Anchor Norman Robinson blogs and broadcasts LIVE from Houston September 18 - 22.
All this
week we’re traveling across Houston, trying to find the people affected by
Hurricane Katrina, people who are still labeled “evacuees” more than a year
after the storm. Today, I want to tell you about the thousands of untold
stories of struggle we uncovered at one assistance fair for the people who used
to be our next door neighbors.
We visited what’s
called the “Power Center” on the outskirts of downtown Houston. The people at the center were evacuees
from New Orleans looking for electricity to stave
off eviction from their apartments, looking for someone with the power to help
them find a job, or simply someone with the power to help get them back to New Orleans.
David Ellison,
a reporter with the Houston Chronicle, described the New
Orleans evacuees as the ones who were really traumatized, and left
trapped in the Crescent
City following Katrina. The
people, who were subjected to the flooding and were trapped in our man-made
hell on earth, were eventually plucked from the city and deposited in Houston. Compare that
situation to the evacuees who were able to leave the city before the storm hit.
Many of those evacuees ended up in cities like Atlanta; cities where they had the means and
resources to blend in.
There is no
blending in at the “Power
Center.” It’s a large
gathering of evacuees, who are still struggling to find their way. Human
outreach agencies from across Houston came to the center to help thousands of
jobless and homeless New Orleanians find a way to keep their apartment, find
healthcare, or find a job. The intent was well-meaning, but the atmosphere was
demeaning.
Uniformed
police herded evacuees along sidewalks lined with police barricades (the kind
you find separating pedestrians from the floats along the parade routes in New Orleans at Mardi
Gras). Once inside, the evacuees were passed from agency to agency. Two overworked
social activists from New Orleans
desperately tried to interpret and analyze each problem, so they could guide
the evacuee to the right agency for help. But the process seemed to further
marginalize those who already felt unappreciated.
In an
attempt to make a bad situation better, the City of Houston is now urging Katrina evacuees to
discontinue using phone numbers with the 504 area code on their job
applications. It’s a dead giveaway that you are from New Orleans and sure-fire way to abruptly end
your chance for a job interview.No doubt,
many are being helped in Houston.
But there are just as many who have given up and have gone back to New Orleans. Where are
they living? Those who keep track, say these second-time evacuees are now here
in the Crescent City in even worse conditions: living
five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten deep in a house. If you doubt this, take
a drive any evening into Central City and parts of Uptown where you’ll see five
and six cars parked in the front yards of these crowded homes.
For better
or worse, this seems to the future for people who are now coming from Houston to the new New
Orleans. Who can change it? Who can make it better? Or
is that, in the words of American’s former most-trusted news man Walter
Cronkite, just the way it is?
