05468
Sept. 9, 2005

Presbyterians in Gulf area
wonder where friends, parishioners are

by Alexa Smith  

LOUISVILLE — Ford Deith is trying to find the roughly 300 parishioners who worship at Parkway Presbyterian Church in Metairie, LA, on the outskirts of New Orleans.

     So far, he’s found about 40, and he figures they’ve heard from about 40 others since Hurricane Katrina roared through on Aug. 29.

     Cell phones only connect sporadically, but text messaging, inexplicably, seems to work. That’s how the youth group connects. Internet access is available in some places, but not all. Regular phone lines are fuzzy. And just about everyone is out of place — in someone’s spare bedroom or in a hotel in a different town with a different phone number.

     “About all I can say is, I don’t know where my people are,” says the Rev. Tom Oler, who has been working at the South Louisiana Presbytery office in Baton Rouge because he can’t stay at his house in Metairie and there’s a tree on the roof of his church.

     Twice he’s driven into the old neighborhood for quick inspections, but what was once a one-hour trip now takes six. Traffic lights are out. Only one lane is open, and it’s clogged with troops. It all adds up to slow.

     Oler’s clerk of session is in Houston, his treasurer in Baton Rouge. A member of his session is headed for Louisville, but right now is still in north Louisiana. The director of the preschool is rumored to be in Mississippi, but Oler can’t reach her by phone.

     Everyone else is who knows where.

     Oler’s not sure how to find an elderly member who rode out Katrina, staying on her second floor. Is she with the son who is a policeman? Or the one who’s a reserve officer? And where are they?

     “Our congregation isn’t likely to be the folks you saw on television, sitting on the roofs of their houses,” says Deith, who has powered up a Parkway Presbytery blog in hopes of finding the missing. For the moment he’s in a friend’s spare bedroom in Houston with his wireless laptop and photographs of his kids that his hurricane-wary wife grabbed as they headed out the door.

     “As far as the safety of people, we’re in good shape,” he says, surmising that his house and his law office are probably messy but largely intact. “But nobody’s life is going to be the same.”

     He’s talking about exodus. Who has left never to return? Who’s starting over somewhere new? Who would like to get back but can’t? Who’s got no job, no house, no security? Who’s waiting for authorities to certify that the city is safe … and in the meantime, where are they? How long will it take to find everybody.

     Janie Shahan talks while packing her things in her house in Kenner, another town on the fringe of New Orleans. She’ll comply with the evacuation order that goes into effect tonight and will be enforced by National Guard troops bivouacked at the middle school two blocks downs and two blocks over.

     “I heard from one friend in Texas,” she says over a scratchy phone line. “Judy Zabala, she’s in Baton Rouge, but I’m not sure where. The Pruitts are in Kentucky with their daughter, Lee. I don’t know where the others are at the moment.”

     She says the Shahans got back into town Monday at midnight, having waited out the storm in Texas, and then, when it was clear there wasn’t going to be a quick fix, in Kentucky.

     She heard through the grapevine that one member of the choir died in a hospice the day before Katrina hit. She worried all week whether he’d been evacuated, and now she isn’t sure how to find his family. “He was a good friend,” she says, choking back tears.

     Shahan isn’t staying put. She’s setting out tonight for Henderson, KY, with her husband, who returned home to Kenner this week to repair the house’s damaged roof. With the phone lines out, she’s talked to him all week by walkie-talkie.

     Suzie Springler, the church’s education director, has been text-messaging teens all week. She’s living in a hotel-casino in Tunica, MS — at $40 a night, the hurricane rate. She plans to move to Clinton, MS, for at least at few months. She logged onto Presbyterian Disaster Assistance’s Web site and found a rental house where her ailing, 75-year-old father can be close to a Veteran’s Hospital and her 12-year-old daughter can be close to a good school.

     What’s more, the rent is free — a hurricane discount. She has given the keys to her father’s River Ridge house to a relief worker, who will make himself at home until the family returns, whenever that is.

     “We’ve tried to stay as connected as possible,” she says, adding that, if nothing else, the storm drove home the lesson that we’re all our brothers’ keepers. Today, when she went to fill a prescription, a drugstore clerk spontaneously took her hands and said, “May the peace of Christ enter this person.”           

     It made it her cry, and the tears felt good.

     Back in New Orleans, Betsy Molaison is tearing up soggy, mold-infested carpet and waiting for State Farm to call. The house is a mess, but salvageable. Three inches of water and a damaged roof aren’t so bad, considering what others have lost.

     She’s spending the night with friends in Baton Rouge and checking her email for messages from friends. She works for the Navy Department, and she’s being transferred temporarily to Pensacola, FL, because the Navy facility in Orleans Parish is wrecked.

     She’s heard that a friend and fellow congregant died.

     “All this time, I’ve been thinking about him,” she says, “wondering if his wife was with him at the hospital. … That’s been difficult.”

     Molaison says, “People will rebuild. Tourism will come back. … We’ll make things bigger, better, stronger.”

     But right now, things are tough.

     “You know, when you go back into the neighborhood, many landmarks that you don’t think about being there are gone,” says Oler. “It just doesn’t look like the same place. I understand that our folks are pretty much dispersed all over the United States — some in Arizona, some Florida. Some are up in Illinois, others Kentucky. Making contact is very difficult. … It is a very frustrating situation.”