Article published December 07, 2005
Delegation will travel to Mississippi
Wauseon sends Christmas gifts to Katrina victims
Pat Gleckler leads her sons, Tom and Rick, to a truck that will deliver Christmas gifts donated to Katrina victims.
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THE BLADE/LORI KING
)
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By JANE SCHMUCKER
BLADE STAFF WRITER
WAUSEON - For children in the Mississippi coastal town of Waveland, devastated by Hurricane Katrina, there's nary an intact roof left for Santa Claus to land on this Christmas.
But he's to travel by tractor-trailer from Wauseon. And he's taking his own homemade cookies and milk to the community where some people are still sleeping in tents, three months after their homes were destroyed.
Wauseon residents, who have mulled doing something to help a similar-sized city since soon after Katrina and Hurricane Rita hit, settled this fall on providing toys for children for Christmas.
"This seemed to be the idea everybody liked," Wauseon Mayor Jerry Dehnbostel said.
From there the project grew to include furniture from Sauder Woodworking Co., 50 dozen cookies made in Fulton County kitchens, and pints of milk from Sterling Milk Co.
An extra-large tractor-trailer being packed this week with an estimated $40,000 to $50,000 worth of goods is to depart for Waveland Saturday morning. Tomorrow, volunteers are to buy toys with $7,000 collected by students and staff in Wauseon schools.They plan to shop at every Wauseon store that stocks toys, from the local Yoder Family Pharmacy, Hammontree's TV & Appliance Sales, and Bill's Sports Center - where they ordered 50 basketballs - to the chains such as Rite Aid Pharmacy, Big Lots, and Wal-Mart.
About a dozen volunteers are paying their own way to accompany the truck to Waveland. Half of them are from Pat Gleckler's family.
She heard about the toy drive and decided to donate a bicycle that a grandchild outgrew. But she felt as if she ought to do more, so she asked her 19 grandchildren if they would like to use the money she had intended to give them for Christmas to buy toys for the children in Waveland. They agreed and most of them accompanied her on shopping trips.
"It's just as great to give as receive" is the message she hopes her grandchildren will remember from this Christmas when they only get a card from her.
Plus, she said she was sure that children in Waveland "would not have a decent Christmas unless we did this."
Many adults in Waveland, according to Terry Guenard, secretary to the Hancock County Board of Supervisors there, would just like to forget about the holidays.
"You just don't want to deal with it. You can't," she said. "We're all in a survival mode."
For weeks, Ms. Guenard said, she and her neighbors "lived like animals." They slept on hard attic floors in intense heat and mosquitoes with no lights and no escape from the putrid odors of the floodwaters. They used a bucket for a toilet. And they tried to wash mud off of canned goods before using their fingers to eat the contents straight out of the tin.
"You didn't have anything," she said. "You didn't have a cup. A spoon."
Yesterday, everyone in her office still was attired entirely in donated clothing.
"All our clothes are not ours - shoes, socks, underwear," she said.
There aren't many shops open to buy anything. One of the few is Wal-Mart, which just recently moved out of a tent and into a portion of its damaged store.
But many people are unwilling - and some are completely unable - to make almost any purchases until they get settlements from insurance and help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Some people in Waveland are giving up on any federal assistance after placing dozens of calls to FEMA without any clear answers.
Ms. Guenard worries that they don't give up on life altogether. She's concerned about the possibility of suicides among people who have lost everything as they face the onset of cooler weather and the holidays.
"It just looks like Ground Zero," she said. "You ride around here and there's nothing but devastation."
Contact Jane Schmucker at:
jschmucker@theblade.com
or 419-337-7780.
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