Tomorrow I fly back to Chicago where I'll rush to get our house in order for S's visit home this coming weekend. I can't believe he's finally coming home, even if it is for just fifteen days. I'm nervous about it. We've had so little contact, really, the past seven months. We've talked occasionally, and we've emailed some, though truthfully I've been the one writing him, keeping in touch with him, while he's sent me painfully short emails that leave me with no real idea what he's experienced and seen these long months. I worry that we've grown distant, just as I trust that we haven't and that these two weeks will be as if he never left. I ocsillate between being blindly supportive and therefore elated that we'll finally be together again, and angry that he's put me through this in the first place. I wish he kept in better touch with me.

I'm sad to leave Houston and Rebecca and her wonderful family. This week has been amazing. I'm so glad I came down, even if it was for a short trip. There are now only 5,500 evacuees at the dome and center. I don't know how many remain in the medical shelter, but no matter. I know it is only a matter of time before they find better shelter. The Red Cross has done an amazing job of reuniting families and finding temporary, comfortable housing for tens of thousands of evacuees. When I arrived just a week ago there were more than 10,000 evacuees in the dome alone. Imagine! We've moved from worrying about immediate needs -- food, shelter, medical assistance -- to how to help evacuees find lives for themselves these next months before they can go back home.

During our training at the Red Cross yesterday Louis' mother Hilda called me on my cell and I was able to connect her with the Red Cross volunteer social worker at the shelter that I'd met the day before. The Red Cross volunteer told me that they were "unbelievably close" to getting them together. I feel confident that they will find each other soon, and that once they do, things will be better for Louis. I wish I had taken the Red Cross' Family Services course before coming down here so I would have been able to connect them myself. But since there will inevitably be a next time (hopefully not on this scale), I will take the course in Chicago in November and be prepared to help the victims of the disaster of the future.

It took a disaster of this sort of magnitude to get me back into the non-profit world and into the Red Cross for the first time. I don't think I'm unique. Most of the students in our Shelter classes today had been moved to action by the images splashed across the front page of the New York Times and flashed on CNN. And I wasn't the only one who flew from far away to help, either. I met a man from San Francisco and a couple from northern California, as well as an EMT from Columbus, Ohio. People have stepped up. And they'll continue to, as the effects of this disaster will be felt for months to come. Our shelter instructor said that after hurricane Andrew families went back to Florida after a month or so thinking they would go back home, but since they had no homes to go to, they had to live in tent cities put up by the Red Cross for months. I had no idea. Did you?

The past two days we took four classes: Introduction to Disaster Services, Mass Care I, Shelter Operations, and Shelter Simulation. We also signed up for the disaster services register with the national Red Cross so that we can be called up for future disasters (or to help with this one in the coming months). Rebecca has extensive experience in disaster assessment and direct service and I have none, but it doesn't matter in bureaucratic America. Here we are treated the same, illogical as it is. Rebecca has a term for this tangle mess of forms and cards and revoked cards and unfulfilled promises that has defined the post-hurricane paper storm: Bureaucane. And is it true! The bureaucracy has taken over with nearly as much ferocity as Katrina. Over 350,000 evacuees have registered with FEMA, the first step toward getting that coveted $2,000 of assistance. Since the FEMA money is going to come in that future Bush keeps insisting will be bright, the Red Cross has been handing out stop-gap funds to give immediate relief for evacuees. They originally handed out pre-paid debit cards, but soon realized they didn't have enough cards as the number of evacuees in the Houston area alone grows every day. Now they are handing out checks and/or direct wire transfer to Western Union storefronts. Even this plan B has had its wrinkles, of course. Today they stopped handing out funds at 12 noon at one of the local shelters, which I'm sure led to hundreds of angry phone calls to the Red Cross phone bank.

In order to be a part of the disaster services section of the Red Cross you have to have the right combination of cards. Cards are given out after every class you've completed. I half expected to get a pin or a patch for my junior sash, especially since our classes were in the Girl Scouts of America building (Mmm! Thin Mints!!). I'm sure there are some volunteers out there who have the sole goal of earning as many cards as possible, with no real intention of using the skills they've learned. Most are like Rebecca and me, though, and look at the whole process of card-gathering with ambivalence and perhaps a little hostility. The level of bureaucracy has been a little discouraging, but it hasn't overshadowed the level of commitment of most Red Cross volunteers. Our instructor today has been working non-stop for a week at the park, yet this weekend he taught ten hours worth of classes both days. And he's a volunteer, not paid staff, so he's doing it all for the joy and fulfillment it allows and nothing else.

I'm exhausted again tonight, but it is entirely my own fault. Yesterday we found out a number of good things: first, the New Orleans apartment has minimal damage and no flooding. Rebecca's subletter, an attorney who had moved to New Orleans to clerk for a judge just a couple of weeks before the storm (he arrived just a few days before I left New Orleans for that last trip up), went into the city yesterday with federal marshals in order to bring court documents to Baton Rouge where his judge has set up an interim shop. He stopped by the apartment to check on things for Rebecca and thankfully found the place still standing and dry, with only a handful of window panes blown out and some damage to our neighbor Steve's car. What luck!

The second was that last night we toasted to New Orleans with Steve and his near-husband (near- because they aren't allowed to be married. Yet.) Johnie and another dear friend, Larry. They called us yesterday to tell us they'd come to Houston to live for a few months before going back to New Orleans. They have been nomads since the storm, travelling to Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arkansas before settling in Houston. The three of them are some of my dearest friends from New Orleans. It was so exciting to see them. We stayed out way too late, though, leaving me groggy as hell this morning and tired as hell tonight. Of course it was worth it.

Steve told us the harrowing story of one of his co-workers. He works for a marine salvage company, going out on large oil-type barges for two week stretches. He evacuated off the barge, but several decided to stay behind and try to ride out the storm. They anchored the barge about five miles away from the twin spans that connect New Orleans to Slidell, those highway river bridges that looked like mismatched DNA sequences after the storm hit, with large sections moved this way and that, out of step with the direction of the roads. During the first wind piles of the storm, the barge was torn from its anchors and landed at the base of one of the spans. The water was not deeper than the barge there, so though the barge sank, it was still above water. Steve's co-worker was blown off the barge and swept to the second span. He managed to grab hold of a pilon, climb up to a bit of shelter underneath the lanes, and hang on for eight hours as the storm slashed him. When the winds died down, he crawled his way up to the top and walked as far as he could, rescued somewhere near Chef Monteur Highway. No one from the barge died that day, miraculously.

There are so many stories. I'll write more of them later today when I'm back in Chicago. Now, though, I have to go catch my plane. I fell asleep halfway through writing this post last night!



Here's a picture of Johnie and me at Mardi Gras this year, just months ago and only a few days after the last time I saw S.


Here's Rebecca and me during that same trip to New Orleans, seated in the bar at Emeril's Delmonico on Saint Charles Avenue.