With Receding Waters, Another Gathering Storm
It's been a few days since my last post. Time to work through the night, helping to set up and run the data center for where the evacuees are staying. Since Saturday night it's turned into a real command-and-control center, a floor up from the evacuees, ringed with computers, televisions, lists and notes, whiteboards, help desk phones and all the detritus of a complex technology organism.
On the floor the story is different. Their chaos has not become more orderly: rows of cots are hoarding locations. Hair stylists have set up shop where we computers stood. The no smoking signs in the evacuee center are systematically ignored by Louisianans and locals alike. The tension and crowding is palpable now; it's as if everyone fluffed up and is taking up more emotional and physical room.
During that long night I tried to play welcome committee to evacuees wandering the halls and caverns of the convention center. One was a man with an oversized, knitted cap bulging with dreads. "Is there a Western Union around here?" I explained that there was little to spend the money on at 2:30 in the morning. "No, that's fine; just show me." I pointed him in an approximate direction and went to the next issue. As I left the next morning I met him, grinning, a filtered cheroot between the fingers of one hand, a disposable camera with the other. He seemed inordinately pleased: he'd walked about four miles in various directions before finding a WU. He was taking pictures of trees, flashing police lights, me. He had clearly scored something other than cash -- I worried about where he'd be keeping his stash in the shelter.
FEMA is insinuating itself into the area. Typically, taking up space before taking form. Other social and welfare agencies, working since the weekend, are being moved aside so the debit-card issuing behemoth can get on with providing raw money instead of solutions.
My prayer, my fervent wish, is that we find some way, quickly, to move the families out of this booming, open shelter and into the community. The faster the better, before the feral humans swept up with innocents get hungry for foods no law allows.
On the floor the story is different. Their chaos has not become more orderly: rows of cots are hoarding locations. Hair stylists have set up shop where we computers stood. The no smoking signs in the evacuee center are systematically ignored by Louisianans and locals alike. The tension and crowding is palpable now; it's as if everyone fluffed up and is taking up more emotional and physical room.
During that long night I tried to play welcome committee to evacuees wandering the halls and caverns of the convention center. One was a man with an oversized, knitted cap bulging with dreads. "Is there a Western Union around here?" I explained that there was little to spend the money on at 2:30 in the morning. "No, that's fine; just show me." I pointed him in an approximate direction and went to the next issue. As I left the next morning I met him, grinning, a filtered cheroot between the fingers of one hand, a disposable camera with the other. He seemed inordinately pleased: he'd walked about four miles in various directions before finding a WU. He was taking pictures of trees, flashing police lights, me. He had clearly scored something other than cash -- I worried about where he'd be keeping his stash in the shelter.
FEMA is insinuating itself into the area. Typically, taking up space before taking form. Other social and welfare agencies, working since the weekend, are being moved aside so the debit-card issuing behemoth can get on with providing raw money instead of solutions.
My prayer, my fervent wish, is that we find some way, quickly, to move the families out of this booming, open shelter and into the community. The faster the better, before the feral humans swept up with innocents get hungry for foods no law allows.
posted by Da Shlom at Thursday, September 08, 2005
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