Hello!
We’re here in the US South, where the hurricanes hit, and we live with it every day. Just like the North lives with blizzards and ice-storms, the mid-West with tornados and draught, the far-West with heat and earthquakes, and the Middle-East with war and terrorism. We’re all the same. As people we’re united in our sameness. Our differences, when embraced and understood, often only enlighten how much we have in common.
My name is
Paige Soehren. I attended the
AmeriCorps*VISTA PSO (pre-service orientation) in Atlanta, GA from November 29th through December 2nd, 2005. While in attendance, I met lots of VISTAs with similar goals. Our group, “the pink group”, was primarily focused on disaster relief. AmeriCorps would call us the “Homeland Security” group. We all work in hurricane affected states, MS, LA, AL, and FL. While at training, we discussed needs and issues surrounding disaster relief in these areas. We shared our experiences: happy and sad, tragic and funny, and all together beautiful.
One topic came up again and again: lack of information about this situation in the rest of the country! We all realized that so much of the nation has filed Katrina away as “old news”.
Katrina.
I’m going to steer clear of the pity stories you can read or hear anywhere. I’m not writing to give you a list of statistics about lack of water and power, etc. Because everyone’s tired of hearing the same old facts and figures, the same old sob stories. Heck, even we got tired of it at PSO and we were the ones telling the stories!!
This is the problem. Everyone is still saying the same things about Katrina and the toll on this country.
The truth, the now, the real pins and needles are much less dramatic than the news.
It’s real. To us, this is just like what you do every day at your office. It’s tragic and funny, highs and lows, the daily grind, nothing glamorous. The heroism is left behind to the heroes of the first weeks. Now, we’re down here just helping people, doing our jobs.
People like me, thousands of us, are sitting in front of computers working on spread-sheets to properly pay prescription bills, relocation disbursements, travel expenses, and detect fraudulent actions. How much was that check? We don’t have a file on so-and-so, but we’ve got a prescription bill for him, what happened? We have two copies of this check, one has void stamped on it; the other doesn’t! Who took the disk? Where’s my coffee?
The Boards of Education are determining the number of hurricane-displaced children that were recently enrolled in local schools, for funding.
In areas closer to shore, we’re mucking out houses. Cleaning, rebuilding, repairing, every day seeing some progress on one house, but driving back-to-base passing rows and rows of houses to be worked on tomorrow, next week, next month? And it’s messy, and dirty, and cold, and it smells bad. But it’s somebody’s house, and because it wasn’t fully destroyed, and it can be made habitable, they are expected to move back into it once we’re done working on it. So, we work.
We’re just down here in the South, dealing with thousands of people who had lives and homes and jobs three months ago. They were planning for the new school semester, for Halloween, maybe even Thanksgiving and Christmas if they thought far ahead (who does, now days?), and now the only planning is “Where will I get this necessity next week if so-and-so stops paying for it and I haven’t found a job yet?”
See, these people are now living in a community just like yours. It’s a community that has an unemployment rate with or without them. Here, just like anywhere, college kids have to compete for jobs at Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, and usually have to know somebody to get in. So, it’s not like there’s room in the job market to quickly find new jobs for all these people that can’t go home, because there’s nothing to go back to.
Where you live, if somebody’s house burns down, there isn’t much your community - as a whole - can do about it. Just provide food and shelter and basic supplies for a finite period of time. After that, well, we can only hope they have friends or family or insurance or connections. The father de-bugged programs for a software company on his home computer? Well, now they’re homeless AND jobless and you still can’t do much more for them than we can do for survivors down here. Just hope and pray and be thankful for all the random strangers who open their hearts and reach out to help.
On this site are the e-mail addresses and group information of VISTA workers in the South. Their groups all have needs that will be met eventually, one way or the other, or they’ll find a way to do without, that’s how the world works.
But, if in your community, in other parts of the country that haven’t been sucked dry by Hurricane Katrina... (There’s no money left down here in some non-profit’s reserves to even buy pens or pencils for the office; one group, repairing houses, has to ask volunteers to bring their own hammers and screw-drivers.) If you know people who have a surplus of supplies needing to go somewhere, people who have big hearts but haven’t found a cause, people who always want to take on another cause, etc. ... Let us know!
We’re not just asking for hand-outs. AmeriCorps*VISTA is a community, a team. We can help you, too, just ask!
We actually have surpluses! We can donate, if your community needs something we have. In Mobile, AL, for example, there is so much sterile, brand-new medical equipment just sitting in a warehouse. If you need bandages, syringes, dressings, medical tape, gauze, gloves, the works! We got it! I know they would trade truck-loads of it for a couple boxes of basic tools, which are in dire short-supply.
Write to these people and tell them what you need or what you have to give. Or, just write to keep up the nation-wide community experience! Heck, tell us if you don’t have anything and your community’s problems alone are too much for you to handle, without the weight of ours, but you just want us to know you support us spiritually, emotionally, and wish us good luck!
Anything we can do for one another is a start.
Katrina. The heroism is left behind to the heroes of the first weeks.
The melo-drama is over. Now it’s just regular, run of the mill drama.
Now, it’s the little people, the little things, making a hero in one person’s, or one community’s eyes.
Thank you,
And, please, feel free to write me about anything!
I spend a lot of time at this computer and I like to read.
writepaige@cableone.netLots of love,
Paige Soehren
VISTA, Jacksonville, AL
