At breakfast today, we met up with an animated woman escorting twenty-five energetic young people. As she made a video tape of the group, the look of pride on her face was so evident, I felt moved to ask who they were, and what they were doing.
"We’re a group from Atlanta, making trips back and forth to Biloxi with supplies," she said. "We’ve packed our vans with food and water, bath products, shovels, hair care products, tarps, you name it. We’ve packed in so much stuff, when we open the doors, things pop out. We’ve been running these supplies down to a church, where they can be distributed."
She tells us a story about Katrina’s convergence on the church the group is working with. "There were members up in the second floor, praying as hard as they could. At first, folks were telling the pastor’s wife she needed to move her car, because the water was up to the tires. The next thing they knew, the car was floating down the street. Across the street, they could see someone trapped in their attic. The church members tried throwing that person a rope, so she could cross over to the more stable structure, but they just couldn’t make it work."
She pauses, pressing her lips together and trying to hide her anger. "FEMA is not down there. Our government is not down there. We saw everyday citizens, people like you and me, with vans of water and food and supplies. But where is our government? They are nowhere to be seen."
"If you’re coming," she says, "tell me you’re coming and when. But don’t say you’re coming, and then not come. People in New Orleans, they waited. They didn’t try to get out. They didn’t try to escape, because our government said ‘We’re on the way.’ If they had known the government really wasn’t on the way, they could have started walking. They could have gotten out of there themselves."
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