I’m on my way back from 3 days of shooting video in Shreveport, LA, where a great number of New Orleans residents took refuge. It’s been 19 days since Katrina came ashore, and people’s lives are still turned upside down.
What I saw in Shreveport was a church that stepped up to run the main Red Cross evacuee facility in Shreveport, because the Red Cross had no one to run it. I met Roy, an 81 year old man who had stayed in NO thru the hurricane, and was rescued with one small suitcase and a small cardboard box, and was sleeping on a blow up mattress on the floor of the local coliseum. Denise was a lady that had open heart surgery just before the hurricane hit, and had to go to Tulane hospital for treatment in the midst of the storm. A kind person made a garden apartment, built for her father, available to Denise and her son. Another church is working w/ a relief organization to place a family that I met in a home, rent free, for one year. This church is going to cover the utilities for the family for either 3 or 6 months. I could go on and on.
One interesting note: a city rescue mission from Licoln, Nebraska, showed up in Shreveport with two buses and about 10 volunteers, ready to load up 20 families to Lincoln to live. The mission had reportedly organized rent free apartments (not mission housing) for one year, all utilities paid for one year, jobs, cell phones, integration into local churches, and a bus ticket back to New Orleans if they ever wanted to return. Out of 500+ evacuees, only 14 got on the bus this morning.
What was fascinating was that even though most of the people that I had met had nothing (and I mean nothing), no one seemed to want to risk going to Lincoln. The weather, fear of losing family, fear of the unknown. Here was a golden opportunity; free rent, free utilities, jobs, removal from the projects, and no one wanted to take it. Wait, 3 families did take it.
I’ll write more as I reflect. the fear is; what I’m reflecting on doesn’t make for good “uplifting” writing…Oh well, as my Amy says, “do you really want the whole world to hear what you are thinking?”
And that, my friends, is the question for me.