This is another rather disorganized post. Sorry!

I'm sitting here on the bed, still in my pajamas, after another late night at the park. Yesterday morning we rose early to get to the Red Cross for an orientation meeting -- a history lesson that's required if you're to take any of their other courses -- only to find the place overwhelmed with eager volunteers and the class we'd signed up for already full. We got breakfast then lunch, then went back to the Red Cross an hour before the next orientation session to make sure we could stake out two seats. The session was full of the silliness that all large bureaucracies thrive off of, but it wasn't difficult to sit through and now we're "qualified" to attend the disaster relief workshop this weekend.

Thousands of displaced people have found apartments and homes the past two days, so the floors of the Center, Arena, and Dome are sprinkled with empty cots. There were so many empty at the center last night that families were placing some on their sides and creating little "rooms" for some semblance of privacy. The biggest barrier to getting people out of the shelters right now is locating disconnected and separated families. The evacuation was done so poorly (because it was done so late and therefore with more urgency) that children were separated from their parents, wives from their husbands, sisters from their brothers. Many people are alone at the park, their families scattered across Texas and Louisiana or beyond. They are desperate to find each other, and need to in order to figure out where to go and what to do next.

Rebecca received an email from her cousin who is also volunteering and she recommended that we take our computers to the Reliant Center to help evacuees find their relatives. We headed over the Center in the early evening, received a brief orientation and introduction to this cool new search engine Yahoo has set up that allows us to search through the dozens of databases that have formed the past ten days online, including the MSNBC and CNN forums, and ICRC. Yahoo also helped the volunteers use "family messages" to begin to standardize the entries of the survivors and the missing. More than 20 Yahoo reps came down to Houston and set up a computer lab, open to the evacuees, and more than a dozen stations for volunteers to assist evacuees in their family searches. There is a very low level of computer literacy at the park, as you'd expect, so there is a great need for computer literate volunteers. The founder of Yahoo graduated from Tulane and he recently gave the university a multi-million dollar gift. He's set all of this up on the Yahoo dime. The rumor at the Center was that the Yahoo team was headed to Dallas and San Antonio to set up similar computer labs there, since it is making it even more difficult to locate people when most of the other shelters have no computers.

It is also difficult because tens of thousands of evacuees are staying at the hundreds of smaller shelters around Houston (and elsewhere) run by churches and assisted by the Red Cross. None of the people staying at these shelters are in the family databases yet, so evacuees are still "unknown." They have been registered with the Red Cross, but under privacy law those registrations are considered health records so they can't be publicly searched. The "family messages" program is a "sign-up" deal, not a "registration," and I guess that semantic difference is enough to make the records searchable.

Through the "family messages" program we are able to make searchable cards for survivors and the missing family members the survivors are looking for. The cards have comments fields which is particularly helpful. These shelters are immense. More than once the past couple of days family members who were staying at the same shelter were only able to find each other through the database. They had no idea they were at the same place because it's impossible to link up in such a chaotic, massive complex. We can write in the comments section where evacuees are -- by row and cot location -- to make it easier to physically find them after a match has been made.

The Reliant Center is far less chaotic and much more pleasant than the dome (though there are equal numbers of people there since the dome has begun to empty out), but even there we had to escort the people we were assisting back to their cots to take note of their locations. It's not like each cot has a number and each evacuee has a name tag. None of the volunteers have name tags either! The entire enterprise is an exercise in the power of spontaneous organization and leadership, and given that it's pretty impressive that so many families have found each other and so many evacuees have found more permanent shelter.

Some evacuees came to us looking for help with non-family search computer issues. I met a couple from New Orleans who had been turned away by the unemployment office and told to come to the computer lab to find out how to get paid. Apparently the unemployment office is as ineptly run as the other federal agencies, which all seem to expert at hosting meetings and not-so-expert at actually helping people. The husband worked for the sewer and water board of New Orleans and was told by unemployment to find an 800 number to call and find out what's going on with his job and paycheck. Since the entire city's website is down except for a handful of pages, since there are no working phone numbers in New Orleans, and since his credit union is under several feet of water, it was pretty foolish of the unemployment office to send him to us. If only the feds would take it upon themselves to solve a problem or two, things would improve. Instead, they pass evacuees off to volunteers and NGOs, offering them half-baked notions and rumors of how they can be helped elsewhere.

I'm so sick of how rule-based we've become, so obsessed with bureaucracy. It's completely nuts and proving to add more disaster to existing disaster. Even the Red Cross falls prey to The Rules, but at least they have an excuse since they are volunteer-driven. I learned during the orientation yesterday that 91% of the money they receive from donors goes directly to services. Only 8% to administration. Talk about impressive! But then, maybe they could use a few more paid administrators who could take control during disasters and plan things a bit better. Rebecca and I talked about how they needed to deputize some volunteers to get more leaders out on the floors. The ones out there need direction and need relief. They're ragged and overworked.

The small shelters around town are being assisted by local Red Cross, but the large shelters at the Park are being run by the local county with the assistance of the national Red Cross. The national volunteers were flown in (or flew themselves in, actually -- everyone pays their own way) from all over the nation to assist. I met one guy from Des Moines, Iowa, and another from Michigan. And it's not just Red Cross people who have come from all over to help. I met a doctor and his wife from South Bend, Indiana who drove down in a truck stuffed with drug samples and are now helping out at the Brown Convention Center, the makeshift field hospital that's been set up. The doctor told me that he had two weeks off and decided to come down and do what he could.

Do I have to say that just about every volunteer I've met down here is appalled by the feds and seems to be "liberal", at least as liberal as they come in Houston? One volunteer at the dome had a tee with a picture of Gandhi on the front. He's on the board of the Gandhi Library here in Houston and talked to me about the importance of peace and nonviolent protest and how much better off we'd all be if more followed the teachings of Gandhi. Of course every single evacuee I've talked to is against the administration. We always have a lot to talk about!

Posses of FEMA reps, predominantly male, predominately white, roamed the administrative hallways of the Center in matching blue polos and with their little IDs dangling around their necks, in between meetings held around little round tables with craft service spreads (snack tables) around them. We were tempted to spit on them when they passed us, but then Rebecca pointed out that they were probably middle-agency people who have been disgusted by their leadership too. (Of course they might have been typical political hacks in need of a curse or two, but it's not good to through curses around willy nilly).

I've witnessed a couple of spontaneous religious events. At the dome Tuesday night, after Harry Connick, Jr and Branford Marsalis were done playing, a man in a suit (clearly not an evacuee) conducted a handful of people singing gospel tunes in the seats along the dome floor. They clapped and tried to get others to join, but no one did. Though there were thousands in the dome, there were only about 10 people singing or clappping in their area. Yesterday Rebecca and I were gathered into a prayer ring by a group of displaced men last night just before we left. It was pretty bad timing because we'd just walked over to find a man so he could talk to his cousin, a woman I'd text messaged on my phone earlier that night and who had called me back to talk to him. The prayer ring disrupted the call!

I think the man for whom the phone call was for was the most interesting case last night. Louis is slow. We don't know how slow, but he is definitely mentally handicapped. And he has been completely separated from his family and is in the Center alone. There are some men who are taking care of him at the shelter, more evidence of how much people want to help each other there regardless of how much they themselves have lost. On her way back from the bathroom, Rebecca saw Louis hanging around the computer center, clearly too nervous to come in and ask for help. She asked him if he wanted to search for his family and he said yes. It took both of us to help him. He had a list of family that he wanted to search for. We located one relative through ICRC in Baton Rouge, and we found out his mother and sister are in Dallas at a shelter there. It's almost as tough to get through to Baton Rouge cell phones as it is to New Orleans ones. Text messaging seems to work, at least some of the time, so I text messaged his auntie in Baton Rouge and hoped for the best. (Rebecca's phone is a New Orleans number. It usually works, but why risk it?) Around 11:30, she called me back. We had packed up our computers and we heading out, so I kept her on the phone and we walked over to Louis' cot. How exciting! They talked and I gave her the phone numbers we had for a volunteer in Dallas who had posted information about Louis' mother Hilda. Tonight we're going to follow up and see if we can arrange transportation for Louis to Dallas or Louis to Baton Rouge. The Red Cross is providing free transportation for evacuees all over the country, with several buses running around Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi every day.

We helped a woman, Judy, find her husband too. She was thrilled. Hopefully they'll see each other soon. For every person who comes, we set up yahoo email addresses for them so they can post those as well, and give them little tutorials on how to check for mail. I helped Judy send email to some of her family in Baton Rouge who are also at shelters and who had volunteers help them set up email as well.

I just talked to Rebecca and we've decided to go back to the dome this afternoon. The word is that Houston hopes to have the dome closed in two weeks. Thousands have been placed in apartments or connected with family outside of Houston already. Impressive, eh? I'll write more tonight or tomorrow morning. There are more stories and no doubt I'll accumulate more today. I'll write about Louis and whether or not we can get him matched with him mom or his aunt. The story of this hurricane is a human one. Each New Orleanian a member of a family or a community. And each one, therefore, just like us.

Just a quick note about the use of the word "refugee" by me and the press over the past week and a half. Rebecca told me that it is incorrect because "refugee" refers to someone who has crossed a country's border. (Of course, sometimes we thought of New Orleans as another country!) The UN calls evacuees like those from New Orleans "IDPs," Internally Displaced Persons. That might be too callous of a term too. I don't know. The Red Cross' "clients" reflects the corporatization of this whole country, sad as that is. When I'm talking to Red Cross I call displaced New Orleanians "clients" but to everyone else it's now "evacuees." Words do matter, so I think it's important for us to respect the wishes of those we're labeling and be conscious of the accuracy of our language.