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Web Exclusive...
In the Aftermath of Katrina
By Monica Hesse, January 2006
An editor for AARP the Magazine headed south to lend a helping hand. In this personal account, she shares her experiences and impressions.
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On November 6, 2005, I went to Mississippi with five co-workers for one leg of a three-week Gulf Coast tour, arranged by AARP to help victims of Hurricane Katrina wade through the endless sea of paperwork and red tape required to rebuild after the storm. For one week, we lived together: Kim, India, Adam, JoAnn, Kumie, and me, Monica. Two RVs, six AARP employees, two drivers, 10 boxes of resource guides and pamphlets, three cases of water, lots of granola bars, one can of insect repellent.
The drive to the coast was surreal: forests of trees bent to right angles from the wind, billboards twisted into spaghetti, towns filled with houses covered in the ubiquitous blue tarp provided by FEMA, to protect against rain until roofs are repaired. We stayed in communities so devastated by destruction that it was impossible to tell what they had once looked like: I sorted through a junk heap for half an hour before someone told me that two months ago it had been a stately church. We visited places that felt like the Twilight Zone: nearly normal, but with a twist of the absurd. A restaurant in Waveland, up and running and efficiently functioning, with the exception of the power: the chefs prepared the meal in the dark. We saw things that would have been funny, were they not sad: a perfectly undamaged house, habitable except for the fact that it was upside down in the middle of a highway.
We spent our days helping as we could. Armed with boxes of information on consumer fraud, insurance claim forms, and Medicare Part D, we traveled to a new city and a new FEMA site, Red Cross tent, or community center every day. We had an afternoon of training, but most of us didn't work with these subjects on a regular basis. Still, we were amazed at the ways that our basic knowledge became precious, and the ways that our smallest actions became enormous in the eyes of the people we met. One very shy woman took 12 prescriptions on a regular basis, but didn't know if the Medicare supplement would lower her costs. India helped her catalog her medicines and taught her how to go about choosing an insurance plan. (The supplement did help. It helped a lot.) The woman left smiling, something she said she hadn't been doing a lot recently. On another day, India and JoAnn helped a woman write a letter to her insurance company that she had been putting off for weeks. That same afternoon, Kim and I spent half an hour on the phone with FEMA, trying to figure out why a lady named Loralye hadn't received her trailer yet. We weren't able to get her a definitive answer, but she was so extremely grateful that we had taken the time to try. She had Parkinson's disease, and it was difficult for her to stay on the phone for long, so it touched her that we were willing to do it for her. That was the hard thing. Many times we were able to help, and sometimes we couldn't do anything except wait on hold, offer hugs, and listen. We did a lot of listening.
I had planned to create a day-by-day diary of my experiences in the cities of Biloxi, Waveland, and Gulfport. But as the seven days seemed to bleed into one very long one, my experiences did not break down into a neat diary. Rather, what I saw and heard and did fell into categories. People, places, good things, sad things, funny things, hopeful things. I wanted to write about the trip in a way that would help people comprehend the incomprehensible levels of destruction and would show the big picture. But at night when we all returned to the RV and recapped our days, we were not talking about big-picture events. We were talking about the little-picture events—one person we had spoken with, one item we had found buried in the wreckage of someone's home, one smile of thanks we had received, one way we felt that we had made a difference. We realized that what made the experience powerful was not the big picture, but the thousand little pictures. And so instead of a diary, what I wound up with was a series of lists.
Things written on homemade signs in front of damaged houses and along roads
You Loot, We Shoot
Katrina 1, Biloxi 0: Game Not Over
House Guttin' and Tree Cuttin'
Mom, if you see this, we're alive.
This was our home.
Things set out by the side of the road for trash collection
Washers and dryers
Refrigerators
Heirloom china cabinets
Wine collections
Exercise equipment
Home entertainment systems
All of these things were in good condition. None of them were looted because most people would not have a home to take them to.
Things that were sad
The FEMA site in Waveland which, two months after the hurricane, was still serving 500 new people a day who needed trailers or other assistance.
An abandoned car with the rescuer's X spray-painted on one window. On one side of the X, workers write the date that the automobile or house was found. On the other, the number of people found dead. This car only sat two people, both killed. The passenger side is occupied by a car seat and a pair of baby booties.
Grown people crying in frustration over trailers that have not arrived, insurance companies that won't pay, home inspectors that didn't show up, and homes that are gone.
Things that were funny
The woman who said she remained patient by repeating this prayer: "Lord, make my words sweeter than honey, for tomorrow I may have to eat them."
The dilapidated house with the sign "Don't worry. It looked this bad before the hurricane."
The children who laughed when we handed out backpacks at the Biloxi Community Center.
People we met
Loralye, a Parkinson's victim caring for her teenage granddaughter because her mentally ill daughter wasn't able to. Loralye had been promised a trailer by FEMA on three separate occasions, but one never arrived and her trailer permit was about to expire. She had been sleeping for two months in her sister's armchair.
Katherine and Jessie, two sisters who could still stop traffic in their eighties. They held each other's hands the whole time they sat with us. Jessie's house was completely lost in the hurricane, but she was grateful that she still had her sister.
Pat, a 75-year-old woman whose caretaker illegally signed off on a trailer in Pat's name, insisted Pat move into the trailer on her own property, and had now given Pat 24 hours to either pay $8,000 or move off the property.
Jen, an endlessly energetic twentysomething from California who, when the hurricane hit, quit her job and relocated to Mississippi to help. She had been living in a tent in Gulfport for the past two months, working for no pay at a community center that dispersed diapers, canned goods, clothing, and toiletries to people in need.
Rose, who had run a senior activity center on the coast until it was washed away. The organization was the only free community center available to seniors in the area. Rose was sad because the quilts that seniors had been working on for a year were all destroyed. I made a mental note to send Rose some self-threading needles and a box of scraps to help the quilting begin again.
Things that were astounding
Casinos the size of barges uprooted from their lots on the coast and moved across the highway from the sheer force of the wind.
Houses ripped from their foundations, so that even the linoleum on kitchen floors was peeled away.
The contents of an entire Wal-Mart Supercenter destroyed by winds, relocated to a giant tent in a parking lot so that essential shopping could continue.
Things we saw in the rubble of one house on East Beach Boulevard in Gulfport
Neckties, teapots, family photos, muffin tins, canned preserves, cross-country trophies, recipe books, Blockbuster videos, a scooter, a KitchenAid mixer, a surfboard, a disposable camera with one photo left to shoot, an Anakin Skywalker collectible popcorn tin, broken light bulbs
Things that were hopeful
Gulfport and Biloxi high schools playing each other in football. The towns were virtually demolished, but football practices had begun six days after the hurricane to give players a sense of normalcy, according to an athletic director we talked to. A total of 18 students from both teams never returned; their families relocated to other communities. But this was like any other football game, with hot pretzels and marching bands and ponytailed cheerleaders, except for the large chunk of the home team's bleachers that had been destroyed by wind.
Kamp Katrina, a volunteer community set up in Waveland. I talked to people from as far away as New York who had been living in trailers in this makeshift RV community for weeks and months, and who planned on staying until the devastation was under control. A group of hippies cooked an organic breakfast every morning, and in the evenings people talked.
The Waveland FEMA site, where people had been returning their disaster relief checks because they felt other people needed them more.
A woman whose roof had been blown off in the storm, who nonetheless opened her damaged home to two strangers and their baby, because she felt that she had something and others had nothing.
Things that hurricane victims said to us
I am so frustrated.
I am so angry.
I am so lucky.
Thank you for being here.
Things that we said back
Thank you for letting us be here. We are so lucky to be able to do whatever we can to help you.
We promise to come back again.
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