Saturday, September 10, 2005

Things I've Heard Along the Katrina Relief Way

  • One family called the church that had just set them up in a new apartment with furniture and appliances saying, "We didn't have this much stuff in our home in Louisiana. Please come back and take some of it back so that you can give it to others."
  • One shelter started out of the goodness in the hearts of an elderly congregation who knew they had the facility space but didn't know if they could make it work received one check for $10,000 and another for $5,000 from a nearby Jewish businessman and another Jewish woman impressed by what they were doing.
  • One person with a two-bedroom apartment had 23 people living there at one time.
  • One TV producer, again impressed with Houston's generosity, insured that the church where they were broadcasting from was mentioned more than once in a program that wasn't really supposed to be focusing on the location. "I'm proud of what you're doing here," she said when asked if she had purposely planted the information.
  • One once New Orleans resident grieved, opened up her home, then opened up a distribution center in a matter of hours. The very people she needed to make the distribution center work were the very people who had landed on her doorstep the night before.
  • One church staff knew that their pastor who wasn't reachable would say yes if asked about feeding hotel-based evacuees so they simply made it happen. In the first few hours of the survivors' arrival, that meant hot meals for hundreds.

One by one . . . it's the one-ness that is making this effort truly a relief.

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