On the Road to Recovery

Six months ago, Fredricka and her baby were airlifted out of New Orleans as it filled with water. Today, thanks in part to Mercy Corps, she's establishing herself anew in Baton Rouge. Photo: Dan Sadowsky/Mercy Corps

Baton Rouge, Louisiana — There are plenty of people here with tales of white-knuckled escape from New Orleans' rising floodwaters. Fredricka Collins is one of them.

Just days after giving birth two months prematurely, she and her two-and-a-half-pound son were airlifted 80 miles from a hospital in New Orleans to one in Baton Rouge. Around the time her rental home began filling up with five feet of water, the 28-year-old Collins left her native city with only her newborn and the hospital robe she had on.

It's now six months later, and thanks in part to Mercy Corps, Collins is adjusting well to her post-Katrina life. She's still in Baton Rouge, where she shares a comfortably furnished apartment with her fiancée, Vincent, her 11-year-old son, Larry, and her tiny infant, Legend. Vincent found work at a local catering company and soon may return to his job at a New Orleans cold-storage facility that reopened in January. Larry, a fourth-grader, is doing well at his new school, and Legend is up to a healthy 12 pounds.

Mercy Corps helped soften the landing for Collins and other New Orleans evacuees by supporting Baton Rouge nonprofits who cater to vulnerable populations. Residents here say their 225,000-person capital city swelled to twice its size after the storm as New Orleans residents fled to shelters, hotels and homes of friends and relatives in Louisiana's capital. Many of the estimated 60,000 who remain lost everything to the floods, and needed things like housing, clothes, counseling and basic necessities to get back on their feet.

As a new mother in an unfamiliar town, Collins was referred to Family Road of Greater Baton Rouge, a nonprofit devoted to helping pregnant women and new mothers raise healthy babies. Family Road responded to the enormous needs by launching a pregnancy-to-parenting program exclusively for Katrina evacuees who were pregnant or had children younger than six.

Mike Tucker, the agency's operations director, describes the response as a scaled-down version of a federal program called Healthy Start, which Family Road administers to help reduce infant mortality and promote perinatal health. "The whole goal is to identify pregnant women and new mothers, identify their immediate needs, and provide them education and assistance for them to rebound quickly," he says.

With $152,000 in funding from Mercy Corps, Family Road extended its program for Katrina evacuees, originally scheduled to end in November, until the end of February. That gave families more time to get resettled and allowed additional women to enroll in the program. In all, Family Road has aided more than 260 displaced families since September.

Family Road's Regina Moore, one of five case managers in the evacuee program, assists 26 unmarried moms with needs that range from mental-health counseling to job-finding help to rent assistance to clothing and food. Most of her clients belonged to New Orleans' working poor, and while some have moved into their own apartments, others remain in hotels or with relatives, she says. They rely on her sympathetic ear and resource knowledge to move beyond relief to recovery.

"You think about how long it took you to get where you are in life. When you lose everything, you feel helpless," says Moore. "You don't know where to start."

In her initial meeting with Collins and other clients, Moore goes through a "problem list" to pinpoint the family's needs. Collins had already found a nice apartment and received a couch, loveseat and dinette set through a local church. Hospital nurses had given her clothes and shoes. But she still needed help with expenses and items for her infant son.

The only things she'd been able to salvage from her moldy house were a few family photographs that hung above where the water settled.

"It was hard," says Collins, who had a job processing payments for the local power company. "It was horrible to see all your stuff just gone."

Moore provided a huge lift, Collins says. She brought over diapers, infant clothing and a baby swing. She paid for an electricity bill and gave her a Target gift card. And she referred her to a health-care clinic where Legend received medical care and food.

Giving new mothers this kind of assistance, Moore says, is critical to helping them get established in their new surroundings. She sees herself as providing a bridge from assistance to self-reliance in a time of profound need.

Collins is grateful. "I'm one who really appreciates all the assistance I've received," says Collins, cradling a wide-eyed Legend on her shoulder. "It was very helpful."