Hurricanes and worry-canes

Well, I suppose you know the drill — dad's doing fine as far as the recuperation goes. Since he is not able to lift anything heavier than a mug or a fork, yet is not as active as he probably should be, I have tasked him to unload the small dishes from the dishwasher. But he kind of has backed off that, because he wants to see if mom needs anything. Mom, you see, slipped in the tub last night and hurt her arm bad enough to need to go to the ER. She didn't break anything, only bruised it pretty bad, and she took the day off.

I swear, the luck of those two. Aunt Carol has always said they'd be a good sitcom.

Well, because it was Labor Day yesterday and mom was home, I did something mom and dad would have liked to do if they weren't overwhelmed: volunteered at their church, which was to be a shelter for some families from Katrina.

The church offered to take in a "bunch of Indians," and when I asked Indians or Natives, I heard, "you know, Indian Indians, like a tribe." Obviously I have a lot more exposure to the, er, politics of this sort of thing, what with being from the Northwest and all the fishing and gaming and tribal issues up there. But I was in for a little more White cluelessness before the day was over. Before anyone gets upset that I am making fun of these goodhearted volunteers, I would like to point out that these are all goodhearted volunteers I am talking about. They are people who are honest and open about what they don't know or understand, in that incredibly protected white person way. They want to understand so bad. It was charming.

When I got to the church in the afternoon, only one family was there. They were from New Orleans and had been there since the day before. They were intent on relocating to Arkansas, and the father (it was father, his pregnant girlfriend, their almost 1-year-old daughter, his mother) was looking for work and already had some business cards. Normally he's a barber. Poor pregnant mother had to sleep on air mattresses and her back was hurting something fierce. The grandmother had picked out a new cotton dress and lime-green shoes. "It's my new Labor Day outfit," she told me. She has 17 grandchildren and a great-grandbaby and the only ones she can't track down are the baby's family.

There were scads of donations, though. Some of them were ... weird. Like a bag of clothes with six unmatching socks at the bottom. Like stained old drawers — male and female. Like about 8,000 T-shirts. I swear, we are a T-shirt junkie of a nation, or maybe a junkie of what the T-shirts represent — vacations, biblical sentiment, regular cheeseball sentiment, pride in breeds of dogs, pride in breeds of brand names (unless Old Navy has actually established football, rugby and street hockey teams), pride in sports institutions — then using and discarding the T-shirts once they are raggedy and stained and don't feel so soft or new like so many busted syringes. There were plenty of toys and games and books. I was stacking and sorting some — Clive Cussler, John Grisham and LeCarre really have a grip on the imaginations of the people of mom and dad's church (there was also a full set of the "Left Behind" series. I couldn't blame a body for wanting to shuck them, but hadn't these evacuees been through hell already?) and came across one titled "Social Welfare Policy" with a long subtitle by Ira Colby.

It made me mad; I had no idea what the politics of the author were and the cover was no help. I held it up to one of the volunteers that seemed to be kind of in charge and said, "Is this for real? Is this a joke? What is the point of this?" Her reply: "Just chuck it. If you don't feel comfortable, just chuck it." She and another volunteer regaled me with stories of stuff they'd already chucked, unwashed sheets being the main offender.

There were a lot of nice things — and NEW things, too. I pulled out some pants in misses sizes 0-6 with tags still attached. But when the evacuees came, lemme tell you, those will not do the job. Gals from southern La. are on the big side. Willing donors were dispatched on an emergency run to get some big-girl bras. A search was posted for big-girl clothes. The well-to-do women of mom and dad's church seem to be a pretty petite, fit bunch. There were new shirts from LL Bean, Izod, Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, you name it.

About 3 p.m. or so Donell, who was kind of running interference for a lot of shelters and delivering families from the Arkansas State Fairgrounds (which he said was horrible — three hots and a cot, but no privacy or dignity in the big old Hall of Industry), brought us a family that had been evacuated from the Convention Center in N.O. Of course, the church was expecting 40 Native Americans, but they didn't want to turn the family away.

If the church had turned away the family of four, it would have been the fourth time they were denied a refuge. They were put on a bus in N.O. with no clear direction where they were going. The bus first stopped at Ft. Smith, at the now-converted into a refugee center Fort Chaffee (where dad spent a couple of weeks back in the reserve evading 'Nam), where they were turned away because it was full. Then they stopped at Camp Robinson and the bus was turned away. Then they were sent to a Baptist campground that had been converted into an evacuee shelter and that was full and the bus was turned away. It ended up at the state fairgrounds, where the father and Donell met.

The church has one of the better refuges, Donell said. Not only are there plenty of clothes and supplies, but there are toys, and the families are to get their own "apartments" in the gym — really just partitioned areas with air mattresses, folding chairs, a couple of tables and chests, but able to be screened off from the open area. Evacuees also all got checked out by a doctor (pediatrician to boot) and registered nurse who are members of the church. That's not a service that's available to everyone.

So the Choctaws came in and it was just crazy registration time. There was supposed to be a security search of the bags — did not happen (no alcohol, drugs or weapons allowed in the gym. A pastor said the stuff would be confiscated but returned when evacuees left. The weapons thing also could apply to the church — one pair of donated shoes came with a box of shotgun shells. Apparently this being Ark. one must make certain allowances for hunters who hide ammo from kids and then forget about it.) Nobody was sure how the families would break off into groups or which apartment they'd stay in. All the organization was being dumped on one overloaded volunteer so I tried to break off the responsibility a bit and approached a nice liberal woman about figuring out who goes where. She gave me a little talk about how the families choosing where they would sleep and having some autonomy was part of the healing process and I was like, okay, if that's how you want to play it.

Medicine is an important service — when the tribe came in (25 Choctaws, but none of them easily identifiable as such — they were all Black, which did a little confoundation on the volunteers) — some of them had not recieved any care for ages. Many evacuees just plain old forgot their medicines, too, usually for asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes and more. One elderly woman had a terrible wound and a deep staph infection on her leg and the doctor recommended she go to the hospital (there was also a boy — teen or so, I guess — with serious developmental issues and a feeding tube and medications. I can't imagine the woman taking care of him would want to return to the fairground).

But that would get bound up in some politics. The chief, who went by that title and was fairly reachable through a cell phone at the state fairgrounds, had agreed to the rules of the church in a preliminary discussion with one of the pastors. But there was a question of keeping the totality of the tribe together, even if that meant putting an elderly woman with a staph infection back at the fairgrounds. It was all a bunch of drama, and the goodhearted volunteers were disappointed that not only would noses be turned up at the hospitality, but that other families that could have been moved there — and two were turned away while waiting for the tribe — were not.

Most of the people who came in wanted to stay, though there were issues with the air conditioning. Also, remember the thing about the choosing and healing process? Well, partly because of that and partly because a room was set up to be a hospital-like room, there were all these joined rooms and the people decided the couples with small children should have their own rooms and all the teenagers should dorm up in one room — a coed room. This was presented by the kindly liberal at an organization meeting. I and another, senior, pastor both said "Nuh uh" at the same time. That didn't fly. The rules were written to make sleeping in "family groupings" mandatory, to be presented with the chief present as an authority figure.

Another source of potential tension came to see me while I was alone at the desk. A kid who had a Gamecube wanted to hook it up to the huge tv on loan from a local dept. store. I told him I didn't have any say-so, that I would ask someone who did, and that in the meantime, I didn't think it was a good idea because there were a lot of kids and they could be jealous.

Man, it was interesting watching how these two communities are going to come to an arrangement (or not).

As I was leaving a Lincoln Town Car and a Jeep Cherokee pulled into the church and three very native looking people got out — a man with a red shirt that said "Arkansas Bear Dance" and a big braid, a man with a braid and a Muskogee t-shirt and a woman in a flowy white ensemble with beaded jewelry and the affect of a living dreamcatcher, if you know what I mean. Bear Dance had a real typical native accent; the other two sounded Latino. Bear Dance asked me if this was where the people from Mississippi were. I said there were a lot of Louisianans and walked them down to the hall. I asked who they were looking for and Bear Dance said "Choctaw." I said, "well, they're chock full of Choctaw in there." I guess they've heard that a lot or maybe it's just the understated Native American thing to not laugh, but they were clearly on a mission and I really really wish I had stuck around to see what was going to happen.

At any rate, I came home and mom was in the hospital's e.r. and dad was reading that second Hamilton bio. I volunteer tonight so I guess I'll find out who is staying and who is going and will update.

P.S. This blog vetted by dad for potentially over-sarcastic things about good, kind people. I can't say enough how much folks want to help at that church and how positive the response has been. There are going to be misunderstandings, crummy T-shirts and all that everywhere. I'm just trying to be honest about it while doing justice to the authentic goodwill that exists in my folks' church.