Hurricane
Katrina Relief
Dispatch from Cal Poly Student & Red Cross Volunteer
Nick Hoover
SEPTEMBER 18th -- NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
THE FACES BEHIND THE RED CROSS
My
days of zipping around on forklift in the Red Cross’ Jefferson
Parish warehouse are coming to a close, as I fly back to San Luis
Obispo on Monday (Sept. 19). It might be difficult to understand
why I would miss work days that were no shorter than twelve hours
long, or the concept of working seven days a week with no time off
-- but if you met the people that I’ve labored with side by
side, you would understand that leaving my fellow Red Crossers is
difficult for me to do.
In my day-to-day life, I go to class and work at the SLO Tribune. For these two short weeks, however, as a team of Red Cross volunteers, we’ve managed to load 30 semi trucks a day, serving over 20,000 meals to neighborhoods in New Orleans.
I’ve never operated a forklift in my life, but now I could probably load a pallet of diapers blindfolded. There’s something to be said about being taken out of your element and getting placed in a situation that has no room for failure. To look into the eyes of the people that we serve daily at the Red Cross requires you to sign a contract with your heart, binding you to getting the job done at whatever cost because these people have nowhere else to turn to.
The
six men that I’ve worked with these last few days truly deserve
being titled the A-team. The walks of life that we came from are
all across the board in professional life: from a retired Alaskan
fisherman to a youth pastor from northern California. Yet those
dividing lines disappeared in the wake of thousands of grief stricken
Louisianan citizens.
Our small team ran the only warehouse in the New Orleans area, no small task for seven men and two forklifts. Daily, we loaded water, food, snacks, baby food and supplies, household goods, and kits to get damaged houses back into shape. We did this coming from nothing, as our warehouse was just a vacant building a week ago. We built this supply depot from the ground up to serve those returning to their homes.
I couldn’t believe the background of the people I worked with. Gary Miller is 65 and lives in Porterville. He could outwork anyone half his age. He goes to bed at 9 p.m. every night and rises at 3 a.m. to clean up the grounds of the hotel we’re staying at. By the time the rest of us get up at around 6 a.m., he’s already spent three hours of his day getting things ready to go. Tack on a 12-hour work day that never ends before sundown, and you’ll see what kind of people are out here volunteering their time to help those in need.
When
I asked him for his e-mail address, he said “I’m a dinosaur,
I don’t even have a cell phone.” But Gary always wears
a cowboy hat that his friend Willis Parker used to have before passing
away a few years back. “Everywhere I go I try and take this
hat with me. After my friend died, his wife told me to wear it wherever
I go to remind me of Willis,” Gary told me, as sweat dripped
off of his forehead from the humidity here in the South. He and
his wife will be here volunteering for three weeks before heading
back home to Central California.
Sean, John, and Rob came here from Maine over a week ago. They took leave from their jobs at a Naval air station in Maine. The three just returned from Iraq. It’s hard for me to understand as they call their wives and children every night. They are gone so much on deployment with their jobs, and now they’ve come for another three weeks to a crippled southern Louisiana?
Bob Koerperich, our supervisor, came from a small island near Juno, Alaska. He tinkers around at his job as a boiler technician with the Alaska Housing Corporation, a company that maintains transitional housing – but Bob really doesn’t need to work because of his journeys in being a snow crab fisherman years ago. He came here to help out for three weeks as well.
All of these people left their jobs behind to work nonstop with no pay. But is that really correct? Are we not getting paid? I think the answer is no. We’re being paid in a different way. I’ll walk away from this experience knowing more about life. I say that not to give some idealistic view of the world, but to give you an insight as to what really goes on here. Here, people eat, sleep, work, and live together for three weeks. In that short time, we shelter and feed thousands of people that can’t even return to their homes to see if they’re still standing. The pay that I receive from this experience won’t go into my wallet.
The pay I received for my work here comes from handing a man like Roy Ordoyne a bottle of water while he waited for word on financial aid from the Red Cross. “I borrowed a pair of shoes just to get here. One week before Katrina, I had just found a job – now, nothing. I didn’t even realize the storm was coming until it was too late.” Roy sat for hours at our distribution site for food and water figuring out his situation with Red Cross and FEMA workers. As I carried two cases of water on both of my shoulders for some other people, it was Roy who held the door open for me. I know that our efforts opened a door for Roy – who lost his house, storage unit, and the job that he just found which no longer exists.
During my time here, I drove my truck for 17 supply runs for a total of 1,206 miles, loaded 97 trucks, stocked over 3,000 pallets in our makeshift warehouse, and worked 206 hours in 14 days. During Red Cross training, a man in one of the videos says “If I had to work this hard in real life, I’d probably quit.” I’m tired, but after spending my time here working for the people of Louisiana, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.