Aiding the Displaced

Lynette Elps with son James, 16, and twin daughters Jade and Jamara, 9, outside their hotel room in Port Allen, Louisiana. James benefited from mental-health services arranged by a Mercy Corps-funded outreach worker. Photo: Dan Sadowsky/Mercy Corps

Baton Rouge, Louisiana — Staying a night or two at the Holiday Inn Express in Port Allen, across the Mississippi River from downtown, isn't a bad choice for families visiting Louisiana's capital. It's relatively clean, convenient to Interstate 10 and has a large lobby with lots of cushy sofas and several big-screen TVs.

But holing up for five months there? Well, that's far longer than any family would want to stay under normal circumstances.

Since early September 2005, Lynette Elps and her three children — 16-year-old James and 9-year-old twins Jade and Jamara — have squeezed into a room only slightly bigger than the furniture it holds: two double beds, a fold-out cot, a desk and a dresser. "It's almost been like camping," Elps says good-humoredly.

But it's actually much worse. Because unlike weekend backpackers, the Elps weren't able to fold up their tents and go home.

The single mother and her three children most recently lived in an apartment in New Orleans, where Elps was looking for a job in graphic design as Hurricane Katrina approached. Three days before the storm's landfall, she packed up the family and drove 45 miles east in a caravan with aunts, cousins, and nieces to a storm shelter at Mississippi's Stennis Space Center. Just three days later, they gathered their belongings and drove back west, stopping for the night at a shelter in Covington, Louisiana.

The next day, they set off again before pulling off the Interstate and checking into this hotel. They’ve been here ever since.

The ordeal has taken its toll on James, a stoic teen recently diagnosed with depression. He's attended three different schools since August, the last of which required him to wear a uniform. But the family couldn't find, much less afford, the right pants and shirts for his six-foot-plus frame, or proper shoes for his size-16 feet.

Eventually, though, the family got help. James' name appeared on a list of hurricane-displaced students at his school, a list that ended up in the hands of Kenneth LeBlanc, a veteran social worker who'd recently come out of retirement to join a Mercy Corps-funded effort to help families reeling from the storm.

A refuge for New Orleanians

Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc along the coast, but it only scratched Baton Rouge. Here in this riverfront city of about 225,000 people, there are no blue-tarpaulin-covered roofs, no leaning lampposts and no blown-out marquees that marked Katrina's wrath further south. But Baton Rouge bore the brunt of what happened afterwards. "All hell broke loose," says LeBlanc, a mild-mannered Louisiana native with gray hair and a soft twang in his voice. "Overnight, the population just exploded. Traffic exploded. There were rumors all over the place about riots."

Carloads of evacuees poured into the city, straining its already-fragile safety net of mental health counselors, after-school programs, social workers and the like. "It's always been lacking and limited," says LeBlanc of the network of services for vulnerable populations. "Then it was completely overwhelmed."

To help, Mercy Corps doled out $325,000 in relief grants to Louisiana social-service agencies. One of those grants went to LeBlanc's former employer, the Capital Area Human Services District, a mental-health agency that serves seven Baton Rouge-area parishes. Mercy Corps gave the District $101,000 to create a temporary crisis-assessment and intervention team to find and help evacuees in need.

The funds helped hire a staff that includes LeBlanc, a nurse, several case managers and a resource coordinator. It also pays for the program's housing, supplies, travel and administrative costs.

LeBlanc, 55, had counseled low-income folks for most of his 31 years as a psychiatric social worker with the State of Louisiana. Although he'd been retired since May, and was beginning to settle into a life of fishing, golfing and gardening, the needs created by Hurricane Katrina were too great to ignore. "I like helping people … and I wanted to help out," he says.

There was plenty of help to give. LeBlanc and his colleagues began scouring FEMA trailer parks, schools, hotels and contacting other social-service agencies in search of people in need. He found families who didn't have a lot to start with and families who had good homes and livelihoods but had lost it all. He saw people in crisis, simply overwhelmed by their circumstances.

"For some people, they had the ability to cope but they couldn't even use the resources they had," he says. "Their thinking was so messed up."

Helping the Elps

At the Port Allen Holiday Inn, the family gathers around a coffee table in the lobby. The girls giggle while they slurp down ramen noodles from Styrofoam coffee cups, chasing each other around and trying to draw attention by putting on a stuffed-animal puppet show from behind their mother's chair.

James doesn't say much, but he is polite and makes eye contact when he speaks. The fact that his mom likes to talk, and tends to answer for him, magnifies his taciturn nature.

"He's a secluded person, especially since we moved from California to New Orleans two years ago,” Elps explains. "And this hasn't helped."

James started his sophomore year in high school in New Orleans, but had to leave less than a week later when Hurricane Katrina approached. In Baton Rouge, he enrolled in the well-regarded Southern University Lab School after his mom thought she'd secured a lease on a nearby rental house. After that fell through, James moved to Port Allen High School, near the hotel, which he says he likes the best of the three schools because "it's the cleanest."

Port Allen High School is where he met LeBlanc, who had received from school counselors a list of students who'd been displaced by the storm. "He asked me what it's been like since the hurricane," James recalls. "We talked for 20 or 30 minutes."

LeBlanc noted that James was "feeling hemmed in a bit" from living in a hotel room and the multiple school moves. LeBlanc helped refill a prescription to treat James' high-blood pressure and, after recognizing some disquieting signs, arranged a follow-up appointment with a psychiatrist.

He also referred the Elps family to Nykeisha Joseph, the crisis team's resource coordinator, who eventually found several pairs of uniform-standard tan pants and navy-blue collar shirts in James' size. To save money, she persuaded the Salvation Army to pay for the size-16 sneakers she'd found online, and arranged to pick them up at an athletic-footwear store to avoid shipping charges.

A positive change

James laced up his new shoes for the first time in mid-February. By then, he'd also started taking medication for depression, which had never been diagnosed. "I've seen a big change in James since he's been counseled," says Lynette Elps. "He looks better, he's feeling better, and he’s working out more."

And, after five months at the Holiday Inn, the family has something to look forward to: a four-bedroom, three-bath house in Plaquemine, a small town on a bend in the Mississippi River ten miles south of Baton Rouge.

Fittingly, the house is on True Hope Lane. "Isn't it strange?" marvels Lynette. "I think it's because we were always very hopeful."

James admits he's excited about getting a home. Despite the pending move, Elps says she'll keep her son in Port Allen High for the rest of the year.

LeBlanc considers the Elps family a success. "I think they're getting their lives back together," he says during the ride back to his Baton Rouge office. "Success is getting a certain degree of normalcy back. It's making sure families have got the basics, they've developed coping skills, and for the kids, they're grades are up."

For lives derailed by Katrina, each step toward normalcy is indeed worthy of celebration.