Article published November 24, 2005
Touched by Katrina: Local volunteers gain fresh perspective after aiding hurricane victims
Among the areas where local volunteers assisted along the Gulf Coast was the hurricane-ravaged city of Biloxi, Mississippi.
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
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By ANN WEBER
BLADE STAFF WRITER
A dry floor, a good meal, someone to listen — such were the blessings that hurricane survivors counted after Hurricane Katrina stole everything else.
Months later, in this week of Thanksgiving, local disaster volunteers who worked with people who had lost so much say the experience has made them even more grateful for the plenty in their own lives. “Things” don’t matter as much as they used to; life’s daily aggravations don’t seem so significant, and relationships with family and friends are cherished.
Their volunteer work in the Gulf Coast changed them, rattling comfortable routines and shaking emotional foundations.
“It’s a reality check about what’s important,” said Dr. Richard Paat, a Maumee family practice physician who pulled together a medical team to go to Biloxi, Miss., in September, and traveled to Indonesia earlier this year to treat victims of the tsunami.
For Vonda Hogle, who traveled to Biloxi and Gautier, Miss., in October, in her capacity as director of missions at Calvary Assembly of God in Toledo, “When you walk back into your house you think, what could I live without? Those people didn’t have an option.
Everything was wiped out. Very quickly you realize there’s not a whole lot of material things that mean that much.”
Sure, she’d miss some of them, “but they’re not essential to who I am,” she said.
“The people were so thankful and so gracious,” recalled Kevin Anderson, a Monclova Township psychologist who was a member of Dr. Paat’s mission team. “They had lost everything, and all they could say was, ‘Thank you for coming.’”
The mission was Mr. Anderson’s first. He wrestled with the decision of whether to go but says now, “It’s affected my whole life.”
Like many others, he had wanted to do something to help Katrina’s victims. He thought he’d write a check for the medical mission being organized by Dr. Paat, one of Mr. Anderson’s high school classmates.
But Dr. Paat suggested another way.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you come with us?’ I spent the rest of the day thinking about it and decided I would do it,” Mr. Anderson said.
His job in Biloxi was to help people sort through the psychological wreckage left by Katrina. He returned exhausted.
“It was not just about sleep. It was an emotional exhaustion. Your whole life seemed a little trivial and a little small,” he said.
On Sept. 7, as he was flown in with other mission volunteers on private aircraft provided by Heidtman Steel, Mr. Anderson’s stomach twisted as he saw the devastation. “Why am I doing this?” he asked himself. “I didn’t have any sense that I’m a big hero, and I kind of felt like I knew too much. I knew first responders were being traumatized.”
Dr. Richard Paat, Dr. Stephen Camacho (walking behind Dr. Paat), and Sarah Liegl, a volunteer from Hamilton, N.Y., who has a masters degree in public health, walk through donated goods at ISOH/Impact in Waterville, before leaving for a hurricane ravaged area of Mississippi, on September 6.
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THE BLADE/DAVE ZAPOTOSKY
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To his surprise, the experience was uplifting.
He remembers the two Biloxi women who drove him around the area to meet with patients. Both women had lost their homes to the storm.
One day he asked them how they were holding up. On a scale of 1 to 10, “How’s your spirit doing?” he wondered.
“The driver said, ‘I’m a 12.’ These two women were spending all their energy helping as many people as they could, and it was inspiring,” Mr. Anderson said.
The mission left him with what he calls “a go-for-it type of attitude” that he didn’t have before. “You can’t save the world, but you don’t have to sit around and say I can’t do anything, either.”
His new attitude isn’t just about service, Mr. Anderson explained. It’s about anything you’d like to do but can think of a dozen reasons not to: “What do you want to do with your life, and what are the things that get in the way?”
Ed McCauley, executive pastor of operations at CedarCreek Church in Perrysburg Township, said he too “came home with more than I took.” He led the church’s first group of 15 volunteers to Covington, La., leaving Sept. 11 and returning Sept. 18.
Volunteers unloaded trucks, organized relief supplies in a warehouse, and cut away trees and branches that had crashed into houses. Two months later, what stands out isn’t the fatigue or the smothering heat and humidity.
“It was a remarkable experience to get united to help others who were struggling. My heart changed in a way,” Mr. McCauley said.
“I came back with a clear resolve to do whatever I can, wherever God wants me to go, to do more mission work in this country, to do what we can to help end racial and economic prejudice,” he said.
Dr. Paat also was struck by the camaraderie among disaster volunteers, after both the hurricane and the tsunami. “The spirit is what is amazing — everybody willing to give up their time and come in to help because somebody else is less fortunate.”
Members of his group gathered at the end of each day to share stories of their experiences and the people they had encountered. “We needed to do that to keep our own sanity among the devastation,” Dr. Paat explained. “We were just as emotional as the people that we were serving.”
Lives in ruin
A father and children had gone back to their Biloxi home to search for their mother; her body fell to their feet as a ceiling collapsed. A distraught man who had saved his family by putting them in a boat and holding onto the roof of the house for six hours blamed himself for not getting them out before the storm hit. What kind of father am I? he asked Dr. Paat. “You’re the hero,” the physician replied.
Ms. Hogle, who went to Mississippi to find out how Calvary Assembly of God could help churches there with long-term assistance projects, was moved by the destruction: collapsed walls, a roof resting on the foundation of a house, a street-corner heap of battered appliances left to be hauled away.
First puzzling, then eerie, were the markings she saw on buildings: X’s, circles, numbers. The code, Ms. Hogle learned, indicated when the structure had been searched, the team that had searched it, how many people were found alive inside, and how many bodies.
“Once we found out what it meant, every home and every building you went past, you looked,” she said.
Frank Borgelt of Sylvania Township said he saw lives in ruin.
Mr. Borgelt, who owns Greater Toledo Home Improvement construction company, led CedarCreek Church’s fourth mission team to Covington, La., to help residents repair homes. For him, it was the latest in a string of missions over the last seven or eight years that have taken him to such places as Africa, Ukraine, and Honduras.
“Before, I was focused more inwardly and focused on my needs. After having done numerous mission trips, it made it much easier to perceive the needs of others,” Mr. Borgelt said. “It can’t help but soften your heart to see what others are faced with. You certainly do appreciate what you do have.”
He described Covington as an economically depressed area that experienced extensive tree and wind damage. Many residents lost what little they had.
“They need to be bolstered economically but also need their hopes bolstered, and we tried to do both,” he said.
Contractor Frank Borgelt, center, on a job in Toledo, led CedarCreek Church's fourth mission team to Covington, Louisiana.
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Bishop Charles Waters of Love Fellowship International in Toledo tells this story of his first volunteer mission for the Greater Toledo Area Chapter of the American Red Cross: “There was a little old caucasian lady from Alabama. She was 70-some years old. … She looked at me and said, ‘Are you going to help me?’ I said I was going to do the best I could. When I got finished, she grabbed me and kissed me — a lady from the era of racism kissing a black guy! That really hit me.”
Bishop Waters had called the Red Cross about volunteering after watching televised reports of hurricane damage. “I knew I had to do something more than just money,” he said.
He went through a two-day training class that ended about 5 p.m. on a Sunday and was on a bus the next morning, headed for a center in Detroit where evacuees were being processed and given vouchers for housing, food, and clothing.
Hundreds of survivors poured into the center, “not knowing where they were going to go or what was going to happen. They were scared,” he said.
“We had people who came in with nothing but what they had on their back. Mothers with three or four kids, people 80 years old …12 people in one car. It was something you just couldn’t believe.”
Bishop Waters marveled at the leveling effect of the disaster: “The hurricane didn’t care who you were. It didn’t care what color you were. It didn’t care how much money you had. Everybody was in the same situation.”
Emotional aftershocks
Kathy McVicker, a first-time Red Cross disaster volunteer from Rossford who worked in a shelter in Slidell, La., said she “came home feeling guilty I had a beautiful house and a family that was alive.”
Among her memories: a soldier who had returned from Iraq two days before Katrina struck. His mother, sister, and two nieces drowned.
And another: a woman, probably close to 80, who decided to ride out the hurricane. She had lived in New Orleans all her life; what was the big deal?
“She woke up to the sound of water and went to put her feet on the floor and realized it was already up to her knees,” Ms. McVicker said. “She tried to open the door but couldn’t because of the water pressure, so she broke out a window with a shoe, covered [the broken edge] with a quilt, and pulled herself out the window.”
She grabbed onto a car and spent the rest of the night sitting on top of it with the storm raging around her, Ms. McVicker continued. A neighbor in a rowboat rescued her at daybreak.
Ms. McVicker said her duties at the Oak Harbor Civic Center in Slidell included registering evacuees, serving food, setting up cots, distributing water and hygiene packs, even plunging toilets. “It was much more rewarding and much more emotion” than she expected. When it came time to leave for home, it was difficult to say good-bye to some of the people she had lived with for two weeks.
She returned a different person: “It just helps you realign your priorities. I think I’m much more relaxed about life in general. Things that seem like big problems here really aren’t.”
So it is with Karen Durniat-Suehrstedt of Perrysburg, director of quality improvement and training at the Lucas County Mental Health Board. Don’t grumble to her about getting stuck in traffic; she’s seen people waiting in line for hours to get an air mattress and a few feet of space to claim as home.
A registered nurse, she was sent to the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, La., to serve as a disaster mental health volunteer but ended up working as a nurse there. The shelter took in about 3,000 people the first day it was open; the population grew to more than 6,000.
“It was a sea of people. …There were just people everywhere,” she said. “It was constant noise.”
And the work for volunteers was constant. “One time I know I could not remember taking a break from the arrival of my shift to the end. There was too much to do,” Ms. Durniat-Suehrstedt said. Her shift was noon to midnight, but she would always start early and never left before 1:30 a.m.
The unrelenting responsibilities and commotion take a toll on volunteers; some struggle with sensory overload when they return, she said. “When I came back, my family and my co-workers, that’s the first thing they noticed. I was overstimulated.”
Ms. Durniat-Suehrstedt, who arrived in Lafayette on Aug. 31, didn’t take any photos during the seven days she was there. “It was so overpowering, very overwhelming, and still is,” she explained. “I slept the first three days I was home.”
Among her patients was a woman with second-degree burns on her face — the bridge of her nose, her forehead, and cheeks. The woman had fled to the attic of her apartment building to escape the rising waters, then broke a hole through the roof just big enough to put her head out and wave a flag to attract rescuers.
Others were dehydrated and hungry after being stranded for days. Many were people with chronic illnesses who had to leave home without their medication.
She still gets emotional as she tells the story of a shrimp boater who had decided to ride out the hurricane in his home on the water. With him were his beloved second family of cats, 15 dogs, a horse, a pig, and some chickens.
As the waters rose, he left food for the cats in the house and turned most of the others loose, hoping they could survive. He was able to take out four of his dogs, which were housed in an animal shelter next to the Cajun Dome.
“He spent every day sitting at the animal shelter with his dogs,” Ms. Durniat-Suehrstedt recalled. “He was just devastated. He kept saying, ‘I can replace my boat’ … but his biggest sadness was that he lost his animals.”
As days passed and he got rest, fluids, food, and medical treatment for his wounds, “I saw the life come back to him,” she said.
“He was like a different person. It really helped me see that what we were doing was making such a difference.”
Contact Ann Weber at:aweber@theblade.com or 419-724-6126.
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