'Tired, aggravated and disgusted'
Posted: Thursday, September 15 at 08:29 pm CT by Kari Huus
Walter Rhodus, a McComb, Miss. native, is a volunteer at Faith Assembly Church, which runs a small shelter and a clothing and food distribution center for Hurricane Katrina victims. He’s angry and frustrated about people abusing the situation. Click here to hear his views.
MCCOMB, Miss. -- A few miles off I-55 as we head north from the disaster zone, we stop at a Red Cross shelter at the Faith Assembly of God Church, which has been housing 20 to 25 people since Katrina hit.
The shelter has tidy rows of cots, and a handful of Red Cross volunteers have been working long days, cooking three meals a day, while in a separate section, church-linked volunteers have been distributing food. It sure looks more inviting than the massive shelter we saw in Baton Rouge almost a week ago.
But volunteers seem tense and exhausted.
“I’m tired, aggravated and disgusted,” says Walter Rhodus, a local who has been working here for more than two weeks.
He’s not the only one, but he’s the most outspoken about people taking advantage of the food and clothing that the center has offered.
This is already a poor area, so some people who are not flood victims have just taken the opportunity to stock up.
“There’s one lady who came back three days in a row and loaded up her car,” says Rhodus, a retired plant worker who now takes care of the church facility. “There’s no way she can use all that stuff.”
As a result of people taking more than their share, he says, the distribution center has closed for the day, and is forced to turn people away.
“We need help, we need labor,” he says.
The Red Cross workers are far more circumspect in their comments, but the strain still comes through. One tells us that they had been promised National Guard security, 24-7, but the Guard came for exactly one day, and then left them to their own devices. It’s been so tense at times, says Kim Sullivan, a volunteer from New Hampshire, that she has formulated an escape plan in her head.
“There are people who come and if I gave them a can of string beans, they’d be appreciative,” she says. But she says others are taking advantage of the situation.
“You have the compassion, but then you think, ‘Hey, wait a minute’,” says Sullivan, who has been here a week.
We meet evacuee Gwen Lea, and her husband Donald Washington, from Kenner, near New Orleans. They’re here waiting for power to be restored so they can return home with their one-year-old granddaughter Aniah Girod. (She’s having a great time climbing over and under the cots.) They’ll return as soon as there is power in their area.
We meet Eunice and Katrina, a Chihuahua and a kitty rescued from the storm. They stay in their owner’s Miata convertible while he is in the shelter. He says he evacuated his New Orleans home near the French Quarter well after the storm and flooding under pressure from authorities, and hopes to get back soon. In the meantime, he says the people at the church shelter have been terrific.
The people in the shelter are genuinely in need, says Rhodus. He has no problem with that, or the people who come to the distribution point and take what they need. But he has no more patience for the other “greedy, lazy” people.
“It’s disgusting,” he says. “It’s sad.”
Voices cutting through the chaos
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