled.  One company of firemen had t-shirts printed that said “WE AIN’T FEMA!”

 

I reclined in a corner losing faith, but sipping my cold coffee grateful for caffeine, and wondering if I would ever be able to help anyone.  I found a phone to call out to the world for words of encouragement.  (My cell signal struggled there and I was afraid to charge it at night for theft what with mercenaries all around…)  Home was encouraging about my mission but it became clear I would pay a high price: my job there was being advertised.  Then suddenly word came: We had a job at last!  Tim had threatened to rip Dominatrix Debbie’s head off.  Randal had worked his magic and scored us a job for a…

 

Day.

 

It seems there were not enough “leads” to open a DRC (Disaster Recovery Center) for us to staff although  New Orleans desperately needed one (some of us went there to make sandwiches).  Our offer to open a DRC leadless (what difference would it make) was rouldy rebuffed.  There were rules.  So we were off for the day to Slidell on the other side of Lake Ponchartraine and to the Caravan of Hope…

 

*

 

Maps were secured.  An obscene amount of bedding was taken- just in case… and not enough water for the heat of course!  Security hassled us going out.  Jimmy’s rental fit us all miraculously, Peace Corps style.  It even had a computer that talked to you- scary.

If you stopped for gas and turned off the set route it said “no.”

 

At first the drive was beautiful, green.  Then there were more and more downed trees.  Then the shacks began to appear.  Slidell had been a train wreck before any hurricanes hit.  But there was no doubt though about their faith.  There seemed to be as many churches as houses.  Typically they were small white wood structures but they were not unadorned.  One had a huge sign with an agonizing bloody crucified Jesus on it.  It read: “Sin  Sins Sinner”, something like that.  It was scary in context, and portentous.  It was undamaged.  Those who say Katrina cleansed a sinful city are casting dangerous stones.  Forgetting the Enlightenment and Lisbon, they do not know they live in glass houses.

What they say is terrible and makes more difficult this task of understanding the chaos that strikes all faiths equally.

 

Billboards were splintered.  Storefronts were smashed.  Soon every other edifice was showing signs of damage.  The image that stands out in my mind is that of a boat tied up against the side of a house.   The water had subsided in such a way to leave the boat hanging about the height of my head.  Broken stalks stood where perhaps water towers once were, satellite dishes dangling.  Giant containers overflowed with detritus: splintered planks, siding, window frames, house frames, tree limbs, bushes, broken bicycles, sheet metal bent into eerie shapes, iron rods snapped neatly in two…

 

*

 

We see a giant eighteen-wheeler with “Caravan of Hope” painted on its side against a stars & stripes type patriotic motif complete with eagle.  It would have been more honest if it also had the suffering son of man on its side.   It was parked in an enormous parking lot.  The strip mall therein was utterly devastated.  I used to have nightmares about the “Day After” like many Cold War era children.  This looked like our worst-imagined fallout from an A-bomb.    For the first half hour after I finally found a porta-potty all I could do was walk around surveying the disasterscape.  The saddest thing was a little library branch with thick black stuff on the floor, like tar, ceiling tiles falling among the books all of them molding becoming something fuzzy and fungal.  The front was all smashed in and I heard someone say it was looting.  For books?  I wondered how many of the images of looting were actually scenes stolen by the rain and air.

 

Next I walked around the operation.  We were to work in the back busting up boxes and pallets.  Then we sorted cans into bags for families, a few potted meats, a few fruits and veggies.  It is the kind of work I love.  But I wanted to see the rest.  The recipients came in cars.  I suppose those without must starve or depend on neighbors.  As cars (trucks mostly actually) entered, the first stop was a bunch of Midwest Christian high-schoolers who asked if clients wanted to pray with them.  Only after that did they roll up to meet Randal and get a cool drink and directions. 

 

There was a stop for picking up paper goods, another for sanitary goods, a separate one for women’s things and diapers, a nurse’s station, boxes of dried goods, the cans of course, then they could pull around for a branch operation offering clothes and more of the Christ. 

 

“Camino de la Esperanza” offered “crisis counseling” on their sign but had no counselors and spoke little Spanish.  It consisted mainly in the pastor putting the arm around your shoulders and bowing heads in prayer to the risen Lord.  I am not generally one who is critical of faith-based social services.  On the contrary they have always been among those who are doing the most.  But I must admit this seemed parasitic to me.  They flocked like flies at disasters I soon learned.  They were nice.  I sat with them.  They gave me lemonade.  We chatted.  But within minutes the subject of my soul came up.  My avowal that I was Mahayana Buddhist did not deter.  After a few questions to show their complete ignorance of other faith traditions, they started in on their spiritual journey and wouldn’t I want to join them?  The Way of the Cross is alright by me although I received neither the communion nor confirmation of my Catholic family.  What I object to is folks like this one who ask me of these victims who live in sin: “How can they call themselves Christians?”  Southern civility barely kept my tongue in my head as I thought: “How can you not??” 

 

*

 

Luckily it was then that a nice Honduran lady came up.  Buena suerte too that I was there to speak Spanish with her.  She was not in crisis luckily.  She just had questions about the clothes.  I interpreted.  Then we chatted a while.  She was a hairdresser, not a migrant worker.  One of her daughters was a lawyer back home and another a travel agent- she wanted to go back there.  The complication was these children she had with her here.  They were not hers it seemed to me but she kept them for someone.  

 

The younger was busy among the donated toys.  The older, a wild-haired girl of ten or so, came over with a big smile.  She had a bedraggled little floppy-eared puppy in her arms.  She had found him during the storm, she said.  His name was “Tormenta”.  At the time I did not see it; we were happy.  Later I reflected on “Torment” as a title for this book.  When I worked for a Catholic group with Latino immigrants the faith question seemed less pernicious.  But when Evangelical sects proffer aid to other evangelical sects, all of their doctrines vaguely Protestant and mysterious to me, what is the line?

 

Whatever one believes, it seems to me, here comes another to challenge it.  For those who can listen strong in themselves, that can be a fine thing, I think.  There are dangers, complications, assumptions- but one must eat!  The Christian kids I packed cans with in back were quality persons, full or the spirit, sacrificing their vacation to serve.  But I think of the villages after the Tsunami where group after group came to vaccinate the children until it killed them- killing with kindness.  I do not doubt their intentions.  But we must assist in such a way as honors the recipient, must we not?  When I was in Chiapas during the elections that toppled PRI after eighty years in power there, the only violence that brought out the machetes was between Catholics and Pentacostals.  My personal preference among the many missionaries in Africa when I was there were those groups who did development work without proselytizing.  Surely this tragedy teaches us however that we must take the good with the bad.

 

*

 

The smell there is not of death.  It is the bayou.  I had lived in a swamp before and knew the smell well- decay certainly, some rotting flesh perhaps among the acridly recycling vegetation, stagnant water with algae, droppings, gases… Tim was horrified at one point he got a whiff of a suddenly turned breeze.  I was finishing my umpteenth Gatoraid, it was so hot! 

 

“My God, is that New Orleans we smell?”

 

I did not have the heart to tell him it was the porta-potty he smelled.  Even stench can be leant grandeur by our imaginations.  The spam burgers we ate on our lunch break I thought smelled nice.  Later though I did smell one of the worst things I have even encountered in my travels through Africa, Mexico, China, open sewers and the lot!

 

We opened the hundredth or thousandth box of creamed corn or pudding or some such.  A can had exploded therein and Botulism immediately infested the air all around.  Not just from heat and fatigue, I thought I might vomit.  Instead I sat right there and kept sorting cans.  This is what I had come to do and I was happy to finally be of use.  On the way back to the JFO to my cot however I have to admit to some bitter reflections. Surely this was not the best use of my skills.  There are many Christian kids to sort cans.  They really ought to be employing locals to do it actually.  They need the money!  Not only that but I had to go to Orlando to get trained for this?!  I was doing better work with Red Cross in Columbia before!  I had perhaps lost my job and certainly my semester for this.  And I had to get up early tomorrow to beg some FEMA flunky again for this chance!  I did not talk the whole way back.  Ruins passed by my window.  I may have dozed.

 

I did try to tell someone before I left the Caravan to change the crisis counseling sign to something more honest.  He said it was not his group!  Then I mentioned the local Food Bank crew that had come through inspecting.  Did they give any good ideas?  (It was soon to rain and everything was sitting outside- cereals, rice, etc.)  He said they were the ones who told the locals how to do it.  I said goodbye.  He did not say thank you.  That is the truth and I knew I would not go back there again.  I was running out of options though.

 

*

 

Debbie sent some of us to the animal shelter.  It was then I tried to create a coup.  I had gained the name of a local Food Bank in need of a crew.  I called the lady in Covington.  She offered an air-conditioned room to stay in, seemed desperate, wished me a blessed day.  I did try to get Randal our leader to call her.  But he was still in negotiations with Debbie to get us to a DRC.  Another one had opened and the group after us had been sent.  We were lost in the shuffle.  Apparently there were still not enough “leads”.  So I gave the Covington Food Bank contact to Debbie and she sent another crew- not us!- and again just for the day…  We meanwhile were stuck back at the JFO!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Up the Rope in

BATON ROUGE, LA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adam disappeared.  We had lost another.  He went to stay across the river at Port Allen.  I was also plotting my escape.  Tim was fit to crack.  Even Randal seemed manic.  We did not fit in.  Picture a giant warehouse with fifty to a hundred cots.  They were all in rough rows.  Ours were the only ones in a little square by a pillar, our little fort.  We had not noticed at first.  We just came in, tired, and plunked down naturally.  I prepared care packages to leave for the guys.  I had gone to the dollar store before deploying and picked up things to cheer shelterees.  Now I was using them on us.  There was oatmeal, beef jerky, cards of course, a super bouncy ball, light up party sticks to help find your way in the swamp, funny books, duct tape (a Peace Corps icon) for Tim, chopsticks…

 

*

 

Then we got sent to Salvation Army.  It was just another food bank preparing to open.  We did get to give out water and meet folks at least this time.  This was good enough to keep me in FEMA’s clutches another couple of days.  It was in another strip mall, in town this time.  A quiet, hard-working man ran it.  As usual we were not given any real instructions.  We just sort of figured out how to help.  The fellow who told us about it was a U.S. Marshal and looked the part, long blond fair under a hat, stubble, hard-nosed.  There were local volunteers there too.  One was taciturn.  I tried to talk to him on his smoke break.  He was just off his hundred acre farm, used to big silent spaces perhaps, come to help out in the “city”.  He knew about hard work!

 

The work was hot, so hot I could not eat but just gulped drinks down one after another.  I could not imagine living here.  I was like a mere day-tripper.

 

*

 

I bonded with the other local volunteer while pouring water over myself.  He had headphones on so I hadn’t spoken to him.  He took the headphones off and poured water over his self and told me slowly with coaxing his horrific story.  I could never do justice to what happened to him and the calm matter-of-fact way he told his peace without malice but here goes:

 

He was in a rehab clinic, a roundish fellow with an easy smile, Black, short hair, quiet, not a leader there I imagine, but his courage showed.  They smashed their was to the upper floors as the water rose.  Days passed.  They ate all the ketchup on crackers.  They had no water.  Boats passed.  Finally he climbed down like in a movie on a rope made of tied-together sheets.  He was at the level of the water, waiting, disease lapping at his heels.  The police boat came.

 

“Up the rope,” they said.

 

“What?!  We have no food or water!”

 

“Up!” the policeman drew his gun to explain. What could he do but climb back up stunned.  They cut the rope.

 

When the helicopters came they made it up on the roof. It was not the police who rescued them.  Not all of them had survived that long of course.  Did they feel cursed or worse- just expendable?

 

*

 

Sometimes I hear people say stories like this are apocryphal, urban legends.  I heard this even from clients in Louisiana.  I cannot see any reason for these folks to have invented them, and having met them in person I tell you I believe them without doubt, and anyway I’ve seen some things myself…

 

Another fellow asked for several cases of water.  Jimmy was inclined to set a limit.  I was of the feeling that as water had no street value anyone who waited ages in line for it most probably needed it pretty badly.  This young African American man was running a make- shift shelter.  I got to talking to him.  He told me about a ten year old who was celebrating his birthday that day.  He was happy because his parents were out of the hospital.  But his little sister was still touch and go.

 

“What happened?” I asked with some sudden sense of dread.

 

“The guard at the grocery store shot them.”

 

I did not ask any more.

 

The role of security forces in disaster is complicated.  There are masses to contend with and sometimes shortages.  Some order is needed.  But the real danger is panic.  In stress-ful situations one is either escalating or deescalating; there is rarely middle ground.  I like best those forces which are helping with the deescalating.  They should be trained for this and defer where appropriate to those with the proper training.  There is more to be said on this for sure but I want to tell stories, not editorialize. The stories speak for themselves.

 

* 

 

Of course there are some shady types, but they were innocuous.  There was a family came back day after day for water.  They had a truck with a bumper sticker about Noni juice.  I asked about it, trying o make small talk as always.  It’s the only way most people can start telling you their troubles. The brother from the Caribbean sold Noni juice.  She starts in on the sales pitch.  I remain non-committal.  But hey, they are just trying to get by, now like before, the only way they know how.  It reminds me of the lady in Michael Moore’s Flint who survives by cooking and skinning rabbits.  The Department of Health shuts her down, requires an expensive special sink.  Who knows where folks get the phone cards they sell?  Who knows if the cards work?  I have met many people through life who I knew could not tell me all their story truthfully just then.  But they never hurt me, not once.

 

*

 

Car after car, truck after truck came, even after we closed down for the day they were still coming for water.  There was a Vietnamese family of twenty some. This was common for all folks now.  People Black and white took in all their kin from New Orleans.  Even the rich LSU students had their parents with them now, on curfew, I joked. 

 

They were distracted sometimes, would drive off with trunks open, through barriers not seen.  A man came to pick up for his old neighbor.  He could barely open his car door, let alone haul water.  I can only imagine how feeble the neighbor was, whether still alive by the time he drove hours back out to him. 

 

There was a postman who came in his official jeep.  Perhaps he was taking water to folks on his route.  He asked me about Carolina hurricanes and told me ours was named after his grandma Ophelia who would wake him up at night to give him a whoopin’ if he had been bad, she was so fierce-  “Whooped me onto the right path!” he said.

 

Regular life makes a semblance of going on.  Many trucks have high school football flags.  We ask about the game.  They had won!  One boy had a broken leg and couldn’t play.  That was his major tragedy.  Jimmy and I gave the kids granola bars and felt good about our selves.  It is never enough anyway.  Or is it?

 

*

 

 

I was afraid of the forklift.  I admit it.  I used a hand truck.  Another huge truck arrived with food to be put in aisles for agencies to shop at soon.  It was unclear what forms and identifications would be needed; we never knew how to answer the clients’ constant questions. This truck was from the Midwest, sent by Boy Scouts and they took a nice photo in front of it for the folks back home.  Meanwhile we had to unload it before we could go “home” to our cots.  So I used a hand truck.  The pallets were piled high with kids’ clothes and stuff.  I would have still been all right but the floor was all cracked up from the storm so I was basically off-roading it with this hand truck piled high.  I put my back out of course, though I would not know how bad for a month.  It was cumulative too.  My big victory there was sneaking out some diapers to a lady who really, really needed some.  At the end of the day the boss man thanked me.  But I had had enough of hard labor.  I needed a change.

 

*

 

FEMA had had me now for over a week without using me for whatever supposed intended purpose.  Enough!  I knew an agency that could use me.  We went to do laundry at a place that turned out to be full of Latinos (where did they all go as clients, to their own informal networks?) and there we talked to a lady who told me about Red Cross by the mall.  She had been screwed by FEMA and Tim fully shared his own frustration with her: “Fuck FEMA!”  We asked him not to further tax her with grief.  “Vent on us,” Randal begged.  Tim continued.  He a real big heart in his chest.  At the airport he held a victim’s hand as she cried. 

 

When Tim was the only one keen on joining me for the jump to Red Cross I was hesitant.  And what would Crisis Corps say?  I did not care.  As it turned out the others got sent out shortly thereafter to a DRC opened by Coast Guard volunteers.  Tim hesitated a day as Red Cross played coy about offering him a job with International Services.  In the end he went with the rest of the crew.  I took my big bag and moved on, feeling quite a bit alone, weary and apprehensive.

 

The lady who first received me at Red Cross was very nice and listened to my skills and situation which is more than FEMA had ever done.  However!- since my local chapter in Columbia had not sent me- there was some question as to status and therefore I was for now sent to sign in as a  local volunteer.  I circumvented that process by getting in the ID line.  No questions were asked and after that I seemed legit.  I was getting proactive.  Red Cross staging was in an old Walmart and operated differently from FEMA.  Apart from the nice break area with TV, hot drinks, cold drinks, and snacks, and a caged area for our bags, the rest was all in one giant open space, no dividers, high ceilings.  There were a million stations- logistics, transportation, etc.  I went to “sheltering” where a nice woman with a British accent wanted to send me out as a supervisor.  I waited a while.  I decided to get even more proactive.  Going back and forth from her to transportation I managed to get myself some car keys.  With these I had to go to the airport and get another car, which I then kept.  The shelter they had mentioned for me was way upstate but it beat waiting…

 

I did meet a fascinating woman in the rest area, a veteran of many disasters.  She was an engineer and working for Red Cross communications.  She was older and had been the only woman engineer for a long time.  She said sympathy was between shit and syphilis in the dictionary, but really she was more a sweetheart than a pistol.  She wanted to attend the Burning Man festival in Nevada (I tried to talk about other things than disaster), but her husband would not let her go naked, so what was the point?  I noticed her ring of all things, an intricately threaded wedding band.  It was then I realized I was contemplating marriage when I returned home.  Life was short!  She told me the first wedding band she had had disintegrated.  She had made it herself out of gold fillings when she worked as a dental hygienist. She had made her own false teeth too!

 

*

 

In my comings and goings I picked up a pair of hitchhikers, a Black couple, outside a motel by a busy street.  They had been standing waiting for a bus for over an hour.  They had to get back by noon with the motel money, forty bucks, or be put out.  They had to keep the address as they had given it to FEMA in order to receive their FEMA check. 

 

The woman had a cat and besides she would not go to a shelter, something about her health- epilepsy?  The man seemed to have recently joined with her.  He was a garbage man, very interesting, and sure of work here or there, where ever…Anyway, they had money, both of them, at the Social Security Office which was up by the mall where I was going anyway.  When I left them there the line did not seem bad.  They had time to make it back easily if the bus ever came.  I considered waiting but instead pressed a twenty into his hand quietly on wishing them goodbye; she was proud, she had said.  I didn’t know what to say.

 

“Good luck?”

 

“Thank you!”

 

It was the first time I thought I knew why I had come to Louisiana, if only for that one moment- to help out in an everyday situation among the poor (except that there were no weekly rate rooms for them since Red Cross had booked them all!)  When I was a teacher I always felt proud when I reached one student, just one, a miracle.  I left teaching when I began to see all the other students that not I, nor any one else alas, was reaching.  It is never enough anyway.  Or is it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rabbit Pee

SAINT HELENA, LA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a true story.

 

This is a horror story.

 

It has all the elements: a dark, lonely setting, fear and foreboding, tragedy, infestation, anger, gore, supernatural undertones.  For many, from this story, there is no deliverance.

 

The horror!  The horror!

 

I am lost.

 

I left Baton Rouge.  I bought a map at a convenience store.  I ended up on one highway, then another, then another, then a small road, then a church parking lot.  They had their own shelter it seems.  They seemed shocked to see a white man.  I pull up unsteady.  This is the third car I have ever driven.  It is big.  It had cost me an much argument and much finagling in the airport just to get one (even with Red Cross approval and a government prepaid voucher).  I asked directions.  They were friendly but uninformed.  Nobody had ever heard of my destination it seems.  They all conferred.  Finally they sent me on my way with a few turns to remember.  I ended up back in Baton Rouge.

 

Driving slowly along a street that I was sure I had seen before, I stopped and ask a man.  It seemed a bad part of town.  He wass startled.  I apologized.  Police lights.  What y’all doing?  The man explained.  The policeman gave gruff directions.  I drove off into the starless night again, hours it seems.  At last in a town so tiny I almost blinked and miss it, I saw the only turn off.  After that was miles and miles more, deep midnight, I was drifting off barely noticing the change into pine country.  I was looking for a barn by the road marked only with a little sign, but I did not know that yet.  I went past it, asked some drinkers at a convenience store (they did not even have bar!) and they sent me back, glad to go, not sure whom to trust.  I saw the sign at last and with relief note some folks still awake, sitting in front of the door.  I did not notice faces.  There was a mean dog tied to the tree.  Some residents were smoking.  The older white lady laughed and told a young man to get me a cot.  Right away I fell asleep.  The nightmares begin there, literally.

 

*

 

The building- could be a VFW Hall- had a kitchen at the far end.  We were up on a stage.  I did not feel well and could not wake up.  The kids were all playing video games instead of going to school.  At school there had been a big fight.  It became clear that it involved  racism.  The residents are almost all African American.  Not so the town.

 

 

It turned out that Red Cross had sent them several supervisors.  I was last.  The power hungry one Craig grabbed the supervisor spot and tried to get us to sort chairs.  I just  couldn’t fight it.  He was a Red Cross trainer (supposedly an EMT) and a real schmuck, sorry to say!  We were sent to replace this young supervisor who was finishing his tour, nice.  He had actually wants to close down the shelter.  The other contender with me, Chris from North Carolina, was a MacGuiver type.  He fixed everything right up in that place, even rigged up a TV antenna out back.  Chris watched movies himself on his laptop at night: Leave it to Beaver or Little House on the Prairie.  But he was not as straight an arrow as he at first appears.  In adversity at least, we became fast friends.

 

*

 

I just could not shake the headache, the nausea.  The road was still going through my head.  I heard all these voices but could not meet them yet.  There was a huge grassy area with tent showers set up.  They had a resident in the showers, helping her out, helping her “come down”. Someone told me to go to the “staff” shower at the fire hall.  And I went because I just wanted out of there. 

 

The lady who managed the place looked me over, barely.

 

“Don’t call them guests,” she said.

 

She told a story about someone shitting in the tent showers.  She yelled at the whole place:

 

“I set this place up and I can shut it down in five minutes!  I am not your maid!  I HAVE a home to go to!” 

 

She actually admitted that she had said this.

 

*

 

Her son the fireman talked about school board stuff with the power monger kid, Craig.  Was it just my prejudice, this feeling of evil?  He insisted the place was not racist.  The whites just sent their kids to private school, is all. 

 

“Hell, even the teachers talk that Ebonics!” he complained.

 

One client called the place “coon” country.  Don’t get me wrong.  I believed this man and his mom wanted to help on some level.  Maybe they did not even saw the harm they were doing.  But they should have!   Even the macho fireman admitted he would need a lot of therapy after this…

 

*

 

The new problem in the place was the strict new “supervisor” Craig who refused to see that everyone was a client.  A fellow came in to offer us medical equipment for free- that’s his business.  I am not sure what his story was but his eyes were tearing up; then the commandant rushed him out.  A couple of old ladies came to apply for CAT cards, not to stay.  We did not do that there, I knew, but I sat them down, started to chat.  He ushered them right out to, unceremoniously- it’s not like we’re swamped- not even writing down for them the 800 number which was always busy anyway, a waste of their time.  Did they even have phones?  This place was poor and rural after all!

 

*

 

Lost again.  I could not clear my head, not even in the shower.  The first firehouse I found abandoned.  A HUGE tree had fallen through its roof!  I learned later that the local tall pines have shallow roots not able to withstand 95 mph winds.  Farther on I finally found the other firehouse.  The bugs there were so thick my windshield was black.  Lovebugs” they were called, coupling everywhere.  The shelter residents could not even go out; they would get instantly covered.  I wanted to take a picture of a run down half-collapsed shack that I am pretty sure looked like that well before the storm set by this idyllic pond with cows.  A man came out shouting and I sped off.  Lost again. 

 

I finally found my way back.  I had begged the outgoing supervisor to just keep me on as any old staff.  There was one other nice young guy, head shaved, from Wisconsin, and the stern skinny young woman volunteer almost smiled once in the kitchen when we were making sandwiches together, plus the nurse man needed my car to go get supplies.  He seemed intelligent, relatively, at least in the two minutes we talked.  I had three weeks left for Red Cross and just wanted to stay in one place with one crew and be of use.  It became clear though that I was perceived as a threat by “Super Volunteer Man” Craig and so I would have no peace.  I decided to move on after that day. 

 

The nature of my malaise was odd, a vortex of resentment of regular life but- which was really more “real”?  In this I was unlike Randal who I had seen go manic, rushing about FEMA even when senior staff told him to “shut up!”  I would not stand that.  Withdraw instead, distancing as a defense not to feel.  We are all transient in the Buddha-view.

 

I still tried to meet clients though, to get some idea where I might end up.  Should I do sheltering, feeding, case work?  I was not yet licensed, thus barred from being an official Red Cross mental health worker- to my chagrin:  “Find one of the smiling faces”, our trainer had said- you’ll recognize them!  I felt I could use one now…

 

*

 

All I managed to do there was take this guy up the road to look at a car he wanted to buy.  He was a bit of a wheeler-dealer.  He wanted out of there.  We went to the chicken place, the only joint in town really, then to buy phone cards at the general store.  Plus he wanted some medicine.  I did not inquire more.  The car was a bust. 

 

I like this guy somehow, with his earrings and sunglasses, not my usual type.  He wants the freedom to go around his place in his drawers, he says.  When the teenage kid said the sloppy Joes tasted like shit, this guy asks him- “how do you know what shit tastes like?” 

 

I feel sorry for the kid though.  He wants his GED but is wiped out from a roofing job.  (Roofing is the hardest work I have ever done including field work in Africa!)  Probably his first job ever.  The hands he sketches are pretty good: praying?  Perhaps he has skills but he does his best to hide them there, makes himself unsympathetic.  I cannot blame him.  It is strange how little our society interacts inter-generationally.  His taste in video games is fast and violent.  Like his society.

 

*

 

I did get to use my Spanish.  This woman was coming off of a meth addiction, seven months pregnant, tossing all over her cot, ripping at her clothes. 

 

“No quiero.  No puedo!” 

 

She was Puerto Rican and probably knew enough English but in her state was calling for her padres in Spanish.  Something about a Greyhound to Florida.  Staff ignored her for ages.  I went over and sat by her and talked to her.  She was slow but responsive.  They decided to send her to the hospital though, for the baby’s sake.  They put on rubber gloves.  All they wanted was to cover her up.  She was in so much pain.

 

I could barely stand to watch myself.  Her hair was brown and tangled, her skin clear brown, her feet and hands small, her body larger and fleshy, her clothes loose- I think someone else put them on her.  She never cursed even when they moved her.  She hurt.

Sorry, mi hija, I had to leave you there in that hell, somebody’s daughter soon to be a mom…

 

*

 

My handy wholesome new fried Chris came with me gladly.  He concurred that the other fellow was impossible and said one often met such power-trippers on disasters.  He was a talker and we had a long drive.  I am not sure how much of his story to tell but it was mostly interesting.  He had sharp features and a sharper nose, wore glasses, had short, neat hair.  You would never guess he once wore a mullet!

 

As we left the dog was still chained to the tree, barking fiercely, but forlorn.  It had water and food spilled among the roots and trash.  It had pooped everywhere.  It smelled.  I noticed then that it had puppies too.

 

*

 

Chris begins with the religion and I think this ride will be even longer than the first one.  I consider my slump and the merits of driving us into a bog to test our faith.  He is born again, a welder, but had seen some of the world, served in Honduras and Mongolia, had some adventure I should not say…

 

He has this dilemma it seems in that he had married a “fallen woman”.  He thought he could save her but she will not turn her back on her children who use drugs.  He informed on them but denied it to her, a lie.  He feels bad but cannot condone her actions.  He is considering divorce.  From this you would never guess he ran away as a young boy, was on the street himself, met strange men…

 

“My father did dental work on me.”

 

Then a Christian home for boys turned it around for him.  I cannot remember all the details now- and there were many- but actually he was divorced before, a Stepford wife attracted to all the money he made fixing air conditioners (was it her daddy’s plant he worked at?) but he hated the big mansion and she made him give up country music. Or was it Nascar? Anyway, he lost the kids and the condo.  Her friend was cute though.

 

“I wish I had nailed her best friend,” he said.

 

Anyway, the farther I got from Saint Helena the better I felt.  We made it back to Baton Rouge without getting lost and it was there I remembered passing a place called the River Center that seemed to be a shelter.  I asked him: could we try there?  I refused to go back to central processing, not sure either if they were mad about the car, but gladder than ever I had it, just in case.  You never knew.

 

“Sure, let’s go,” he said.  We got some dinner first, blackened catfish under etouffe.  

 

He was a good fellow traveler, Chris, but I realized now how I missed Tim and the gang, such as they were.

 

I never do get to use my French in Cajun country, alas.  It will not be until I am boarding a plane to go home that I hear any spoken in fact, outside of song.  I will wander dully as a storm cloud seeking caffeine to help make sense of the whole experience before landing in “real life” land and being asked to account for myself.  The uniformed airport attendant

will then inform me that everything is closed except a greasy diner window but he will warn me off their coffee, calling it pisse de lapin- rabbit pee!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Underworld

BATON ROUGE, LA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine you are in an Arena-sized shelter.  National Guard patrol around.  People in red pinnies get on the P.A. and announce your schedule each day.  These are the Red Cross volunteers.  At night they lurk over your six square feet of space.  One morning a fat new one strolls in and introduces him self.  They are always changing.  This guy has pinched little glasses and smiles a lot, bad skin, short hair, big nose.  That is me, not so important.

 

The River Center in Baton Rouge was the second largest shelter Red Cross ran at that time, after the Astrodome in Houston.  The Superdome of course had peeled like an onion and many tears were shed.  River Center Shelter was well run, I thought, all things considered but in far from optimal conditions.   It is a shock to first see such a place.  I can imagine it is quite nice for culture during regular times.  A nice place to visit…

River Center is gigantic- with the Arena, an even larger convention space, the exhibit hall and offices upstairs, a separate theater building where we showered, landscaping leading down to the river or up to the Library, City Hall, and the Cultural Center.  The Sheraton is across the street with the its Riverboat Casino.  Next to that is a Military Ship museum and planetarium.  …But you wouldn’t want to live there.

 

We came in late one night into what they call the “spine”, a loading dock between the Arena and the convention hall side called Shelter One.  Boxes of donations were strewn about, piles of cots used and less used, kitchens wafting Styrofoam meals (supplementing MREs: military Meals Ready to Eat that cooked in their own pouches). We wandered, no idea where we were going, and entered the Arena and met Erika who tried to answer our questions while we got bedding and toiletries (personal care kits) for a newly arrived family.  She recommended the night shift as mellow; and this was the best thing I had seen I went looking for the boss to request it.  Folks I’d never seen before shouted questions and commands at me, people people everywhere- all exhilarating somehow!  Nonetheless the boss Skip, a superintendent from Pennsylvania, was noncommittal.  We were overtired.  We found a dark room, some covers, curled up and went to sleep.  In the morning my new partner in crime Chris left me once again alone there, reasons unstated.

 

*

 

After one more false start, I would finally find my place.  Little did I know it was my place in a giant science fiction experiment!  I would barely see the light of day for two weeks!  I would break down twice…  Then it would all end unexpectedly.

 

I went hat in hand to Mark, the commander of the place.  He heard me quickly and pronounced me useful but labeled me a mental health worker.  It so happens I had met one on her rounds the night before and had some idea of what was entailed.  She had been go-between for a fighting man and wife.  The man was absent, drinking perhaps.  The wife was in the “infirm” section near the nurse’s station.  Was she pregnant?  She seemed more interested in her radio than in talking to us, so we left her, dissatisfied.  There had clearly been physical violence.  I learned that one had to manage situations; no time or space for interventions; it would not do to elicit too much.  All this I garnered quickly.  Nobody explained it to me. 

 

In fact I was just about to introduce myself to the head mental health worker.  They were identified by bug stickers on their badges.  We were in Room Five with window looking over Shelter One where felons and singles were put, generally considered less stable. 

 

“Mark sent me,” is about all I got out before a call came up on the radio and off I was sent. 

 

I had been pointed to a reclined man, largish, bearded, in a section roughly delineated by letters and numbers on the wall.  When I got down there though there were folks teeming everywhere.  I could not get oriented.  I could not get any staff attention.  I dared not talk to soldiers, unaware of protocol.  I had had no orientation, no training, had not been assigned a bunk, met only one colleague, the friendly but busy Erika, now absent.

 

Nonetheless I had signed up and volunteered for this and eagerly went.  I knew he was depressed (suicidal?) and a veteran.  When I finally found him, half-asleep, he was also pretty drunk.  In the shelters where I had worked before residents had to be sober, so this was tierra incognita.  I had met a psychologist with the V.A. before I left (in my French conversation group of all places) and I had asked him about hints for working with PTSD which was all new to me.  I could not remember anything!

 

In addition I do not think having all the uniforms around was helping this man much, nor the hard cot.  He stared at me glassy eyed when I said hello and introduced myself, not as a counselor, or course, just as a volunteer.  I said it did not seem like he was doing too well.  He nodded agreement.  Can we talk? I asked, with nowhere to sit, squatting down.

These were lame and standard remarks.  “Yes, sir.  No, sir,” he said.  Should I ask if he was a veteran- would it give me away, give him paranoid thoughts, give him an opening?  In the end he was dozing off…

 

“You have had some drinks,” I said, “but I can come back when you’ve slept to talk more if you want.  I want you to know we are concerned for you.”

 

“Thank you, thank you,” he mumbled, but his eyes showed he understood and appreciated.  I left and let him sleep, feeling pretty lame.

 

When I got upstairs I was just being shown the book.  Record keeping seemed spotty.  We had few if any local resources.  They had done one group- with children- but it was not repeated.  AA was meeting but not going that well.  Religious services, various, were well attended and there were chaplains here as well.  Then the boss walked in.

 

She was no nonsense.  You’re not licensed?  What studies do you have?  Internship?  Years of experience?  A second to ponder, then: No. This is too intense.  You are more tired than the volunteers I am sending home now.  No.  It was useless to argue. Liability?!

She is too swamped to talk to me.  “You’re swamped but can’t use me,” I say, leaving.

 

*

 

Back to Mark.  Luckily Superintendent Skip had learned of my skills by now and wanted me as supervisor of the night shift.  With no sleep then I took over control of the Arena.  I was very lucky in my excellent staff.  Although Patrick was a lone wolf, he would do what you asked if you could find him, and he probably kept the shadier elements in line of sight at least playing poker with them in the hall where one of our guests cut hair.   I think Patrick who went around brooding in his hoodie was probably homeless in his regular life.  They had taken on some residents as staff in the early going and there was much controversy about “demoting” them after some incidents of “theft” of donations. 

Patrick never did leave, I think.  He said he was a fisher and made noise of going to work on an oilrig…  I often wonder where everyone is now.

 

Erika and Naomi were Jersey college girls and also wandered a bit, mainly flirting with soldiers or pulling giddy pranks, but the guests loved them.  Not all the Red Cross staff appreciated their positive vibe as much as I did.  Erika especially got in some trouble for naively promising money to a client for giving her hair a weave.  I almost accidentally threw out her beg of natty extensions!  They were innocent, fun loving.  When one client lost an index card with family phone numbers on it, Erika said it would be easy to find with the name “Monkey” on it!  Of course it was “Mulki”, an African name, and I did not dare laugh then, but luckily our client did!  Naomi came back later complaining of pain below.  She had used a medicated wipe and it stung, she unabashedly told us!  Erika put the big clock round her neck with duct tape and called it bling bling!  When I first arrived she was frosty having serve as interim supervisor and as I sat at the information table she said something about “who is this new guy nobody knows?”

 

“It’s me!” I said.  Thankfully they quickly made me welcome as I laughed it off.

 

Rita and Ralph were ex-military, he a helicopter pilot, she a navy photographer.  They were steady and ready.  Rita went the extra distance helping older clients.  Ralph filled me in on most of the procedures.  I had to have him break down the snack table right away.  As luck would have it I came in on the day upstairs decided to cut out evening munchies which was felt to keep folks awake resulting in more “behavior” and less smooth transition in the mornings. 

 

My only problem was old Dale who we did not even know was on my crew.  He lived to make the coffee.  When the supervisor in Shelter One, a young Latina, came in to the spine to remove the coffee, Dale flipped a lid.  I tried to intervene gently but he got harsh right away: “Who are you?  Where did you come from?  What do you know?”  I tried to assure him this came from Mark who seemed to be the only one he respected, but he would not listen.  He stormed off to the smoking area, his other domain.  Eventually we found a niche for him.  We sent folks to him for clothing needs since it was not strictly authorized for us to give them out.  He was another useful renegade.  Red Cross seemed to constantly fear a sock riot. 

 

There is some confusion later when I am called upstairs about the car (now returned) and my “attitude”, not a “team player” apparently, what is my DSHR#… They had confused me with Dale it seems about whom the Latina had echoed my questions and her complaints!  I sweat and remain silent and receive the apology at last.

 

Anyway, I ran a pretty tight shift, watching the side hall by the phones and the front shower area myself, which seemed to me the main danger areas.  When staff saw me pick up dirty towels myself and be nice to clients they respected me.  It also helped that I did not come down hard on practices already secretly in place like rotating out for naps in the quiet wee hours.  I was used to managing volunteers- using their skills and motivating by showing appreciation.

 

*

 

Ralph was an interesting character.  He was somewhat serious and thus the butt of many of the Jersey girls’ jokes, wrapping him in his cot for instance and waking us all with their giggling!  He was handsome, young with whispy mustache and crew cut, fit but quiet.  He was already head of a household in a way: he took care of his younger brother who was in high school and lived in the house Ralph owned.    He actually owed the military a little more time but with accrued days off he would be out soon enough.  He was not big on the military ironically and deeply conflicted about his brother’s interest in ROTC.  When the guards would get domineering in the River Center (once they actually confiscated my chop sticks!) I would deescalate.  Ralph would whip out his military ID- he outranked the soldiers there, and then lecture them on there assumptions.  It was not always easy to stand up to heavily armed men in uniform dressed in my tied on little red pinnie, but I had to do so several times for the sake of clients. 

 

When it came time for me to go I recommended Ralph replace me as supervisor, although Rita was just as strong.  She was uninterested in leadership, a natural.  He was scared of it but at the same time craving recognition.  Upstairs of course, having solicited my staffing recommendations ignored them completely, on this and other decisions.  They were always trying to split up the Jersey girls for instance, who refused to be supervised by one of the older ladies who rebuked them harshly, in front of clients.  She was a Red Cross trainer too, this older lady.

 

*

 

My biggest worry was Naomi.  At a certain point she turned listless.  Whereas before she had great energy, doing stickers with the children, coloring, running errands without complaint, suddenly she was absent.  Even when she was there she could barely leave the cot to go out and have her smoke.  She stopped talking or bringing us food.  She hung around Patrick suddenly whom everyone usually mutually avoided.  It may just have been burnout but in her case she had told me about staying in contact with her N.A. sponsor back home.  I suspected she might be using and asked her to talk to mental health.  One night the Jersey girls came into the Arena after a football game.  Erika was definitely smashed.  They were scantily clad.  It was too much and I sent them firmly to bed or out again!  Some Red Cross staff had been arrested.  There were meltdowns for sure.  It is also true the police put pressure on us.  Baton Rouge wanted out!

*

 

My second night as supervisor another hurricane hit!  Rita hammered us all night long and just about tore the roof off.  We had to crowd all the residents around the edges due to leaks in the center of the Arena.  Tension was in the air.  My major concern was loss of lights.  All it needed was a little screaming by kids, one warning shot in the air, and we would have a riot on our hands for sure.  The essential thing I knew was for everyone to remain calm.  I felt sure of my staff and they knew the evacuation plan.  Unfortunately the chain of command was not clear.  Skip my boss had disappeared.  Samuel and his fiancée who had both been at the Arena far too long, since the beginning, had both been on shift all day but refused to go home.  Samuel was manic in my opinion.  His fiancee went to hide in the bathroom hall with the walkie-talkie.  Amazingly, I could not find a megaphone.  Police and military refused to part with theirs!  If we lost lights due to power outage, obviously I would lose the P.A. system too.  Also I wanted to pipe in music to counteract the constant loud banging which was causing everyone to relive their previous horrors.  I could not find the facilities staff.  I had no radio.

 

Finally I said, “Okay, Samuel, here’s the deal.  We have to trust each other quickly I’m afraid.  I can take control or leave it to you all, no problem.  If you are responsible, tell me what to do.  If not, give me the damn radio so I can call out at least!”

 

He gave me a radio.  Mutual respect had been established.  Apparently his fiancee had once been attacked and did not like to be without a radio, so I put someone else in the scary bathroom area and her with me at the information table.  Samuel went up to the bleachers to survey the water damage.  I looked after our families.

 

*

 

There was a Korean lady with her daughter and elderly mother.  She rarely spoke to anyone.  She did not want men residents so close.  I could tell it cost her a lot to come up and speak to me. 

 

“I am very nervous,” she said, barely audibly. 

 

She walked a lot at night.  Her mother just slept.  Her daughter smiled.  I tried to talk to them sometimes.  We got her family moved with as much space as we could, which was not much but they were reassured.  I said I would keep a special eye out for them, and I always did.

 

*

 

Betty was one of Rita’s good friends.  She had senile dementia but could be very sharp.  Her language on this occasion was quite sharp.  Not only was she not happy about the roof noise, she had wet herself again, and it seemed to me been sick as well.  There was a tough New York nurse man there who was the only one she would listen to and Rita got him. 

“Betty, you giving me a hard time again,” said the nurse.

 

She said don’t step on her shoes.  He had not moved his feet!

 

“I can’t do like you.  Can’t get up so fast. All my people died of leukemia.  The sickness gonna get me too.  I lost my only son on January 30.  Don’t touch his photo!  I’m tired of talkin’.  What’s that noise?”

 

“It’s the wind,” I offered.

 

“Well, shoot the wind.  Kill the wind!”

 

The smell was something terrible, but one got used to it.  We often changed soiled cots. 

 

“Could we put her in bathroom B?” Rita asked.  We had a couple private bathrooms by the nurse’s station, but I did not want her forgotten there:  “Tell mental health too.”

 

“Sure,”’ I said, “Brilliant!” and Rita set it up.  I got her in a wheelchair with firm offers of applesauce, believe it or not.  Rita and the nurse took her in to clean up.  I removed the old cot and things, without gloves to Ralph’s horror.  I was busy!  (Later I learned that Rita went over to the Sheraton and washed Betty’s things.)  I am the one the nurse calls his new hero though: Back at ya!  There are many, volunteers and clients!

 

Next item of business:  There were some volunteers jamming in the break room.  I drafted them, their guitar and harmonica.  I miked them up in the middle of the Arena.  This is your big concert, I offered! 

 

“Make it quiet, and soothing.”  They did.  And we made it to lights out and morning.

 

I lived in the Bronx and the Sahara and Southside of Chicago and Southern Swamps, even the Selva of Mexico, a barrio of Mexico City, Communist China…

 

I have never been as scared as I was that night, shivering with cold night sweats of terror.

 

*

 

Rita had not finished with us yet.  There were busloads of more refugees.  The sewers backed up into our showers.  Phones went down, even landlines.  The Baton Rouge police threatened a take-over.  But I had one more little victory left before all that came to pass.  The center of our Arena, you see, was empty.  When I came on shift the next night most of the water had dried up.  It looked like a perfect play area to me!  We had many children as the Arena was the family shelter.  Some of these children had barely been out of their bunks in days or weeks.  I gave them an hour, until a little before lights out.  I got on the P.A. and threw in some balls.  The kids were ecstatic, and not just the little ones.  The big kids left their X box long enough to throw around a football with some other volunteers.  (We often had different groups come in to help, known by their colors- bumble bees were Scientologists, laying on hands, Orange Blossoms were Interfaith, the Hersheys Kisses were confusing: the Muslim kids and some Christian sect, etc.)

 

Now whenever one is sharing space, some will be displeased.  In this case is was a mean old man reading his Bible of all things.  The microphone cord passed by his cot and he yelled at me vaguely.  I figured out at last and went on the inside of the baseboards to announce things.  Most of the residents were gleefully cheering!  Some Red Cross staff scowled as they walked by- happiness in a shelter; what is this?  But I did not care.  It brought a little joy for while in a stressful time and we were still all cleaned up and in bed by lights out at ten!

 

*

 

Supervisor meetings were at nine in the morning, a tough time for me to stay up the extra hour (we worked 8pm-8am) but the worst by far was general staff meeting at four in the afternoon.  When would I sleep??  There seemed to be new information every meeting those days.  Baton Rouge had said they were in command of the River Center, not Red Cross.  Mark prepared to pull us all out, not a bluff if I read him right.  The city backed down.  Still there were problems.

 

It became apparent after several days that the city was purposefully not sending the health inspector to clear the reopening of our cleaned up showers.  I personally inspected them and did a last wipe down myself.  Finally I managed to get two random people from the city crew at my table one shift.  They said- you sign off and go ahead and open, you’re liable!  Was I ready to risk it?  I thought I was.  My residents had not showered in days.  But instead I got right on the horn to Skip.  He declined; we had to wait for the inspector.

 

*

 

We got bus loads of new residents from the Lake Charles area evicted by Rita.  They had lost people on route, in a barn, had to wash in a trough.  They wanted to wash the smell of death off of them.  This time it was some lady from human resources muddling in the chaos.  She yelled at me in front of staff for sending away all these extra folks who had been awake 24 hours working already.  It was more easily handled with my crew and the Americorps volunteers. (Americorps automatically works with Red Cross- I wish Crisis Corps had as well!)  I had them set up all the cots they could with blankets, soap, and towels (we were out of pillows and other things) with an overflow area in the back hall where we put large families so they could be together.  We could always bring them back in later.  It worked well and I was able to welcome most of them in person at the door with a smile!  They were so grateful after all they had been through.

 

In the middle of this there is a call for Spanish at the front desk area.  No response so I had to go up front to check in a couple of Latino families.   Nobody knew who spoke Spanish on staff but Human Resources was dogging me!

 

When we got the extra staff to agree to go to bed it really quieted down.  Everyone was settled before lights out.  The suitcase that was lost was found by other residents.  The trash bag of belongings alas was not.  It was common for residents to lose things in the confusion of that life; theft was rare.  One man lost his jacket, empty, but as it was the last thing he owned he was rather upset.  He had come in late the night before.  At last a resident thought to ask him which side he came in on.  Turns out he had been in Shelter One not the Arena and he went there and found his jacket but came back to stay with us.  He liked the Arena better.  Our Catholic chaplain, a rosy-cheeked older lady in green, lost her mind a bit leaving frantic messages at the church she was locked out of wherein she thought she had left her fanny pack.  Her cell phone with which she was calling was of course kept in her fanny pack, which she suddenly saw was on her waist all along!  I met a lady on an afternoon off and out, wandering the dead streets.  She had been covered for everything by her insurance.  She then took that money to pay bills.  One of the bills she paid was the insurance on her house and car.  Then she remembered she no longer had a house and car.  That is why she had been awarded the insurance!

 

*

 

I remember best the large families from the back hallway.  I went out to explain to them that custodial staff informed me that the storm light in the hallway would not go out at night.  Would that be all right or would they like to move.  They begged me piteously not to move them again. When they were moved the next day against my recommendation it was the first of my breakdowns.  I cried bitter tears for them, silently, in the dark.

 

There was a widow there with her daughter.  She was not as freaked out as the man’s best friend and wife.  They told me the story: the man had heart failure.  He begged everyone he could for his medicine.  When they finally found a hospital the hospital shut him out and said their medicines where for inpatients only.  He died that night.  The man’s other friend was jumped, beaten and robbed.  The man told me the story stunned, in shock, and eventually did accept medication from mental health.  The wife walked the night, night after night, with horrible insomnia.  I do not think she slept the days either.  The widow meanwhile slept a lot and watched her daughter who seemed in oblivion.  Another lady in that hall asked me to touch her each time I went by for head count.  She was afraid she would suffocate in her sleep.

 

The most haunting image from that night was from one a.m. headcount.  Usually there would be more activity then but they were all so exhausted and the phone bank there was shut down.  Everyone slept including old, old Marggie who sounded at death’s door.  She had the habit of rattling breath and stopping breathing frequently at night.  When I asked her once if that was normal she asked if I was a doctor, then told me sharply to go back to bed!  She often had fights with neighbors so someone had put her in a corner out there.   Well, there was a family with seventeen children.  When I went by all were asleep except a dozen of them, not talking or playing, just popped up like prairie dogs, eyes big as saucers with terror, listening to the rattling of the old lady. I could not comfort them.

 

*

 

We have many physically ill clients, but it the mentally ill that worry me most.  There is one woman who will not take her meds.  She needs attention constantly.  She had a foot cast and said she needed help to the bathroom every five minutes.  She needed coffee.  She needed a cigarette.  She needed a snack, a donut.  I heard she had been caught behind the bleachers with men.  What could we do to protect her?  One day she was just gone.

 

Some other residents: a contractor warns me “you got some people in here”, owns two houses, just displaced, wife wants big house, “people be hookin and crookin”, wants his frosted flakes!  This pasty racist with curly hair who tried to tell me what Katrina stood for but I stopped him after “kill” and before he got to ‘n’- we’re all people in here!  An addict tells me about his rehab- run by inmates, harsh!- scrubbing with toothbrush, forced to wear sign, head shaving as punishment- for having money!  There is an old lady up at three a.m. every morning to take pain medicine, has a liver catheter, survives on juice, no naps, notice her reading Christian literature so I give her a card sent in one of the donation boxes, an older Christian lady wanting a client to write her back…

 

One resident I recognize in the staff breakfast line.  He cleans for us at night and works for the city days, I find out.  He seems like an old pro now, a success, so ask him- how are the new Lake Charles/Rita people doing, and are staff and other residents helping out enough?

 

“Some are stunned and some are mean.  I was that way too at first.  Now I turned it around… one hundred and seventy degrees!”

 

*

 

My favorite time is head count.  I like to see the new formations kids sharing beds make, the punked out teenagers with thumbs in their mouths.  I turn down the TVs but cannot turn down the giant snorers on their purchased double air mattresses.  Someone farts in their sleep.  There is an “escapee” who always falls out of his cot and everyone puts him back in.  Another little boy with tossed blond hair always sleeps half off his half-collapsed cot.  The “walker” does his rounds with his headphones on all night.  One night a man with a bent penis (he claims) asks to secretly shower as he is ashamed to during the day.  He smells and we let him.  This is the time to spot the depression, folks staring at the ceiling.  One lady feels singled out- some stuff stolen- “I’d have given it them if they asked”- just like the folks who refuse aid- “others need it more” and I give her a voucher for Goodwill.  One I ask what she wants: “Your house keys!” she says.  All right then, she’ll settle for garlic crab.  “At least I’m losing weight in here!”  There’s a silver lining even in hurricane clouds.  One man gives me one of the tastiest turkey necks I ever ate!  He is delighted I will even try and refuses to believe I lived in Africa.  Another wanderer turns out to be a staff member, nicknamed Diamond, a local:  “Welcome to Baton Rouge,” he says.

 

A boy shows up late, wants a cot.  He has a tiny baby so I sure am not turning him away.  Then I recognize the girl with him, seems a bit simple, telling me she was going to get her baby daddy.  The problem is how to do it.  Baton Rouge has laid down the law: No new residents.  I decide to take it on me publicly.  I tell staff to situate them.  Later that night I see them cuddling after lights out and feel warm.  He looks a little scared though.  In the morning meeting I say what I have done and insist family reunification be an exception to the no new admits rule.  All agree.  We are affirmed.

 

As I write in my journal by the shower area, a kid comes up and rubs the page.  A gentleman come out and says: “You know what black belly say- damn I needed that washup!  I smell gooood- yup!”  Another time I overhear them glued to the TV talking about evacuating, whistling casual.  “I love sausage but I don’t like to see it being made!”

Katrina and Rita are NOT Sodom and Gomorrah!

 

This night this guy is giving me a hard time: too cold, germs, go do this or that, tell them I sent you… I admit I lose my cool but I do not say anything luckily.  Later that night I walk by and I see him nuzzling his infant.  We should all be caught sleeping.

 

On Sunday I have a wake up for Pastor Charles at 5a.m. for the Red Stick Church.

 

*

 

There was never a routine shift.  At five a.m. I would sneak back to the spine where hot breakfast was served, feeling guilty for the cold cereal I just put out for our motivated clients who did get up that early to go to work.  After the supervisors meeting at which I would usually make just one remark and usually had satisfaction on whatever I needed (dates on memos, other boring stuff) then I would crawl into my cot in Room Two, the dark room for daytime sleepers.  Once I tried the air mattress everyone raved about but it hurt my back!  Frequently I misplaced my flashlight and had to feel around for a shirt to run to the john in.  When evening came around it was time to do it all again.

 

The residents were being mugged; forced to wear orange wrist bands (like at the fair, I joked, so you can get back in) they were easy pickings.  They were closing our infirmary.  Where would we send the people with special needs, medically fragile?

 

“We haven’t had a fatality yet,” Mark said non-chalantly, “we usually do.”

Mark was always “working the issue.”

 

There was usually something to distress me in every staff meeting.  At the end of one, Mark came up to me and said:

 

“Keep your ass in that Arena!”

 

I tried not to respond.  I knew the incident.  One quiet night I did an online session for one of my classes (who later failed me) in the back hallway where Skip the night man found me.  Ralph alas had tried to cover and said he thought I was in the john.  They were cracking down on wandering and wanted me on the necks of my staff.  I was too busy watching residents; besides we had the “quiet” shift….

 

I was still frustrated from the lack of leadership the night of Rita.  Many answers crossed my mind.  I just left luckily as Mark turned his back.  Later they would give me excellent evaluations, but at the time I could never guess I was doing well… I could not go right to bed though; I had to vent.  I found a mental health worker, my second cracking.  Not until the end would I need to speak to mental health on my own behalf again, although I often recommended it to staff.

 

What I really needed was a day off.  I take one, lose my wallet, have to be brought home in a patrol car, scaring staff half to death until I explain, and never did get to see a movie.

 

*

 

A “typical” shift:  They try to shut down the smoking area.  A near riot ensues.  Why?!  Facility staff had confiscated all the chairs.  The food vendor who had an exclusive bid for the Arena demanded to enforce the contract and charge us three times what our provider charged us.  Baton Rouge wanted us gone!  The irony was that they would not allow us to become a service center and provide case management.  But some of our clients would not easily transition without help.

 

In the Arena we had a microcosm of New Orleans, of Louisiana, of America.  The middle class who were not used to lining up, waiting hours, being turned away, they were some of the ones with the worst problems adapting.  Imagine your city all in one room.  The worst fit I saw anyone throw was a car dealer over the type of dress shirt a volunteer had found him after diligent searching. 

 

Anyway I get the smoking area reopened.  There’s noise at lights out.  It turns out to be a guard who turned up the game.  Irony: when we do have a wallet stolen, the large gold toothed victim finds a witness and the possible perp who claims to have turned it in “up front somewhere” and I take them all to the policeman but he will not take a statement.  (Some kids, encouraged, steal some shoes the next day.)  When I leave there the large man is still angry about his wallet, hounding me in his squeaky Tyson voice, tank top, and gold chains.  There is nothing I can do.

 

Gadson is a talker.  His story is interesting at least, although I have heard it before.  His house blew up because the pawn shop beneath sold brown powder illegally- he ought to sue!  Hw knows too the levee was blown!  He is a survivor of three heart attacks, wears oxygen at night, last one over the bridge during Hurricane Calire.  He helps others: with has shortwave, they all know him.  He loves gadgets, has an air pump he lends everyone, a high-powered flashlight he uses to spot leaks in our roof and Samuel in the bleachers!  I cannot understand the loss he feels at his gun collection his dad gave him at the kitchen table, his baby he waded back in to kiss goodbye, a dog.  His brother is all he has left and he talks of him with nasal devotion.  Gadson has a heart attack that night!

 

He told the guard not to wand him.  They have to line up to be searched every time they go out.  It can take an hour so some stay in.  They use a metal detector wand but Gadson has a pacemaker.  They have protocol not to wand those with pacemakers and I tried to get Gadson’s medical record so the nurse would agree to write him a note about it…

 

We get him in the ambulance.  I am helping his brother who is just distraught, a tough sonofagun fight back teats- to have survived everything and now, now… The next day a lawyer was coming to get them.  I am helping him gather papers, medicine.  The big man, strong smell, who not long ago would take on soldiers for a puff, he was now trembling, shaken.  The EMTs said he would be all right, as did our nurse.  But I never expected to see Gadson again, God’s truth.

 

Turn around from that and the guards have surrounded a very tall Black man with a large Afro and falling pants.  “Shut up!” they say, pointing and call him “wolfman”.  I have no idea how it started, again at the door.  The man is clearly mentally ill, not violent and I radio for mental health as I manage to get him away from the soldiers.  Soon he is sleeping.  I can usually head these things off sooner but not all at once.  The excellent counselor who works our shift arranges an eval the next day for him to get meds but he disappears before then.  At least we avoided arrest.

 

*

 

There are so many nice residents, but so, so many alas that only the situations can stand out.  Forgotten is the gap-toothed lady with the nice shoes and bag who asked “can I smell it?”, the other lady who always said “what part you didn’t understand?”, the Sikh lady  with her lovely little boy, the man in the corner who somehow got medical to clear him for a tent (but still complained about the diet) around which he put a cardboard fence that the kids decorated with flowers and a sign that said: “Thank you FEMA!”

 

What insists on attention now is the methadone situation.  We have one fellow I call Mr. Kindness in treatment and frequently in nods, a very dignified white fellow with a walking stick, young but aged by hard living, hidding behind a nice mustachio.  He is one of the ones who wakes up not breathing.  Another time he is sitting up half covered in vomit.  I use the medical and mental health staff freely!

 

The problem now though is the tattooed couple with do-rags who say they are in methadone treatment and their doctor before used to cut their dose because now they are in serious nods.  Nobody would care about them except for their baby (although one man showed interest in their preteen daughter too, until we discouraged that).  I knew calling CPS would result in no action and a noisy investigation and I needed them to talk to me.  They were talking- he told me the harrowing story of their escape.  But then the soldiers shut that option down.  They started hounding the couple.  One was in there off duty watching, stalking.  I talked to the commander before about some soldiers crowding staff (flirting, okay- the night is long) when they locked a guy in the bathrooms where I had to remind them we had put a terrifed old lady terrified; they were not apologetic- that time the shenanegans stopped!  This was a new unit though.  This time they were crowding clients.  I asked them to stand down, understand  they are not trained in addiction or mandatory reporting as we are not trained in shooting M16s, so let us have space to do our work.  Excuses, so I took it to Mark who was ex-military and he straightened it all right out- no more crowdng.  But too late for me to get the methadone couple to talk any more after their survival story:

 

Katrina was his ex-wife’s name.  He knew this one would get him.  He wakes up to go down to the kitchen and sees water coming through the door, looks out and immediately yells for the wife to grab the baby.  He has the daughter grab medicine, formula and out they go through the window, pass the baby up.  The neighbor’s house had an upper story.  He cannot get in though, waist deep in water, the door stuck, locked, he tried to kick, frantic.  He is a big guy saved by a plank or pole that floats by he uses to super-humanly bust in.   They get upstairs and the water reaches chest-high on the girl up there!  Mother still has to hold the baby up!  He finally finds a floater and goes for help, helps out an old neighbor on the way, gets in a canoe, comes for the family.  It has been two days.

 

They all head to higher ground, a prison.  The prison, already over-capacity will not hold any more people.  They get her in a hospital with the children while he goes to help rescue folks.  When he gets back they will not let him in with his family.  They hear about a dock.  They all go there.  By luck a police boat comes by to check the dock.  It has been several more days.  They wait hours for a bus to come to take them here.

 

Here they are hounded day and night.  Heroes?  Villains?  Heroin nod nightmares!

“Scared?” he asks me.  How should I answer to calm him, and me?

 

This family is white.  Most of the residents are Black, let’s be clear.  Most of the staff are white.  In fact a local nurse is one of the only Black staff and what an asset as she finds the local methadone clinics at last.  Little here is black and white.

 

*

 

Not all is ugly here.  Red Cross runs a very good school and they win good mention in the press.  I was offered a position with the school or press relations.  I consider it, not sure how long I can stand the strain.  There is noise of closing the shelter, or of going to eight-hour shifts.  In the end is W who discourages me.  He is coming to sign a quilt or something, so they say.  I do not want to meet him.  Up until now he has sent one visitor only.  Was it from FEMA or HUD or any federal welfare agency?  No, it was the Drug Czar, a slap in the face!!!  What message does that send?

 

The head of Crisis Corps emails me to make sure I am okay from Rita. Where am I?  I share some good press with her.  She writes back that she is coming to take me back to FEMA.  Shall I fight it?  Well, I decide at least she should see what the loss is.  I arrange press access for her, very difficult.  She is coming with a film crew.  Even we staff have no picture of the River Center or residents, forbidden to photograph that which it is very hard to impress upon people in words.  But you will never see the film- she never came.

 

*

 

I found this scrap of “Allegra-D” stationary in my bag back home a while later.  It had a song on it a client had written.  It is anonymous, unattributed, found it on the Arena floor:

 

See I’m stuck up in Baton Rouge.

and I don’t know what to do.

I’m living in a shelter

getting free clothes and food.

Didn’t wanna do it

but I had no choice.

In my mind and ears

can hear my momma’s voice.

She said it’s all right.

All you doing is getting smart.

But I can’t understand

how people trapped a van,

water in our houses,

cars and on they land…

 

Another paper I found was a meeting agenda, dated 9/20: client volunteer badges to be taken back, national guard change out to Kentucky unit, stop mis-info. to media, HR needs, legal notes sexual harassment by shower attendant, OEO report, supplies: no religious materials, Sheraton Shuttle can take volunteers to airport, Board of Health inspection okay, show movies?, Arena residents: 1235 (132 new)

 

*

 

My last shift:  Only a couple of crises.  Announcements:  FEMA was coming in the morning to sign up certain people for travel trailers.  So and so please come to the information desk for a message.  A Red Cross Family Service Center has finally opened uptown.  Those who applied for CAT cards at the River Center will have to apply again at the new center…

 

I had fought this unfair decision.  Apparently they could not be sure all River Center applications were residents for some computer reason, therefore they voided them all arbitrarily.  I ended with an announcement about a free concert downtown.  Then I thanked them for having me and wished them all well.  There were many announcements to make each day and I generally tried to make them more friendly and interesting.  No doubt my rhymes were often stupid, genre: “It’s quarter to, you know what to do, put on your shoe, get off to schoo’…” as we had to do four wake up calls for highschoolers and subject the parents and elderly to same.  Perhaps I was just punchy.

 

The Cultural Center in Baton Rouge was very nice.  They offered me free tickets which I gave Mark for volunteer appreciation as we were about to turn over half our staff.  Mine were all leaving too.  I got them pounds of the incomparable local coffee PJ’s, since we worked the night shift.  They got me a Dali Print!  I rarely got out of the River Center as I said but when I did it was a relief to go get coffee and culture.  I had to laugh at the Wetlands exhibit sponsored by Shell Oil.  On the roof terrace over the river there was a sushi place where you could get gator teriyaki or crawfish rolls with Tabasco sauce!  It was called Tsunami!  A brat in there complained about the food- no one called her an ingrate.  For a real escape we went to the Sheraton buffet which was half price for Red Cross volunteers (not residents) and ate excellent Cajun and French food; once they even let me soak in the hot tub for my back!  An art exhibit I saw showed Black Creoles dancing with whites in centuries past- we had gone backwards, seemed to me.

 

The concert:  Zydeco!!!  Do you wanna go?  Funny thing about concerts in the West African country of Mali: they often involved Dogon midgets.  Why do I mention this?  The lead singer here is wearing a Fulani herder hat.  The keyboardist is a midget.  They are pounding out the Big Easy Blues: “Your grandma and my grandma sittin’ by the fire!” The next part: “jacoma fin mine” is Bambara for jacoma (cat) fin (black) and mine (took) which I believe refers to an eclipse when they say the cat took the moon and all the children come out yelling and banging things to scare it away!  I am crying.  The whole crowd is dancing, weeping, yelling, singing: “Louisiana lives!!”

 

Back in the River Center a woman has a breakdown.  She had applied for a CAT card with us.  She could not go again.  She could not apply for one more thing!  She had to care for her children, husband, parents.  She applied for everything by the book.  She is furious.  She cannot explain any of this right off.  None of the volunteers can deal.  They tell me.  She is packing as I come up- going where?  “Hi,” I say, “You’re upset.  You should be.”  She takes me through it all, the FEMA run around, the long lines.  She once stood in line over two hours only to get to the window, way uptown somewhere, and they shut it two people ahead of her for the day- Come back tomorrow!  She did…

 

But she could not do anymore!  I let her vent a while.  It is time for me to go but she is not looking for solutions yet.  Finally she asks me.  I tell her, and her family, one of them, anyone, needs to go apply to get the CAT card.  It should not be her.  She has done all she can do for now.  Later she will do more.  Now she will rest.  She had just had her wisdom teeth out the day before and was in pain.  Would anyone help?  Of course one of her family volunteered.  She was still not that satisfied.  I told her also I would personally right now go complain to Red Cross upstairs but it would probably not change facts but I would do that for her and for everyone.  And I did.  The way to help folks out of a shelter, friends, is not to force them OUT but to find somewhere appealing for them to go TO.

 

On my way out I decided to do one more thing to try to end on a positive note.  I fail.  Mr. Patel, a lonely India gentleman, rakishly thin, talkative, had asked for blanket.  I took it to him.  I found him sobbing quietly into his cot.  I call mental health and sit by him.  The despair is situational and existential.  In the end I left him with a new mental health worker and went upstairs to sleep.

 

Will we ever stop blaming the victim?  The crew that replaced me at Red Cross was so nice.  I had complete confidence in all except the new nurse who thought Gadson’s heart was hypochondria.  She says she knows the “paranoid type”: he often repeats his stories verbatim.  Gadson had still not come back from the hospital.   No news. 

I am haunted by the image of a couple from Lake Charles on their news in the middle of the night praying- God knows what for…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fear & Loneliness in

NEW ORLEANS, LA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They shot Hunter’s ashes out a canon!  His soul entered my body in New Orleans.

 

Kali whirled.  Kali crashed.  Kali cried indiscriminately.  Kali laughed again, bitterly. 

 

Mary, head of Crisis Corps came with her camera crew.  She did not have the decency to come pick me up her self at the River Center so she never saw what good work was thus sacrificed on the altar of bureaucracy, much less did she pride in what we had done there!  They took me in fact to Port Allen so she never had to sleep in the JFO shell.  Port Allen had laundry, huge air conditioned tents and some of the best food I’d eaten in Louisiana: hickory smoked pork chops, au gratin, corn soufflé, glazed carrots, sweet potato pie… Safeguarding the taxpayer dollar, my derriere!!  I was back at FEMA.

 

They had promised to take me to the DRC where my team was.  Now they were not sure there was a car to take me, nor if anyone there could actually use me.  I had already asked to work at the DRC in Baton Rouge across from the River Center- FEMA trained and for free.   They refused me, bad-mouthed Red Cross, and then asked me to take one of their clients across to the Red Cross nurse!  I had even offered to do double time, working days at the DRC for FEMA, nights for Red Cross at the River Center if they would let me- I was clearly a disaster addict now!  Tugboats on the Mississippi don’t pull, they push.  If I had so much trouble negotiating between FEMA and Red Cross as a volunteer, imagine the trouble our clients must have…

 

I remember a FEMA complaining about working seven days a week, telling me about ingrates.  Some woman was living in her car according to her by choice: “She left five shelters!”  I suggest to her that the lady had probably suffered abuse and could not stand crowds.  “Oh.”  Go FEMA yourself!

 

*

 

I set out to make my own connections, having learned not to rely on FEMA.  There was actually a Crisis Corps volunteer who had opened a DRC somewhere in the downstate area with no computers, just a cell phone he used all day.  He could use me.  So he had been made a “lead” somehow.  What had changed in the interim since I’d left FEMA?  I realized then FEMA was moving out soon.  My theory is that they do not open the DRCs when they are so desperately needed.  Only at the very end do they open a bunch so that they can say that the had such and such big number in the state.  Clearly though those DRCs were not supported, and they closed soon after.

 

So the next day I assert my way into someone’s car New Orleans bound.  All along the highway the watermarks mocked us.  I pictured the crowds walking them.  We see only official vehicles after a while. The trash piles rose higher as we approached.  The glass buildings looked like chess boards with windows out.  They dumped me at Tent City then with no way to get to my team.  They had to go to the Convention Center for what the photographer called a “grip n’ grin” with the head of Peace Corps, a political appointee who never owned a passport before but made a lot of Republican bankers rich.  I did not want to meet him.  The last thing they did was have me walk off towards the rubble for the camera, FEMA hat on, back showing, no face.

 

*

 

There I was in the ruins of the Crescent City, Big Easy ghost town.  As it turned out they would not let me into Tent City- something about changing from rescue to recovery status and now no contractors were allowed!  It was a “no-cover” area, I read on the sign: no salutes required.  No “contractors” either, so I threw my pack somewhere, surveyed the situation, assessed that  I had but three dollars to my name with no ATMs in sight or likely to be working anyway, nowhere to go, no cell signal and little power left to try, the power still out all over town too.  I had hours till the danger of dark at least and I knew a few of these hot, dirty streets and dirty, hot sewers.  What could I do?

 

Naturally I went looking for a drink.

 

*

 

It wasn’t my fault. I tried to find an ATM and food at first.  The giant TV at the JFO had said the casino was open but it was boarded up.  I walked the length of Canal, palm trees and street lights strewn about, SUVs smashed to knew-height, saw a tourist office front crashed in- I wanted a map but scared to enter it and be shot.  Signs everywhere read: “We shoot looters.”  Most signs were damaged: “Doubletree” read “D ubl t ee” for instance. Giant hoses sucked at the guts of the large hotels.  I walked the whole way down to the Mississippi where the cruise ships were moored functioning as shelters.  Someone said the command center there had an ATM but the police would not let me in.

 

Walking back up I saw a newspaper dispenser with this headline- “Katrina Takes Aim” dated: August 28, 2005. 

 

Nothing was open, I was told, except on Bourbon Street so that is where I went, and I soon found a bar that took credit cards.

 

*

 

I eat in a place called Desire: turtle soup, crawfish cakes, jambalaya, bread pudding, all on paper plates, Purple Haze beer in plastic cups, sanitizer lotion in the bathroom, the water unsafe to even wash with.  The Acadiens came down from Canada, French refugees: they can make any old insect or road kill taste good! Creole is a more than sauce- it is another element: Voodoo a form of animist Christianity.  Yum. 

 

I listen in on the conversation of the EPA Agents.  Some woman had brought a suitcase of cosmetics, five moisturized shampoos, etc. Some guy had slept in their coed dorm in the buff!

 

The place is attached to a hotel.  I go in their lounge and watch the Saints game- surreal.  The place is full of Police and FBI and other agents.  I am the only one without a gun and I think: this is a recovery operation? Or an occupation?!

 

I steal a box of pizza and leave.

 

*

 

I grabbed the goddess, wrestled her into the air, felt her dark arms encircle me. 

 

Flashbacks good and bad: Entering the Arena for the first time, a gladiator, doomed.  I dashed the egg on the altar and pulled thorns from lion paws.  I cried. 

 

It is Halloween and I am escaping my Ph.D. French Program at Rice in Houston- zombies play Gershwin, clarinet cranes shimmy and rise into the sky.  I am in a pumpkin patch and I believe.  I carve a one eyed pumpkin and win the prize!  I raise my sword in triumph!  Somewhere Bob Marley plays on…

 

One time I passed out in the Sahara on an ant mound under the meager shade of a thorny bush and I swear, I swear, I was in the Mardi Gras parade!

 

Easter- I curl up in a sculpture somewhere in the French Market.  Staying at the YMCA, sunset shines on trolley tracks.  Pink and green lights atop a tower.  Clippity clop of the horse-drawn carriage.   I decide to go to the French Market.

 

*

 

It is abandoned.  Branches are down and the wind whips leaves around.  “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?” says the echo, and the Saint James Infirmary Blues begins…  This is not the street band I love so with scuffed instruments and receding hair, nor even the silent musician sculpture, nor African lilt of vendors, nor old folks dancing.  “What’s that I hear a trombone playing?” 

 

There is an umbrella dancing.  It rises, falls, banks, twirls.  I am in a children’s book.  Wait that it music I hear!  I walk up to Decateur, past taped up windows like lovely snowflakes.  I remember reading a surrealist in Paris watching fish swimming down streets past café windows but this here is a black flow; obscure waters catch me up and whoosh me along.  I grab at tree roots that become snakes!  Then they are black musical notes… Follow the bouncing ball! 

 

A beat up tuba plays bass to a guitar and a one man band keeps time.  New Orleans will never die!  I pull out my harmonica and jam along.  Cameras instantly encircle us but we do not care.  We are playing for the air, invisible children not there, for the future.  It is just another day in N’awlins.  Café du Monde is closed.  There are no tourists.  These are the real deal street performers- locals who will never leave, tellers of tarot tales, jugglers of lives, sad clowns.  A couple has just gotten engaged.  Reminds me of another time- 

I feted the Millenium here with a couple on the cop car hood manacled together, kissing as the fireworks exploded and we all guessed it must be about time, yeah, about that time. 

 

*

 

The signs on the free houses (bars) say: “State ID Required”. 

Written over it is: “Or Federal”!

 

“Are you press?” they ask me again.  They noticed my badge tucked into my pocket- in Slidell they said we’d be shot for wearing FEMA gear!

 

There starts to be a routine of faces, like bluebottle flies.

 

“No,” I try to explain but I see they do not believe, what with this badge and the other- who am I?  A good question.

 

“It was supposed to be Decadence,” they explain.  They talk freely to me nonetheless.  Katrina had interrupted this festival, a celebration of alternative lifestyles.  I tell them how I just seen a troop transporter passing beneath the balloon rainbow and how I had mortified them all (or most) with my wiggly-fingered “yoohoo!” wave…

 

They begin to talk among themselves.  My pallet fence-toothed new friend with bubble gum shaded lipstick insults the Mayor for fleeing to Baton Rouge and not finding a phone.  Her friend takes exception.

 

*

 

They put up plastic bags of water against flies just like in Africa.

 

This sign on a garage business and home: “Help a Brother Out! (all electric kitchen)”

 

Another sign from Baton Rouge: “Our dome is your dome” for football! 

We have weird priorities!

 

All the construction workers in New Orleans were Latino.  The bellhop was Haitian.  Will nothing ever change?

 

*

 

The zydeco player tells me there are two accordions in the same box of his instrument. 

 

In the souvenir shop I am horrified to see the caricatures of slaves on magnets, slick pornographic playing cards and lacquered alligator claw backscratchers, some Christian literature: “Why bad things happen to good people”, a t-shirt that says: “FEMA- Federal Employees Messing Again!”  I love the Pakistani misspelling and marvel at the t-shirt response time, faster than FEMA can get food in!

 

Some guy in the Blues Bar complains to me there are no women.  What it is with machismo and mustaches?

 

There are fridges out on all the corners.

 

Blue Roofs moved through my brain.

 

In the Cajun Asian restaurant I swear there was a flying mermaid on the ceiling!  The bisque came in a martini glass and the Alaska baked.  The place was multicolored with nice wrought iron grapes, a fig leaf… The lotus ceiling fans were slowly spinning, spinning… I needed to sleep.

 

*

 

The guard at the gate of Tent City is Navajo.

 

“Ya ta hey,” I say and she lets me past.  The Ranger gives me a birth in the gooseneck of their own Rocky Mountain trailer.  I curl up in my niche, back hurting, missing home.

 

Nightmares.

 

*

 

Middle of the night trip to the porta-potty: what is that sweet peppermint smell?

 

Morning.  I reach Tim on the phone at last.  He is in a hotel nearby, doubled up in a room with a coast guard agent.  The hotel will not let me stay so I sneak in and sleep on the floor one night for the company.  Tim is sour though.  He is furious with Jimmy “technically, it’s true” for defending a racist remark on TV about Black babies and abortions.  I head back to my gooseneck in Tent City.  I sleep the sleep of the dead. 

 

Another lost day while Tim tries to secure me a spot at his DRC.  Randal has just dropped out apparently: another one down.! I was still a monkey jumping on the bed…

I was not too mad at Peace Corps for dumping me- I was supposed to be resourceful and independent, but why then did they yank me from Red Cross where I was being self-directed?  Mary said she had tried with lawyers in D.C. the get FEMA to release us to other VolAgs  They already had anyway, I insisted!

 

*

 

This bar never closed.  The bartender is friendly but wary of the guy next to me.  I am glad I am alert to this as the fellow starts to talk to me, nice for a second, then into the strange challenges.  He is rich from cutting branches of rich people’s roofs.  He is also a counterfeiter. 

 

“But what good is all the money with my boy dead in Iraq?!”  he asks.

 

He is gaunt and I decide to believe him whether or not it is true.  I am used to sucking in the pain now, numb.  If he is so rich why doesn’t he buy me a drink? I wonder…  The women next to him do not seem interested either.  They are absorbed by their little mutt that scampers behind the bar under foot.  I feel sick, go up the rickety winding stair to a closet bathroom, Art Deco.  I am alone.   

 

*

 

The gonzo journalism seemed purposeless and I wanted to make sense of things.  The sky was gray again and I am not even sure I wanted to talk to people anyway.  Horse charged us in the streets obscuring the camera view of police beatings.  Nobody cared before and soon none would care again, perhaps already.  This is the moment?  Throttle it?!

 

I’m glad the SUVs were crushed.  There, I said it!  And the rich cannot sit in their suites atop it all anymore.  They must come down the street for free meals like the rest!  I just wish the storm took away the blue hairs’ casino boats too!  No, that’s not true.  Peace, restless angel.  Have another drink.  Brooding clouds.

 

*

 

N’awlins is not the balloon flower you buy.  It is the dollar you give the street clown.  Sure it is festive, but the Big Easy if I understand it right is also coffee time, Dead Man’s Blues as well as Dixieland brass, coming back from the funeral dancing but also going out their mournful to cry on stone Tombs, green with moss.  I never get the grand tour of devastation; no doubt that trolley will leave soon from the Garden District down to the Levee or what’s left of it.  What is left of the Metarie Mansions, the shotgun row houses of the 9th Ward?  I do not know.  I want solitude.  I walk past the warehouses, over the tracks to the wide, wide River.  I watch the brown waters, now so quiet, flow by and I wonder what can be cleansed in it, and where the dead go…

 

*

 

Get back to the Center.  I went to Jackson Square, the Plaza de Armas.  The place was deserted except for a satellite truck.  I remembered a Rasta Yogi I had seen there once: “Come closer, it’s safe.  I am a vegetarian!”  Then he stood on his head, literally, feet on dreads, and fit in a tiny box.  I could not breath.  I’d once found chicken feet on all four corners this block where I also once saw a man beaten (half?) to death.  

 

We lost my friend on the way back from the Irish pub singing “When I came home…” and “What do you do with a drunken sailor”.  There was a rainforest in a bar.  There was a flaming fountain.  All that was gone now.  My favorite little patio café under the trees seemed ran-sacked. 

 

Disclaimer: drinking is not a good stress relief strategy, as I learned at FEMA training.  Am I a hypocrite?  It may surprise, but in all the mad musings of this time there were but a few drinks to be had.  Rember also- I had no money, and very little will.  For coping?  Try yoga instead.

 

I wrote all this in a donated children’s notebook with little angel and devil monkeys on it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trailer Turkey

BOUTTE, LA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“No ball is official until it is called” reads a sign on the wall.

 

The Disaster Recovery Center in Boutte was in a Bingo Parlor, fitting symbolism for the FEMA Process: Place Your Bets!  Tim got me a job there at the “station” or seat next to him at the folding table.  We did have laptops and access at least.  With that we did the best we could to decipher various cases as they came up amid forever changing and often arbitrary procedure.

 

Tim used to use visuals to explain the complications of the Byzantine process to clients.

 

So did I:  I drew a screw.

 

*

 

“I think I figured something out,” Tim explains, “maybe there’s a little FEMA in every… female?  Could it be?”

 

He receives strange pop-ups on his laptop:

 

“Come closer.  I cannot catch your thought patterns”

“I’m trapped in here”

“We’re watching you.” 

 

Is it the Blackwater Security guys screwing around?  Certainly they are far from professional, eyeing pretty female clients, making comments.  The coffee box says: “Contribute or else…” There is no coffee. These guys make a thousand a day with Halliburton as personal security associates in Iraq.  They will not say what they make here but the “driver” who came to find the dish trailer on blocks and left it on blocks made $17k for his month reading paperbacks, occasionally barbecuing for us under the Rotary Alligator Festival awning out back. 

 

*

 

Tim told me this story about their evacuation to Baton Rouge for Rita.  Chuck, head of security and confirmed confederate, had all staff park their cars with the noses out at forty-five degree angles.  Nonetheless he left one man behind!  Then he had all the cards caravan the length of the highway to the evacuation point amid much panicked traffic, causing a course of death as they all tried to exit or pass, him honking behind.

 

Then they got to the Comfort Inn with the head of FEMA himself sleeping upstairs and them bunk down in the inside parking area with a generator inside!  Charlie admitted after that he had with eagle eye seen the generator inside, Tim insisted.  It is not of course safe to run generators inside, as most of us know.  Tim and  Paul and others had to be hospitalized for carbon monoxide poisoning!  “FEMA is trying to kill me!” Tim claims.

 

*

 

Our clients in Bouttee are rural poor for the most part with some middle class homeowners among the supplicant.  They are for the most part grateful, cordial, even formal.  I receive many kind words and handshakes.  I hope that one day we will have more to give them more than lines to wait in, that we will give them resources and opportunities along with sweaty handshakes, and without the endless questions!

 

What item would you miss most if your house went away?  Who knows what straws a man or woman will grasp at in attempts sometimes vain to reclaim their lives. One man showed me his family reunion photos proudly.  Families seemed large in this part of the world.  No doubt folks received more aid from kin there than they ever would from FEMA, leastways I hope so! 

 

I could not help but contrast the class they showed, these “throw-away people” of the forgotten underclass, with the common crudeness of the FEMA process.

 

*

 

A woman broke down crying.  Her sister had finally made it back to New Orleans to find the whole house flooded.  Nothing left.

 

Another woman presents upset, her husband called her “disgusting” at fifty years old.  He watches her to see when she goes out, hits her with furniture for talking to another man about anything.  She is separating their stuff.  But she will stay as always, she says- he has a job.

 

Lashanda has beautiful tattoos.  Her children are at home: a nine-year old girl with “skin asthma” and a teenage boy with epilepsy “catches seizures in the sun”.  She was pregnant again but on the road to Texas she miscarried.  She cries and cries.

 

*

 

Men tended to show depression as frustration or even anger sometimes.  One man was storming off when I surprised him:

 

“You’re a long way away to be a Patriots fan!” 

 

He was wearing a New England football cap.  I was trying to get his attention, draw him back in… Turns out his friend had sent him the cap when the Patriots beat the Saints, he explained.  Then he sat down and we did his paperwork.  He was frustrated all right-

 

“I guess I haven’t lost my job.  I guess I don’t have a seventeen year old son!”

 

I looked past the codes in his case and found his son’s name thank goodness.  We talked about his son.  Only later did we get to his lost job in the granite quarry.  He had been turned down for Disaster Unemployment as well as for FEMA.  It took time to establish the details; there was not much I could change.  But I did get his to go to Social Services and the Crisis Counselor.

 

Another man was very calm.  I had to call over a FEMA permanent employee the JFO had sent to sort us out since his case was so complicated.  She ticked him off while my back was turned.  I asked her to step back to explain the case but she refused, suddenly hard of hearing.  She walked off on him!  He apologized to me- he never usually lost his temper.  But she suspected him of who knows what….  He was a school bus driver who had saved up eight thousand hard-earned honest dollars.  He had spent it all that month helping out his whole family.  This I understood but she apparently could not believe.  Now he was broke, sleeping in his bus, his wife had left with the last of the money, and on top of all this his case was locked up for duplication for some reason.  We wrote an appeal letter together.  I apologized for us, for so much…

 

*

 

I do not think that I am somehow scapegoating FEMA and Homeland Security for all the fiasco, like some say.  I saw FEMA up close and it was not pretty.  Monetary waste was usual in operations while we argued with clients over $20 for windows.  I remembered shivering in the JFO in the early autumn heat of Louisiana while folks sat molding in the heat of their ruined homes.  Disorder was also rampant.   

 

Luckily for us at our DRC, we were protected from FEMA central for the most part by our courageous Coast Guard leaders.  Our DRC was even cited for sending clients to their Senators when FEMA cut the $2000 expedited sum which was the only good thing they were doing.  Many missed the “cut” without rhyme or reason.  We Xeroxed the elected representatives’ contact numbers for our clients!  For this we were sanctioned, but our blue uniformed leaders winked!

 

Later I meet a woman whom FEMA had called asking her who it was at our DRC that recommended she contact her congressman.  I asked if they at least asked her what she needed?  She said yes, and it was fixed the very next day.  We called the press and kept on giving out the public servants’ phone numbers.

 

Some structure was inevitable and some just perverse.  What possible reason could there be for telling a client they are “approved” if the “ineligible” code means they will never get anything?  This it beyond confusing- it is criminal!  I call it a con game, fraud, scam.  My motto for FEMA:

 

“Adding insult to injury all over America!”

 

*

 

Tim knows a Po Boy place.  We escape there for a break.  “I feel like I took a big shit!” Tim says- he had nearly broken down earlier when he had a rich housewife say “I guess you never went through something like this” and popped-  I walked away from two houses with the shirt on my back, lady, I wish you wouldn’t be so abusive!”  He looks around, tells me she makes $140k a year-  Someone else talk to her.”

 

I can no longer remember antediluvian life.  After me, the deluge!  I feel sunken.  On the commute to work no one talks much anymore.  Another time Adam talks about strange women smooth in the mouth like honeycomb, but bitter.  I convince Jimmy to stop at the coffee house only to hear about United Way Outcome Measures.  This other Crisis Corps guy Mack is with us, popping a beer on the way in to work to calm his hangover.  He had done the Crisis Corps in the Dominican Republic working with appropriate technology.  Now we are screwing old ladies out of dollars and cents.  It is all lunacy!

 

*

 

They call for me to attend to some clients from the Dominican Republic, a woman and her uncle.  They are so grateful to find someone who speaks Spanish to help them.  I tell them many of the clients are complaining about the FEMA call processing center in Puerto Rico screwing up their applications.  I look for Mack but don’t find him.

 

These folks know about hurricanes.  Hurricane Mitch took their town, not a small village either.  There were no roofs to cling to until help came in canoes or rafts.  No helicopters came.  They did not like to talk about it.  They just wanted to fill out forms.

 

 

*

 

Another family had been evacuated to a State Park in Alabama.  The kids, three dirty blond girls, toddler to preteen, had loved it and did not want to come back! 

 

An older man came in, all chest hair and gold necklace.  He had been Mister Louisiana! He lost eighty trophies in the slime.  Now the pendant on his chest held heart pills.  But he was still proud.  He messed up the application online though and accidentally did two and now his case was locked up for duplication.  HE was embarrassed but I told him not to worry.  I had seen one lady who made herself six applications somehow! 

 

“Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted,” said one client.

 

A common expense FEMA would not consider was freezer contents.  They failed to realize that in this part of the world the hundreds of dollars worth of meat and especially seafood that were contained therein represented a significant asset for these poor folks:

a season’s eatin’!

 

*

 

“Hey, man,” says Tim in his hippie drone, “you gotta be FEMA flexible!”

 

Tim kept me almost sane with his humor and he kept me from leaving more than once with the sobering thought:  Who would fill out chairs if we left?  We would have to of course eventually.  And FEMA did one good thing in the end I must say:  They sent a social worker out to debrief departing staff before we returned to their homes.  Boy did I need it but others refused to go behind the blue tarp to their detriment.

 

 

 

Tim, who returned every night to hotel dinner and TV tells me he saw the President give a speech assuring that everyone would get the same consideration after Rita hit.  Twelve hours later we were briefed that FEMA had stopped the two thousand dollar expedited award on which everyone was counting. 

 

“Know what FEMA means?” Tim tells me- “Fuck Every Mo’foAround!

 

*

 

There was a woman whose husband she called a “follower”.  He went to Arkansas with friends and her FEMA award and now will not take her calls.  He told her “it’s over; move on,” she choked.  Nonetheless she attempted to excuse him- he was criticized by her family because he could not work steady.  She was going to some hospital for a kidney stone (Charity Hospital was closed.) so we make the second step of her plan to go see the social worker there.  Her first step: get some Chinese food! 

 

A man is broken up over his two pecan trees (three barrels each every year!) which had fallen.  At first I think it is just grief, then I recognize survivor’s guilt: They fell on his neighbor’s house!

 

A veteran of World War II had been to the Mississippi coast and said it was worse than anything he had seen in the war.   I could still imagine worse than here, but only with evil, evil fear.

 

An older man who had no letters (reading) caught the asthma.  Another lady lost two parishioners in her N.O. church, elderly, one body still missing.  Somebody heard about a bulldozer driven through a supermarket wall!  There was a highway worker making $26k a year same as in 1987 who was under 310 when the storm hit- “I never saw concrete move like that before!”

 

*

 

Difference between rich and poor appeared even here.  Monsanto had many chemical plants there in poor rural area; many clients had cancers.  Meanwhile some rich parents complained about their own children’s awards when they did not get the exact same amounts themselves!

 

At this time I was able to talk to home more often, and this I needed.  I could relate to home life somewhat but was reluctant to talk about my current experiences.  Folks all over meanwhile told me their own horror stories. One friend told me about a mom who crashed and killed her baby boy evacuating somewhere in Texas.  One another note my girlfriend, still volunteering with SC Cares back in Columbia told me about one of the evacuees there coming back to New Orleans despite good job offers in SC.  He just could not stay away!  Paradoxes abound everywhere people are displaced.  Another friend working in disaster logistics told me stories of police hijacking military food trucks!

 

*

 

FEMA is shameless. An old man who had been left by the helicopters, jumped off a roof onto a scavenged life preserver, spent hours in the water before reaching land, walked miles more, was evacuated to Texas but returned before he had a change of shirt.  He had lost his wife in the storm.  The case notes read: “Auto-determination (fixed income)” He had received money alright but his case was already in recoupment.

 

Briefing: requests for reinspection now require an estimate by a contractor on letterhead with a business card.  The contractors are all busy meanwhile and are gouging clients.

Good luck!

 

My advice for dealing with FEMA: don’t.  If you must do: apply apply apply and then appeal appeal appeal.  But expect nothing.  When FEMA tried to send an agent out to “straighten up” our somewhat sympathetic DRC, Tim said we tore him up “like jackals”!

 

*

 

Tim had bile for insurance adjusters too whom he overheard in his hotel dining room decrying the price tag of $100 billion for the Gulf States.  Should we?  Tim: “I didn’t hear a peep when we spent $250 billion going into Iraq!”

 

But lest you think Tim is anything but soft-hearted, picture him holding the hand of a distraught woman at the airport mere minutes after our arrival!  He was warned not to become over-involved, especially with Shari.  She had a brain tumor.  She would die without her medicine.  Her brother had taken the rental assistance. Tim collected money from friends for her, offered to fly her out to Oregon with him.

 

Tim would laugh at me when I was calling my girlfriend Chrissie.  Said we were growing on each other like a “post-incident mold”.  Secretly I think plans for my scavenger hunt marriage proposal excited him and brought a little joy in a dark day.  We wrote FEMA poetry in the quiet moments.  Mine to Chrissie:

 

Fearlessly I am

Evermore assured of you

Merciless

Angel

 

*

 

Later when I return home I will make “For Ever My Amor” part of my successful marriage proposal.  Life will go on.  It is important to discover why we survive.  But it will be hard.  It will take a while to realize I waking myself up with my own screams from dreams I cannot remember because they are other people’s nightmares…

 

*

 

On my last day I broke down.  It was not the woman in the wheelchair that got to me.  She was facing amputation, cancer in her leg.  Yet she was the caregiver of her family.  Her husband was bed-ridden by some illness and her mother invalid with age.  Her brother would help but was mentally ill and had not had his medicine since the storm.  They had evacuated to Texas and then been evacuated from Texas when Rita hit.  She was shaking uncontrollably with an envelope full of receipts and forms.  She had been a social worker herself for Faith House battered women’s shelter and she was a United Way Chair and no doubt was very competent.  I told her so.  But this was overwhelming.

 

“Let’s make a plan,” I suggested.  We made a first step.  She needed an advocate.  We got her someone from Catholic Charities.  I went around with her and we ended up hitting almost every stop in the DRC from Social Security to the Small Business Administration (the misnomer puts everyone off- they offer loans for homeowners).   After an hour or so I put her in her van, tired but dry-eyed as she had been.

 

Then I met Joyce.  She was just a regular grandma.  She loved to garden and cook.  All she wanted was an oven to cook the Thanksgiving turkey for everyone.  FEMA trailers do not have ovens.  She had at first gone to stay with her son in a subdivision nearby, but while the subdivision would let her stay, they would not let her granddaughters and their mother stay, so she left there with nowhere to go.

 

I tried to call the subdivision to put pressure on them, unsure of the legalities, appalled as always at the closed-mindedness and hide-bound rule worship of many Americans.  But that was an anger path and I was not sure we should go down it.  She agreed.  She told me about the books in her basement all gone to mold.  Her family Bible was in there, signed by generations.  She started to sob, and so did I.

 

I put my screen down and sat with her a while.  “You will never be able to replace that Bible,” I acknowledged.  She had some hopes of freezing it or something, but slim to none really.  “But you can start a new one!” 

 

She jumped up and threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek and said in my ear: “Thank you.  You gave me hope.”

 

That was it for me; I had to take a walk, bawling like a newborn babe, looking over the fields and roads and sunny sky there that day in Bouttee.  Forgive the Hollywood ending: If it helps any, I forgot to do half her paperwork and soon had to go back in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kali is sated, calm.  She has had her mischief, for now.  She has danced and eaten.  Now she will sleep.  Who knows how long she will sleep?  Who can reckon how many times she has slept and awoken?  She laughs but also she dreams, and in her dreams she knows, and she cries.  Until next time…