Live from Pearlington - 7

Yesterday was one of my busiest days here yet. FEMA has finally responded and decided to erect a DRC - Disaster Recovery Centre - right on our premises beside the Pearl*Mart. This will enable residents to get their answers directly and the cluster will include staff from the Internal Revenue Service, Welfare, Unemployment, Crisis Counselling etc. There will be satellite phones and wireless internet etc.

It meant clearing a space for this huge tent quickly and providing them with some things they needed to get things set up. It was a Scrounge Fest finding them what they needed, to the point I wondered why they had come so unprepared, but.... I spent the afternoon with the new Director of this DRC and turns out he lives just outside the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, an area I have spent a great deal of time in, including last summer with team mate Nancy and others during Dream Quest in the Southwest. We have a lot in common and he is a firefighter by trade and this usually means the kind of guy who gets things done. I did some checking and he has a reputation within FEMA of being a “cowboy” who flies under the radar and whose motto is “whatever it takes.” A renegade, in other words, and a perfect match - if this is true - for a Recovery Centre that first drew breath as “Camp Renegaide.”

So, I tested him, because MY motto is: “Action talks and B.S. walks.” I told him we have a good percentage of families still in tents. He told me that “if you have people still on the ground, they’ll be in trailers in 48 hours.” I leaned back to Kelly, a young Americorps worker who manages the database that Joe Clark so labouriously set up and maintained. I winked at her. She pushed some keys and shortly thereafter handed me the current list of tent dwellers. “There you go,” I said. “I’m going to hold you to that!” He just blinked. I also told him that we needed two computer terminals set up for the public to be able to go online and look for jobs, do official business, type resumes etc. By the end of the day he had approval from FEMA and he was on his way to pick them up.

He wasn’t sent here; he asked to come. Is mother is from Gulfport, similarly destroyed, and he has selected civilian staff from the affected area who are sensitive to our needs. He’s from a small town no one (but me) ever heard of. Liike Pearlington. We are hopeful..... The DRC should be up and running on Wednesday, that is if all the parts that were not shipped for the tent that cost $16,500 finally arrive.

Then there is Mr. Rogers. He is an old black man who once played and sang with Fats Domino. At Karaoke Night, he sang a duet with me - Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.” He has been in the Shelter for weeks and is getting more and more depressed. He just wants a slab of his own he can call home, with a TV and a bed. Bechtel placed his sister’s trailer on the same property where his trailer is to be placed and blocked their own way to being able to deliver Mr. Roger’s trailer. Duh!! Of course, with a $2000.00 delivery charge per trailer, they are more than happy to come again, and again.... So we decided to pull it in from the other end of the lot, but needed a culvert installed over the ditch so the Bechtel truck could do that. The County said they would only install it if he paid. He can’t.

There’s a fellow here with a backhoe, a County employee taking care of some things. He had a dump truck coming with gravel for an area he needed to shore up. I asked him to refill the dump truck with dirt from behind the school and take it to Mr. Roger’s house and just fill the damn ditch in. He did. Now we will pressure FEMA to deliver his trailer, at last. Mr. Rogers thinks I’m a great singer and should “go professional.” I thought I would wait for another life to do that job; I’m kinda busy right now.

I told you Charles’ story yesterday. I left out one part, a funny story he told me that shows how, even in the midst of all this tragedy, the folks here can still find a good laugh. Seems while he was hanging onto life in that tent, after the storm, he had propped himself up one day to look out through the open flap. Some huge hogs had gotten loose and were wandering. A pack of now-wild dogs spotted them and gave chase. They barked furiously and he watched as the dogs chased the pigs out of sight. All grew quiet. In short order he heard the dogs again and, as they rounded the bend back into his sight, this time THEY were running for their lives with the pack of pigs in full chase. He said that if he’d had his video camera, he surely would have taken first prize in America’s Funniest Home Videos!

Have a great day and pray that FEMA comes through for us.