I've been down here for a couple of days now, and so far I've not been in the dome or the Reliant Center. Throughout the holiday weekend the Red Cross had more than enough volunteers, an indication of the depth of this community's response. Houston has come out en masse to support New Orleans' displaced residents. Local stores are offering discounts and free materials, including mattresses for those who have already moved into apartments. Target has handed out gift cards. The past two days, traffic wrapped around the dome/center complex, cars and trucks stuffed with clothes, food, and personal items. There are an estimated 220,000 displaced people in Houston right now, with at least 50,000 in Red Cross emergency shelters and countless others at small shelters set up at churches and community centers.

The displaced are marked with bright pink hospital wristbands. The Red Cross, having to do absolutely everything since our federal government has been and continues to be criminally negligent, had to come up with a system of identifying the displaced when some of the displaced no longer had IDs of any kind, as they'd lost them in the floodwaters. It is an imperfect system to say the least and has already led to stigmatization. The evacuees are allowed to leave their shelters, thankfully, so there are often groups of New Orleanians walking along the expansive Houston roads surrounding the complex or sitting beneath the immature trees that circle the parking lots. There are rumors of wide-spread crime and looting here, but no surprise at all, they are only rumor. One of Rebecca's friends told us last night that some Houstonians were accusing evacuees of looting when they saw them with Target bags over their shoulders, unaware that Target had handed out gift cards. And still people deny that race has played a part in this whole disaster. Sure.

There are an estimated 5,000 medically needy evacuees in the Red Cross shelters alone. As you'd expect, there are not this many extra beds in hospitals here, even in the city-in-itself neighborhood of public and private hospitals that sits a tram ride away from downtown, the largest complex of its kind in the US. The city is creating a new hospital for the displaced at the Brown Convention Center. The financial burden to this city is immense. The loss of revenue from the stadiums and convention centers coupled with the expense of running them for tens of thousands of people is costing the city millions every week. Yet the city has not balked once but instead has continued to expand its support.

The Red Cross has teamed up with the ICRC and MSNBC to begin reconnecting families, a daunting task given how disorganized the evacuation has been. Since FEMA completely abandoned New Orleans, leaving the evacuation to evolve organically with no structure, families were torn apart. Children were sent to one city, parents to another. Right now there are four databases being used to connect people, because FEMA did not have a plan for this at all and has left it to NGOs and news organizations to piece a system together. Rebecca has been appalled at this because she has been evacuated herself from a war, and has worked with the UN and ICRC in Africa and seen the systems they have for humanely dealing with displaced persons. There are people who know how to do this, who have the computer programs and the expertise, and who have only now been allowed to help.

Annie, a former co-worker of mine in Chicago at the Neighborhood Writing Alliance (NWA), emailed me today and told me about the Neighborhood Story Project, a community writing program that a writer and an anthropologist started fairly recently in New Orleans' 7th ward that offered writing workshops with high school students and published the students' work in books. Many of the books were destroyed in the flood, so they are working to raise money to republish and distribute throughout the country. Meanwhile, though, they are going to begin hosting workshops in the Astrodome with displaced teens. I'm hoping to connect with them this week and see if I can help in some way, or perhaps see if I can help them or others begin workshops with adults and parents, which is what NWA does in Chicago.

Rebecca's friend, who volunteered at the dome on Saturday, showed us a picture a 15-year old had drawn for her. He started to draw as soon as she gave him a piece of paper and a pen. Many evacuees will hook up with family and move away from the dome, hopefully in the next month or so. But others may be there for a couple of months or more. We all need community and some sort of civic life. The arts give us that community. The writing workshops the Neighborhood Story Project is starting are one way to have that community and civic life, and are more evidence of the creative and expansive support Americans are giving other Americans, even as their government does so little.

We are signed up for the 2 p.m. shift which ends at 10. We will stay if they have no one to help out in the night, but we're hoping we'll be able to come back and get some rest. It's been a relief to have finally slept the past couple of nights. During the day, Rebecca has taken me around the city and given me a sense of this place, a mid-century city where everything is larger than life, including the generosity of many of its residents.

I will post an update late tonight.