Rebuilding

I just received this email from my good friend and former boss. It was addressed to many of the people outside of Mississippi who are coming into the state to try to help individuals with disabilities, particularly the individuals who are deaf and deafblind. She is one of the rocks of the state who is involved with systems change and really making a difference in the lives of individuals who have disabilities.
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To all - I've been silent on this issue for awhile, confused myself on how to explain the reality of the situation from my perspective. Unsure of how to describe things. Even hesitant to give an opinion on what might be next steps to possible solutions. For those who know me, silence and opinions being held back are not my normal behavior.

I live in Gautier with a home for sale in Hattiesburg and have been trying to stand on my own feet, help my family and my neighbors in both communities who got knocked off their feet, and then (while still quite wobbly) get back to work and meet some immediate responsibilities (work at the university in Hattiesburg, not Long Beach where I had just settled in).

Difficulty standing and walking a straight line back to work is true of any of the Mississippi "service providers", or people knowledgeable about services, who live in the wake of Katrina. But people are rising to their feet and beginning to walk and facing the same frustrations of many of you who came from outside the state to help.

As I began studying the efforts down here of Red Cross, Salvation Army, multitudes of "emergency relief teams" and FEMA - I have seen many patterns that explain the ongoing difficulty of why Mia (from HKNC in New York) is having a hard time finding people who need her services - "the lack of coordination of the resources that are available".

Many people in need of services left Mississippi and there is nothing to come back to....not yet anyway...no homes and no jobs and in many communities no post offices, medical facilities, etc.

Many others are in their broken homes and are hard to get to - still no phone lines or internet access, roads still in a mess, perhaps no TV to see the adds about who to call for help, limited gas to get out or no working vehicle, cell phone coverage sporadic.

Others, who are in Red Cross shelters, are hard to find because (due to federal regulations) these shelters must move every two weeks. How can the local and state and out of state disability resource people find people in need on a consistent basis when the "gathering places" keep moving? (One shelter can not even tell you where the others are on a consistent basis.) I believe this is about to improve.

I know that efforts are being made at the state agency level to not only mobilize more service providers to enter the "wake zone" but they are also trying to create a cross agency comprehensive listing of available resources for people with disabilities to give to Red Cross workers and all the other relief effort entities.

With so much devastation, I'm not sure what "available resources" will look like at first and over the next few months. I hope that there is a plan in the works for the arriving disability service workers, like Mia, to have a safe place to stay (hotels are still full of relief workers and citizens with no homes) and the needed "passes" to get to all areas of one devastated community after another. May they continue to find food and gas....and good maps to find the shelters as they continue to move....

I apologize for the weariness in my tone. Please be patient. I know that hope and determination to develop and follow a plan for building anew will continue to grow in me and in all Mississippians.
-- Linda