Coming Through

By Emily King, Heifer Louisiana Field Coordinator

They march through my life, day by day, week by week, the storm-tossed survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

First are Roger Jones, my boss, the South-Central Program manager for Heifer, and Sharon Satchel, the South-Central administrative assistant. Living 60 miles from the Gulf Coast in New Augusta, Miss., didn’t spare them from Katrina’s fury. Roger and Sharon made it through the hurricane without physical injury or catastrophic damage to their property only to be caught up in the emotional hurricane that followed. 

Roger’s world filled with the plight of family members displaced, dozens upon dozens of project participants hammered by the storm, and everyone around New Augusta living for days, even weeks, without electricity.

Sharon launched a desperate quest to find her 83-year-old aunt, Gertrude Dorman, who lived in St. Bernard Parish, where the storm surge topped the levees, leaving most of the parish flooded. After searching the Internet for 10 days, Sharon learned that her aunt was in Joppa, Md. With the help of her family, the elderly woman returned to New Augusta. Happy ending? No, just a beginning.

Now began the family’s countless phone calls to disaster assistance agencies, until finally, in an effort to get through the jammed lines, they surrendered sleep and tried calling at 3 a.m., only to hear the same busy signal. Sharon’s parents traveled to St. Bernard to see the ruined house, flooded by eight feet of water. Wearing hazard gear, the couple entered the structure to salvage whatever wasn’t beyond saving.

Aunt Gertrude, so used to her neighborhood just a few miles from New Orleans, will live in a travel trailer next to Sharon’s parents’ house, her past sodden, her future shaky.

Then there are Heifer’s project participants—their homes damaged, fences destroyed, outbuildings ripped apart, and, for those in the timber-growing areas, hundreds of their trees down.

I see the strain in their faces. I hear it in their voices. They’re tired after days spent cutting up fallen trees, facing weeks, even months of the same back-breaking work. It is work that they somehow have to fit into lives already full, with jobs, farms, families and the dispiriting, time-stealing task of seeking help from one bureaucracy or another.

Add to them the people in my home parish of Pointe Coupee, the people all over Louisiana and in other states, living in shelters, motels and homes of relatives and friends, with no possessions, dependent on others, standing in endless lines to sign up for help. Thankful, angry, stunned—their emotions run the gamut, their old lives snatched away. 

If you haven’t experienced it, the fury of a hurricane is hard to comprehend. If you haven’t seen it, the destruction is hard to fathom. Pictures on TV or in print are little rectangles; but when you’re on the ground, when you’re there, the destruction is panoramic, overwhelming. The mind rebels: It isn’t real ...

But if you look again, you’ll start to see them, those other people marching through my life—people from every state, from all over the world, offering help and support, personal and financial.

In the topsy-turvy reality of disaster, Canadians from Vancouver were the first outside rescuers to reach St. Bernard Parish. Heifer staff from around the globe sent messages of concern. People, rich and poor alike, opened their homes to strangers, gave money, gave goods, volunteered in shelters, cooked meals. 

The members of the St. Helena Cattle Company, a Heifer project in southeast Louisiana, sought to help cattle producers in the southern marshlands, where more than 15,000 cattle drowned in storm surges. The St. Helena members, some of whom had also sustained damage from Katrina, gave $300, plus hay and feed, to help their fellow cattle producers save what remained of their herds.

They did it because Heifer International had helped them start their project. They were passing on the gift, as were, in their way, those people from around the world, marching toward, not away from, trouble and loss. They saw need and they came.

Emily King is a lifelong resident of Pointe Coupee Parish, where she and her husband raise cattle.