This weekend, my wife and I spent some time volunteering at Reliant Arena. I'm going to talk about some of my observations there of the people, of the state of the overall effort to help the victims of Katrina, and let you know what is needed and what is not needed. You may be suprised.
Generosity and Caring
First of all, you have to understand the setting. Here in Houston, people are being EXTREMELY generous in many different ways. A lot of people bash Texas around here, but it's completely unfounded and the Texas-bashers would be ashamed if they could see what all we Texans are doing to try to help. I'm not saying this to pat ourselves on the back, but to help you understand what has happened.
This weekend, there were way too many people volunteering to help. The shelters were turning people away who wanted to volunteer, sometimes saying come back tonight and see if you can help, sometimes saying come back tomorrow. Fortunately, I was able to find out that the one area they did need some volunteers for at one point was for people with laptops to show up. Even this soon got full though, and there was not enough room for all of us to sit and enter data. So, the people that were there the longest were sent home, and any new people showing up were turned away as well.
The food and supplies had a similar thing happening. There were so many donations of food, clothing, etc. that Reliant Arena and the Astrodome were unable to operate as donation centers anymore. The Houston Food Bank and the Salvation Army are still accepting donations elsewhere, but the situation is much better than you would expect.
It is very likely that as the weeks go by, less and less people will volunteer their time and make donations. That is when it will be the most critical for us to step up and help these people. Keep that in mind if you do plan to volunteer. It's great to do it now, but it's also important to plan on volunteering later as well.
My Experience
My wife and I read on the Harris County Citizen's Corp website that volunteers were needed with laptops and WiFi connections. So, being the computer people that we are, we grabbed our laptops (and my iPaq), and headed to Reliant to volunteer. We were suprised upon arrival when the guard initially turned us away, until I told him I had a laptop. After that, we went to the front of the building we were told to report to, and they also were turning people away. Luckily, we overheard someone else saying that volunteers with laptops were needed at the Message Center, so we walked around to the side of the building and went to the Message Center.
After entering the building, we were looking for someone in charge. There was no clear leader, so we ended up sitting with some other volunteers and asking what they were doing. At this point, data entry was the most important thing, so we started on that. The refugees were given forms where they could put their name and contact information, then list who they are looking for. We then would take those forms and enter it into a database set up by Pinnacle Phones. At this point, it was expected that data entry would take a long time, possibly even days. However, it suprised the people who we eventually discovered were in charge that everyone's hard work resulted in all the forms being entered into the system. As a result, they asked everyone who had been there the longest to leave, and we turned our focus to searching.
We moved the tables around, then set up rows of tables where we could all put our laptops and use all the different survivor databases we had access to and let people come up to us to ask for information on their missing loved ones. In some ways, this was a harder job than the physical labor of handing out supplies or carrying heavy loads of supplies. With the physical labor, you can clearly see the fruit of your work resulting in people having something to eat, something to drink, and clothes to wear. With the search job, people come to you expecting answers, and unfortunately, there are very few answers to give.
Since everyone and their brother, and every shelter as well, is making different survivor databases, it's really hard to find anything. Finding a missing family member, unfortunately, is a lot like winning the lottery. Also unfortunate is that one of the main systems we used, Family Messages, went down a lot (prior to Yahoo hosting them) so one of the main places we were told to look was unreliable from an availability standpoint, and it's pretty lame to say, "oops, the server's down, so we can't find your missing kid" to a person about to break out in tears.
Overall, we were not able to help many people. What we mostly did was taken down their information and put it in our database. We couldn't really do much more than that, and I would feel dissapointment with every person I couldn't help. However, the times that we could help people ended up as the greatest moments of the day, and what I will remember the most.
The first person I was able to help was a mother whose daughters were missing. This was not a typical case, because the mother was a woman in a wheelchair suffering from cancer. She gave me a list of names, and I was unable to find the oldest daughter, and the woman was dissapointed. With the second daughter, I was unable to find her name in the Red Cross, in our database, on Family Messages, etc. until I got to MSNBC's list. There, I found the name of her daughter with a message stating that she was ok and looking for her mother, whose name matched the woman I was talking to. Even though MSNBC's database sucked and didn't give much information, this girl was smart enough to at least say what shelter she was at. When I told the woman in front of me this, she burst into tears that her 14 year old daughter was ok. I'm not the crying type, and even if I was there was no way that I could cry at that moment. I felt like a kid at a broken down old carnival who flipped a switch and suddenly all the rides turned on with bright flashing lights and festive music. I was too much in shock to really do much of anything emotionally, but I got back to work and found the phone number of the shelter on Google, then gave this woman the phone number as well as driving directions to the church that it was located at, about 30 minutes from where we were in Houston. This was one of the happiest moments of the day for me, and one of the happiest moments of her life for her.
Another time that I felt really glad to be there to observe was a couple that came in looking for their son. They seemed unusually calm and much more cheerful than the other people who were at the shelter. Like everyone, I asked how they are doing and what their story was. They had told me that the man and his son were at one place, while the wife was at home when the storm hit. They were evacuated, and even at the Superdome at the same time even though they never found each other there. Upon arriving to Houston, the man and his son were seperated, and he didn't know where his son was. He knew absolutely nothing of his wife after the storm hit, and may have assumed the worst. However, a few hours prior to coming to me to look for their son (who they already knew was safe, just not knowing where he was), they found each other. They originally thought that they had lost everything and were alone, and they had gone a whole week without knowing anything of each other. However, they soon discovered that they were both ok and both in the same place, and were happier than they were before the storm hit. These people, who were looking for their 20 year old son, were acting like newlyweds. I don't know how they were before the storm, but I could tell that they clearly appreciated each other more than ever. Since they knew their son made it to Houston, they were optimistic and viewed it as inevitable that their whole family would be reunited and that afterwards, they could rebuild their lives.
After a long day, the number of volunteers with the search area dwindled towards the evening. We ended up leaving after 9:00pm when the number of people looking for relatives dwindled down.<p.<br>
One other thing that I noticed that didn't really fit in here well was the lack of a good response from the government. The Red Cross was there, although stretched thin. There were tons of volunteers. When we arrived, there were supposedly FEMA people (this is what some of the refugees told us) who were supposed to be helping people get food stamps and other things they needed to live. These people were not easily identified, they had lunch brought in for them, and closed shop by 5:00pm at the latest, although probably much earlier.
What is Needed
Here's the part that many of you are probably skipping to, so here it is. Based on my limited experience in talking to these people and the area that I worked in, my biased view of what they need is this.
The food, water, and shelter is taken care of for now. The next priority for people is not to get more comfy beds on cruise liners (although that's a very noble and nice thing to offer), their main priority is to find their families. A big effort needs to be undertaken to reunite people with their missing family members, and after they have accounted for everyone, ship them off to somewhere more comfortable.
To do this, we need one, national database of all the victims, no matter where they are staying, and we need to scrap everything else after we get all of the other systems' data imported into the national one. This is a job that FEMA should have done, but since they have failed we really need to find a way to decide on one single place. The Red Cross has one, but I'm not sure that it's the best one at this point. I don't know how, I don't know who, I don't know when, but this is critical to linking families back together.
As everyone knows, the government response to Katrina has been horrible. So horrible, in fact, that third world countries in Africa are bewildered how long it took our government to respond, and the fact that their government would have done more and would have been faster. We still are having a bad response from the government, and need to continue pushing our politicians to do something NOW rather than later or waiting. There was no governmental leadership that I could find anywhere, and the other organizations present were more focused on the actual work than of managing the situation. I'd think that it's the government's job of at least organizing the response even if private citizens and non profit organizations end up being the ones that do the work.
We also need a full accounting within the government for the failures to react, partially to learn why the failures occurred and who to blame, but more importantly to be able to prevent it from happening again. Unfortunately partisanship comes to play too much in our political system, and we'd probably be better off if this were somehow investigated by the U.N. or some other external group. I don't think we can trust the Republicans or the Democrats to handle this. The Republicans will blame everyone but themselves, and the Democrats will be too sheepish to actually push forward against those responsible.
Thanks
Also, I want to thank everyone else who has volunteered, made donations, or even just taken a moment to think about the people who have suffered. It is important that we as Americans at the very least take care of our own. We have to learn to care again as a nation, because we've been divided so strongly by hatred that our so-called leaders have intentionally used to take control. As more people are getting involved with helping the refugees from Katrina, we are learning that the government's lack of a response has to be met with a response by average people like us. I hope that more and more of us will make the connection that our government is supposed to serve us, and that WE THE PEOPLE are the government, not a bunch of rich old white jackasses sitting around occupying our nation's capitol and not doing their jobs. We need to take the twisted Republican idea of "personal responsibility" and slam it into the ground as the selfish destructive idiocy that it is, and replace it with a better idea of "civic responsibility" where we all learn that we are not only responsible for ourselves, but also our neighbors, our society, our nation, and our world.