Betty Jo Word had two big concerns about her house in Biloxi. Her ceiling was falling in and the hole in her bathroom floor was almost big enough to swallow her toilet. Some volunteers had replaced her Katrina-destroyed roof a couple of months ago, but now she was worried that she had been forgotten.
In that way, Word was like Wanda and Gloria and Robert and Al and Doris and Ms. Williams, and many others. They each feared most being forgotten.
Word waited by her phone for our promised call. To budget the few minutes left on the prepaid card, she decided to answer only if it was us calling. But she didn’t answer when we called, so we drove to her address.
She struggles with diabetes, asthma and heart problems, and it took her a couple of minutes to hobble from her dark, water-stained living room to the front door.
When we figured out she had given us the wrong phone number, she mourned, “It breaks my heart. That’s why I haven’t gotten some of the calls I wanted.”
Her attention snapped to the fact we were there. “God bless you for coming,”
I asked permission to take pictures of the holes in her ceiling and bathroom floor. “Please do,” she pleaded. “God bless you.”
The holes were big problems all right, but the sinking back half of the house might have been a bigger one. She had noticed the back was sinking because her corn bread batter flowed in that direction while it was in the oven.
While we were talking, Word’s sister-in-law drove up and called on her cell phone from her car. “Come on in,” Word answered. “Some church people are here.” It was a common happening. Relatives showed up unannounced and unplanned during our home visits. Perhaps concerned neighbors called them.
We told Word we would take our notes and photographs back and ask the volunteer organizers to assign some experts to help her figure out what to do. She thanked and blessed us over and over for coming and for our time and attention.
The biggest fear of many still in Biloxi of being forgotten has some basis. Their plight made headlines until political blaming took over the headlines and the head of Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown rolled.
Then one international tragedy after another took headlines and attention: Iraq, Afghanistan, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. They echoed the movie “Wag the Dog” in which foreign wars are faked in order to distract Americans from domestic problems.
When wars didn’t make headlines, officials have focused on gay marriage, stem cell research and estate taxes.
Meanwhile, families live in cramped FEMA trailers rooted by sewer connections to the front lawns of their gutted middle-class homes. This month, a year after Katrina, they must start paying rent on those trailers as well as their mortgages.
Also like others we visited in Biloxi, Word’s family is even more important to her since Katrina. Walls in many homes are covered by family pictures, often assembly-line school portraits of children and grandchildren.
Word’s sister was there to help. Her sister-in-law stopped by. Her brother holds the $3,200 the federal government gave her to take care of her home, because “he is just like a bank,” she said.
And like everybody we met in Biloxi, Betty Jo Word expressed an acute sense of gratitude for even the smallest thing we could do. Their gratitude is sharpened by their loss of all but the most essential thing or two.
Their gratitude is magnified by their real helplessness in the face and wake of Katrina. Their gratitude feeds on the abandonment embedded in the slow, inadequate response of our federal government and on the exploitation by free enterprise scams.
With equal gratitude and tears, volunteers take in the gratitude of Biloxi. It is nonprofit and faith-based organizations that bring in volunteers to help whatever way they can; 7,000 volunteers have come to Biloxi through Bethel Lutheran church alone.
People and families from all over the country are helping people and families in Biloxi. The gratitude and blessings turn out to be reciprocal.
Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked at Luther Child Center in Everett. Send e-mail to bill@billfrance.com.
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