On Monday, August 23, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana. It caused severe destruction all along the Gulf coast, but particularly in New Orleans where due to the storm surge and subsequent flooding the levee system failed causing even more disasterous flooding. Although New Orleans got much of the coverage, most of the beachfront towns in Mississippi were also flooded. Because of the massive flooding, towns became uninhabitable for months and in some cases years. The residents of these towns spilled into other nearby states and cities and Katrina became the largest diaspora in the history of the United States. The city hardest hit by receiving Katrina refugees was Houston, Texas which overnight had an increase of a 150,000 thousand people. Just three weeks later, Hurricane Rita destroyed Southeast Texas and the Louisiana Coast. The number of evacuees in Houston climbed to 400,000.
After Rita hit, the already overwhelmed city of Houston was bursting at the seams. Charities were overwhelmed with trying to service all the needs of the evacuees, many who left their homes with their entire extended family, friends and community with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Catholic Charities of Houston was one of these small charities trying their best to help evacuees, but inundated with the sheer number of people and the extreme needs of Houston's newest residents. When the Houston Rita evacuees returned to the their homes, a call went our from Houston Catholic Charities to Catholic Charities all over the US asking for volunteers to go to Houston to assist with the relief effort. The Archdiocese of New York was one of the first to respond. After receiving the request, my boss asked me if I would be willing to go to help in Houston and I jumped at the opportunity.
Like everyone else, I had been watching the news coverage of Katrina and Rita endlessly and wondered how I could help and what I could do. I sent money to responding charities, but that seems so distant and it is funny how after something like this happens, you want to feel close. By going to Houston, I felt close, really close, to the disaster. I've wanted to piece together my experience and the lessons I learned in Houston for years, after looking though my meager scrawled thoughts and worn out mementos, I wish I had done it along time ago. It was such a rich experience and so amazing to see how resilient, faith-filled and hopeful people can be under fire, that I am sad I have mentally lost pieces of it.
When the 11 NY volunteers arrived in Houston we went directly to Catholic Charities. We passed hundreds of people lined up surrounding the building and went to meet with the exhausted Director of the Hurricane Relief, who had been spending 20 hour days at work. She welcomed us with open arms and as she was trying to explain her gratitude over our arrival she started crying. She told us she was planning a funeral for an evacuee that had died since arrival in Houston. Later, she told me that when we arrived she felt like a cavalry arriving at the front lines when the troops were losing the battle.
Our Director quickly told us what we would be doing, everything thing from helping evacuees find shelter in the overwhelmed churches, community centers and homeless shelters and providing emergency gas and food cards to helping evacuees find work and relatives and to simply provide a listening ear. Within 15 minutes we were shuttled into our offices and started meeting with evacuees. We worked late into that evening that first night and still turned away many people.
The next morning, and subsequent mornings after, we were back at the crack of dawn to the office and there were already lines of people wrapped around the block, with many from the night before who had slept in their cars waiting to be seen. This sight greeted us daily for three weeks. The sheer numbers of people was overwhelming, but unlike the images I had seen in the media, the crowds were sitting it out in the heat were patient, hopeful, calm and so grateful for every little help offered. I was shocked to find that most of the evacuees seeking assistance from Catholic Charities were much like me. Many two income families that made just enough to get by, but didn't have much in reserves. Several weeks without income and no promise of it in the near future, while trying to start over again with NOTHING, had burdened them impossibly and their only outlet was to ask for others help.
Many people were ashamed, or embarrassed that they had to come. One of the first people I met with was a working class couple, who after receiving our meager assistance offered to volunteer with us in helping other evacuees. They promised they would tell their teenage son about what I had done for them and to be back the next day to help. They came back each day to cheer crowds, pass out water and do whatever they could to help out.
I met with a woman from Mississippi who had just returned from visiting her home that was nothing but debris. She said more devastating than that was that she could no longer locate her mother's grave.
An old man wandered in one day with binoculars. When we asked what he needed assistance with he said he needed glasses and that he had been using a pair of binoculars he picked up at a shelter to see for a few weeks since he evacuated without his glasses.
I met a couple who swam out of their flooded neighborhood, holding onto debris, who reported weeks later that they couldn't feel clean and felt covered in water all the time.
I met another woman who asked, "What is God trying to tell me?"
I met an elderly gentleman and his wife who came in needing to get their medications fulfilled without any knowledge of where their doctor was or any prescriptions. After we squared away their meds, the older gentleman asked me, "But what about my H?". His wife tried shushing him multiple times and turned red, but he kept asking about his "H". I finally figured out that he was talking about Preparation H. We took care of that too.
I met another family who had been waiting it out on their roof for rescuers. Apparently there had been a lot of contention on the roof, because after a day or two, the grandmother jumped off the roof into the water and started swimming. She told her astonished family that she couldn't stand being around them anymore and that she was going to wait it out on the church roof a block away, by herself.
After calling all the big box retail stores for donations, I turned away a man who needed money to buy an expensive tool kit in order to find work as an auto mechanic. I couldn't get my mind off him, so kept researching someone who could help and found a man half way across Texas, who was an auto mechanic himself and had felt so touched by the disaster that he had started getting donations from all his friends and had pieced together some tool kits for auto mechanics, knowing that they would need them in order to be able to work. By the next afternoon, he had a trucker friend drive the tool kit to our man in Houston.
A met two African American sisters who came in with a fussy, wealthy, white octogenarian. They were her home held aides in Louisiana and evacuated with her to Houston where they were all staying in a overburdened three bedroom home of their other sister, with 20 + evacuees. The elderly woman was quite a handful and very racist, which became apparent in minutes after our meeting. The sisters were so compassionate and even playful with her and didn't let her demeaning attitude get them down. They simply needed help finding her relatives and figuring out where she could go since she wasn't putting up with sharing an apartment anymore with "the help".
One surprising thing, to me and Catholic Charities Houston, was the huge groups of Vietnamese evacuees who came to request help. They came with stories of evacuating Vietnam in the 70's, with nothing, and then being helped by Catholic Charities to find work and homes in the South. When disaster hit again, the community remembered the services that Catholic Charities had provided for them and knew they would be helped again.
I met a man who knew no one in Houston and was staying in a shelter. At the time, we were providing bus or plane tickets anywhere people wanted to go out of the region. I asked him where he wanted to relocate and he said in broken English, "I go where is work".
I remember being told by our Director that the Discovery Channel had contacted her to find any "tragic and dramatic" cases that they might be able to interview. The staff all looked at each other with tears in our eyes and thinking how could we ever pick one that was more tragic or dramatic than another.
I remember many kisses, hugs, tears, heartfelt "God Bless Yous" from evacuees. I remember feeling the blessing of peace, comfort and the Spirit daily and such a harmony with the other volunteers. I remember cheering when we enrolled kids in school, found permanent houses or jobs for people or reunited people with relatives. I remember worrying that we wouldn't have the money to help all the people and somehow just when we thought we would have to turn away people, Catholic Charities would announce more donations. It was one of the most rewarding times of my life. I was rejuvenated by being there and learning that people are resilient amidst the most challenging of situations. I still can't believe that I worked and still work for a company that would pay my salary, my flight and my hotel for me to be able to go and help people that they have never seen in an effort that doesn't benefit their bottom line. It's true that disasters often bring out the best in people which is such a testament to why bad things happen to good people. It reminds us of our own interconnectedness, our reliance on each other, and moreover our reliance on the Lord.
