In Patience to Abide
by Simon Hand

NOLAFugees.com correspondent Simon Hand recounts his experience as a Red Cross volunteer in post-Apocalypse ATL.

When the storm hit, my fiancée and I went to stay with her parents in Atlanta. About two weeks later, we went down to the Red Cross headquarters on Monroe Drive to volunteer. The next day we were put through a crash course in “casework”—how to conduct interviews with applicants, get them medical help, and provide financial assistance. There were hundreds of people lined up outside the building, whole families standing and sitting around on the grass.

My first "client" was Patricia. She was nineteen, and had evacuated from somewhere on Marigny Street in New Orleans. She was carrying a baby in a carrier, and had been waiting outside the building for hours, perhaps all day. About four in the afternoon, she had made it to the front of the line.

I led her into the building and to my table and two chairs in a small storage room.

“Do you need my ticket?” she asked, pushing a piece of card across the table. She had been number "1064."

The baby was sick. He had a cold, and she hadn’t been able to get him his shots yet. His chest rattled loudly with every breath. She had two other babies, she said, and her household also included her two brothers, her sister, and her mother.

I began filling out the forms that would get Patricia’s family a one-time credit line of $1815. I took down names, ages (the baby in the carrier was three weeks, Patricia’s mother, 37), household income (this did not affect the amount of aid), and marked “NA” for “not affected” in the box where other possibilities were “I” (injured), “M” (missing), and “K” (killed).

Patricia held the baby for a few minutes, then when it had quieted, placed it back in the carrier and slid forward on the table, resting her head on her arms. I explained how the card worked—it should be active by tomorrow; no sales tax should apply; Wal-Mart won’t accept it; it can’t be used for alcohol, tobacco, or firearms.

“What about a house?” she said.

The Red Cross did not provide housing. I gave her a list of other organizations providing assistance.

“A car?” she asked.

*

My next case was Sharon, a woman in her late thirties. Pushing a baby in a stroller, she herded her two young boys chaotically around my table. She had been number "1200."

I found an extra chair and lifted it over the table between the two boys.

“Move out the way,” she told one of them roughly. “Sit down.”

Sharon’s “pre-disaster address” had been in Kenner. She had had a steady office job there. Now her house was under water. They had stayed in a motel somewhere in Mississippi for a few days, “But then we ran out of money,” she said, “so we just started traveling.” Now a generous acquaintance was housing them temporarily in Atlanta.

The two boys, who were nine and eleven, had immediately begun jostling each other and fiddling aimlessly with action figures. Their mother repeatedly ordered them to sit still or be quiet. The baby yelled sporadically. Sharon talked about their odyssey since leaving New Orleans, the waiting, the kindness she had encountered in Atlanta.

I filled out three medical forms. The baby needed asthma medicine. Sharon needed to see the nurse too, and one of the boys had a neck injury from a car accident that had happened after the hurricane. This would mean more waiting in lines.

The baby bumped his stroller into his mother’s leg again and again. “He does this,” she said. “He stands up and walks inside his stroller. I don’t know why he doesn’t just walk without it.”

*

Most of my cases that first day, and the rest of the week, were mothers, and most were from New Orleans East. Trina had two children in sixth grade. She was a social worker, her husband a teacher. “We’re relocating,” she said. “I don’t want to go back into all that sludge. That stuff is going to seep back up eventually.”

Her cell phone rang while she talked.

“That was the school counselor,” she said. “I enrolled my kids in school yesterday, but they weren’t there today. She’s wondering where they are. Sorry, I don’t want her to give up on them.”

I passed her the form that she would need to get the Red Cross debit card.

“Can I get a bed?” she asked.

The Red Cross did not provide beds.

“Oh, no, can I buy a bed?” she said quickly.

I explained that the money could be used for whatever she needed.

“Oh thank god,” she said. “You scared me. I’ve been thinking about getting a good night’s sleep tonight. And I have to buy clothes for my kids. The school doesn’t have uniforms.”

The card would expire in 120 days, so the money would have to be spent within that time.

“Oh it’s going to be gone,” she said.

Frances had left New Orleans with her two children six days before the hurricane to visit relatives in Gretna. They had not been home since. She rested her head in one hand and leaned wearily to one side as she sat waiting. Her eyes were red.

“Can I get contact lenses?” she asked. She had taken only one pair of “dailies” with her for the short visit to Gretna. That had been fourteen days ago. I wasn’t sure whether the nurses’ office provided contacts, but they would be able to replace the eyeglasses her daughter had lost.

We talked about New Orleans—neighborhoods, the evacuation, the flooding. Her family would not be going back.

“We’ve seen a lot of love here,” she said.

By the second week after the storm, thousands of evacuees had arrived in Atlanta. The Red Cross estimated the number would soon be 25,000. “We started planning for this the Thursday before the hurricane,” a long-term volunteer told me. The organization had not planned to open the Head Quarters to evacuees—it was usually a blood bank and administrative center—until hundreds of people began appearing outside the building.

Five weeks after the flooding, the Red Cross had provided financial assistance to 32,400 families in Metro Atlanta, or about 94,000 people. And by late October, FEMA had assisted more people in Atlanta than in any other single city outside of Louisiana, with the exception of Houston, Texas.

Two weeks after the storm, the Atlanta Head Quarters closed to evacuees, and its staff began the task of filing the dozens of boxes of paperwork that had accumulated in the rush of those two weeks. (The “processing” of evacuees continued at a number of “megacenters” across the city.) As I sorted piles of pink, white, and yellow triplicate copies, I began glancing at “pre-disaster addresses.” New Orleans appeared again and again, dozens and then hundreds of times. A Mississippi address appeared occasionally.

*

One middle-aged man I spoke to, who had lived in the Ninth Ward, had left hollowed out coconuts sitting on his bathroom floor.

“They’re floating now,” he said. “Although they may have filled with water, so they probably sank back down again.”

Would he be going back?

“Oh yeah. I have to go back. That’s my home.”

His wife, sitting next to him, nodded in agreement.

Are you going to roll this year? I asked as they left.

“Oh yeah,” they both said, smiling.

A.J., an evacuee from St. Bernard Parish, also wanted to go back home. Before the storm his family had been in the fishing business. Some of them had evacuated to Baton Rouge ahead of him, where, because he had not been heard from, a story had gone around that he was dead. But this callous inaccuracy did not seem to bother him.

“It’s like getting a new life,” he said.

The Red Cross was providing hotel rooms to evacuees for two weeks, and as we drove to the Days Inn in downtown Atlanta, A.J. looked up at the tall buildings.

“I don’t want an office job,” he told his sister, who was sitting next to him. He would use his new life to return to his old one.

A.J.’s sister, whose nine-year-old son was with her, did not want to go back to Louisiana with her brother. She was already applying for a job as a cashier at Wal-Mart.

And most of the evacuees I met did not plan to go back. Most of New Orleans former population—at least those who had come to Atlanta—seemed to be looking back at a distant city that they had now left behind. Concerns such as finding clothing, housing, jobs and schools were now taking precedence.

*

My last "client" that first week was Duane, a man in his early twenties wearing a white undershirt. His white baseball cap perched crookedly on top of a handkerchief tied around his head. He had been rescued by a helicopter from the roof of his house in the Ninth Ward. His two-year-old and his four-year-old had been with him, as well as his younger sister.

“We were up on the roof flashing our flashlights,” he said.

He had a small bandage on one hand.

“That was from the glass. The water came from both sides of the house,” he said, bringing his hands together in a wide clapping motion. “We went up the stairs [to get to the attic], then I cut through the roof with a couple of tools my Daddy left up there. I was using an ax, but I couldn’t swing it. I had to do this.” He moved his clasped hands together up and down in front of his face.

“It took me a while. They had that stuff on the roof nailed down good. Then we were up there with flashlights. The only thing left above the water was the tip of the roof." He touched the fingers of both hands together to form a point. "I never saw so many helicopters. I thought a war was about to start. The baby was crying. My sister was talking about she wanted her Mama. That was hard.”

From the roof they were carried to what had become an outdoor halfway house on Interstate 10.

“We were on I-10 under the Causeway,” he said, “but they gave us food. They kept us full.”

When the paperwork was finished he got up to go.

“See you back in New Orleans?” I asked hopefully.

If I go back,” he said over his shoulder.

“Do you want to?”

“In a way I do, but I might as well learn what’s up here.”

Simon Hand is NOLAFugees' answer to Malcolm Muggeridge, and is the editor of the Bywater Neighborhood Association Newsletter.