Reaching Out to Displaced Families

Katrina Response Team Deputy Director Nick Macdonald (right) unloads bottled water at a shelter for displaced families in Abbeville, Louisiana. Photo: Mercy Corps

Sixty-seven-year-old Bernard Laviolett evacuated before the Hurricane Rita shattered the area he calls home. All the same, he sympathized with those who hadn’t.

“You don’t get this kind of flood but once every hundred years,” he said, sitting on the tailgate of his pickup truck. His trailer was five feet off the ground, but still two feet underwater, he said. He has no flood insurance.

Still, Laviolett is certain that his neighborhood will come back. “The Cajun people are tough, you know,” he said, chuckling, “We’re not afraid of a little work.”

Mercy Corps is on the ground in this area of the Gulf coast, bringing help and hope to Laviolett and his neighbors.

One day after Hurricane Rita ripped through southern Louisiana and east Texas, a Mercy Corps relief team delivered a truckload of emergency food supplies to a shelter staging point in Abbeville, Louisiana.

The Mercy Corps team - which had originally deployed to the Gulf coast as The Katrina Response Team, but then last week re-tasked itself into the Katrina-Rita Team - delivered easily-transportable emergency supplies to St. Theresa’s Catholic Church in hard-hit Abbeville, Louisiana. The church is acting as a central staging point for shelters in Vermillion and Iberia parishes.

The supplies included 720 gallons of drinking water, 860 protein drinks, and 1300 single-serving boxes of chocolate milk.

In general, Hurricane Rita appears to have been less devastating to the Gulf coast than Katrina, which struck the same region just over three weeks ago. The combined effect of the two hurricanes, however, has left hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents reeling. There are 48,000 hurricane evacuees in Louisiana alone. After Rita struck the state early Saturday morning, 44 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes declared states of emergency.

The two hurricanes have left behind them a dazed and displaced population, forced to move from shelter to shelter, from friends’ floors to church trailers. Many Katrina evacuees, already living in tenuous and trying conditions, had to evacuate a second time as Rita threatened.

Across the Gulf coast, peoples' lives have been a patchwork of struggle and flight.

The trip from Baton Rouge to Vermillion Parish allowed Mercy Corps team members to meet and talk to some of these folks, the proud residents of a battered region. They found exhausted, yet determined individuals everywhere they turned - people eager to lend their neighbors a helping hand.

Taking shelter under the metal canopy of a closed filling station, Donna Mier, Earline Mier and Jospeh Meaux were trying to find someone with a boat to take them to survey their flooded home. They escaped on Friday afternoon and had spent two nights sleeping in their cars. Their dogs, a boxer, a poodle and a chihuahua, waited with them.

Terry Aucoin’s house was dry, but he came by with his dachshund, Rosco, to help the Miers locate a boat.

Hoang Duong was stranded with his family by the side of the road. His home in Erath, Louisiana, lay about six miles beyond a deeply flooded patch of Highway 14. Duong’s little sedan wasn’t going to make it.

“I wait here,” said Duong, a welder who has lived in the United States for 25 years. Duong’s four-year-old son Charlie, who is supposed to start pre-school this month, waited by the side of the road with his father.

In a few hours perhaps the water would recede and he and his family could return home.

As families return and begin to rebuild, Mercy Corps will support them however we can. In times like these, neighbors are supposed to help each other.