I want to share some of the stories I heard with you. I am not identifying people. I am only giving brief descriptions. I am working hard to share with you what it was like, but not at the expense of their or my privacy:
I sat with an older gentleman one day-- in the geodesic dome tent where the community gathered to eat-- who told me how he and his wife had stayed on through Betsy. They stayed for Katrina like so many others did; it is hard to evacuate, despite contra flow on the highways and evacuation plans and hurricane routes. He woke up that morning to the sound of the water rushing around his bed. He grabbed his wife, trying to reach safety as quickly as they could. The water rose to the top of their one story house in about 20 minutes. Nine feet of water in 20 minutes. He had thought that he was going to lose his wife—that he had never felt as helpless as he had at that moment. He had been afraid that he would not be able to save her from the flood waters. Then he was afraid that the both of them would die on the roof before anyone got there to rescue them.
I had the chance to speak with a Times-Picayune reporter several times—he helped us out by talking with the students more than once—as he described staying in the newspaper building during the storm—not being able to get out of the city due to the gridlock on the roads, the grim hurricane party he and his co-workers held, hearing the office windows blow out in the early morning darkness of the storm, riding in the news truck as they picked up as many people as they could, trying to find their way out of the flooded city. The one thing he wanted us all to know—it didn’t matter if you were stubborn or not, black or white, young or old; it mattered if you were disadvantaged. Those who died were so disadvantaged that there was really no chance to flee.
One of our students joined a work crew that was helping a gentleman gut his home while we were with Emergency Communities. He went out with them, at the start of the day, helping to carrying out everything this family once owned but was no longer recognizable, in most cases. Then they started ripping out drywall and the like, to get to the studs, so they could be bleached. They then started with the ceiling. As chunks of ceiling rained down around them, children’s books and toys, photo albums and other family mementos began falling down as well. The owner started scooping them up and hauling them out, laughing and joking as he had been doing all morning. It was this; what affected the student the most. He became visibly upset (looked visibly upset while recounting the information to us) and the owner reached around, slapped him on the back, and told him that all of it-- even the albums and the toys—was of no matter. They were all just things. They meant nothing to the owner, because he was so fortunate to have every member of his family still alive. And soon, his would be able to begin rebuilding his house.
The most heart-wrenching story I heard was actually when I returned from NOLA the first time. Some of the students had gotten together just days after returning from our trip. They were having a hard time adjusting—in describing the trip to their peers, in getting back to the normal daily life of a college student. They met, rather late, at a place on campus. The person who waited on them overheard their conversation, and went back to tell the man who had recently become a cook there that he should go out and speak with them. He had been a victim of Katrina in Mississippi.
Another symposium was held on campus at the end of the academic year—celebrating several groups of student volunteers (members of Hillel, and Engineers without Borders, to name a few) and this man came to tell his story. I watched him speak, and was able to speak with him afterwards as well.
He described the storm in Mississippi, and how he and his fiancé weathered the storm in the house he had inherited from his grandmother with their four children. He describes how the house came apart around them, and how the flood waters came up. He describes how he and his fiancé floated their children out of harm’s way on a box spring, and how they found a relative’s car to drive them away and how the national guard gave them diapers and food for the children. He talked about the power of prayer and how the six of them made it to St. Louis (a ten hour drive) on a quarter tank of gas. He didn’t have the money to fill the tank—he prayed and prayed to make it to a place where his children would never have to experience another hurricane.
He didn’t have insurance on the house. They lost everything they had. He had lost his sister and his nieces—they drowned in their attic in the Lower 9th ward. And yet, he was grateful that they had made it here. That people had helped him—find a place to live, find a job. People were helping his fiancé go back to school.
The most horrific part of his story, to me, was when he described how he and his fiancé had lost their 5th baby, just weeks before the storm. The child had been born still and premature. He said that he prayed every night and thanked God for his infinite wisdom. He thanked God that the child was not born to perish in the hurricane—and he was sure that he would have. He was thankful to God for allowing his fiancé to become healthy enough after the birth to help him save their living children—and she would not have been able to do so if she had still been pregnant. Her due date had been within days of Katrina striking the Gulf. He thanked God in his prayers every day for his children being alive and well, and the only thing he could see that remained of the storm in them was the fact that they feared the thunderstorms that rolled through.
After listening to him speak, I sat in the parking garage in my car, rocking back and forth and crying. Could you thank God every day, in your prayers, for the loss of your child?
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