Volunteer Training

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) set up a Find Family national call center and asked for volunteers to help staff the phones. On Tuesday night I went for a one-hour training session that consisted of how to fill out forms for callers reporting people missing or known to be dead.

We learned not to give moral advice ("You have to be strong for your family.") or religious sentiment ("It's God's will that...."). We learned to try to offer compassion or at least sympathy ("I can't imagine how hard this must be." "I'm here. I'll stay on the line as long as we need to.")

I say we haven't been answering phones. Call volumes are low, and today it appears that calls weren't rolling to available phones down the banquet tables set up in a hotel ballroom near here. But on Thursday night I sat across from a woman who evacuated from Jefferson parish. She's staying with family. Her son's house in the capitol city is full. There are six families sleeping on air mattresses in every room of the house, so she went to a cousin's house instead. She can't find an apartment, her job has disappeared, and she cannot find out whether she can return to collect her stuff.

She'd consider moving, she said, but she'd need a job, which would cost her all of the years of service here, with all it's implications for pension and retirement. She told me she felt fortunate to have gotten food stamps, though she showed up at 4:00 a.m. to get in a line that was already long. The doors opened at 6:00 a.m. and she walked out the exit at 11:30 a.m. And she was pretty cheery as she waited for calls from other evacuees, getting paid a temp's $8.00/hour thanks to FEMA. "At least it's something," she said.

Last night, the local station broadcast a message that many shelters have a full supply of evacuees needs and that cash contributions should be made to the Red Cross instead. Now's the time to start thinking about concrete help beyond keeping body and soul together: jobs, housing, skill training, child care, and the list goes on.

Think hard about where to contribute again. The government is not going to take care of everyone. Given what we've seen lately, it makes sense for communities, businesses, and service agencies to collaborate to help give people new lives with possibilities, not just a trailer and a handout.

(Photo: Another beauty by an unknown photography from, I presume, Sunday, August 28.)