Bill Shore’s Letters
My Dilemma with this letter
Originally published: October 2005
So here's my dilemma as I get off the plane after two long days of meetings about hurricane relief in Biloxi, Gulf Port and Baton Rouge: If I write to you as I have so many times in the past, telling what I saw and who I met, this trip will seem like the many others we've taken in search of hardship and hope. Such a letter will obscure the very point I want to make, which is that what we found walking through the warped debris of flattened towns, and picking our way through thousands of homeless families under the glare of convention center lights, and unloading pallets of milk to supply families in lines that stretched around the block, was like no other experience I've had in this life, like nothing I've ever seen before or want to see again.
It was my ambition to be your eyes and ears on this trip and to convey what we experienced. But this time I am destined to fail because words and images are guaranteed to fail.
We arrived nearly 30 days after Hurricane Katrina struck. But you wouldn't know it from the thousands of people still stuck in crowded shelters without the slightest idea of where they'll go next. There was a haunting quality to much of our visit, perhaps because nature had created such unnatural results. Tree branches everywhere held mangled dangling clothes and plastic bags, like birds mocking defiantly. Displaced floating casinos were dumped across Highway 90 which is unimaginable given the massive 20 story buildings that they are. The newly homeless sleep, talk or stare, while those who flocked to serve them - relief professionals and experienced volunteers repeatedly, unselfconsciously, break down in tears.
My impressions of what's working and what's not, based on only two days and hundreds of conversations are only that: mine and impressions:
- The food banks Share Our Strength funds and the Second Harvest network have responded boldly and effectively. There is food enough to go around, much of it donated, some of it through catering services purchased by FEMA. There are plenty of volunteers but not the skilled volunteers, such as mental health professionals, communications technicians, fork lift drivers, etc. that are most needed.
- The churches which already play such a large role in the life of the deep South are the unsung heroes of this epic catastrophe. Church leaders and congregations endured significant personal sacrifice to save lives and restore spirits without regard to race, income, or affliction, in numbers far beyond their capacity, and with a dignity and compassion that is simply not offered by the larger governmental and nonprofit institutions. Having never before seen this network first hand or operating at this level, it left an indelible and overwhelmingly positive impression.
- The bulk of charitable giving has already occurred and will come nowhere near the public funding that will ultimately be necessary for a rebuilding effort destined to last at least 10 years. What the storm didn't take, mold and new theories of urban planning will. Almost everyone I spoke with expects to see their home and community bulldozed and rebuilt. The scale of the disaster, stretching for hundreds of miles, and its impact on infrastructure like roads, bridges, phone service, etc. has overwhelmed local capacity to develop a recovery plan. Even basic needs assessments are still preliminary.
- Each community has its own distinct challenges. New Orleans needs to be rebuilt. Baton Rouge saw its population double in the course of a day and does not have the housing, roads, jobs, schools or services to absorb its 300,000 new residents. In federally subsidized housing projects like Edgewood Manor, near Gulfport, Mississippi, moms like Cherie and her four kids sit on the iron stairs of apartment buildings severely damaged but not destroyed, looking out over mountains of garbage, flies and maggots, and waiting for relief officials who have yet to arrive.
As always, resilience speaks louder than despair. Even those who lost everything believe they will be okay in the end. They believe it because they are American and because they have seen and felt how you and I and so many others want to help.
In the long run these fellow citizens of ours need more than our help. They need change: in everything from the way we build levees and protect estuaries to how we invest in schools and economic opportunity. Like all change it will start within people. We saw personal transformation everywhere we turned. Mark Dunn, a father of four, is the personal assistant to the pastor of Bethany World Prayer Center, a three campus congregation of some 12,000 worshipers. For the past four weeks he's overseen a massive relief effort that brought 1200 evacuees, mostly African American, into their facilities. Within 27 hours they had marked off spaces for cots and air mattresses, created a meal service, built showers, and shortly thereafter installed banks of Maytag washing machines and dryers.
"This changed my life. I was in the military for 25 years. I was used to getting things done and had a style that was kind of autocratic. That didn't work here. This revolutionized my way of thinking. What these people needed was love. I must have heard 800 stories of terrible loss and I just sat here and cried. They came here with all kind of walls up. Imagine everything they'd heard about shelters, and being afraid, and having their children here. But love melted them like wax. The walls just came down. I had to look into my heart and find how to do that."
