pity into action

“The police told me to take the water, ‘cause we were thirsty, but the man behind us got shot for taking the same water…”

“There were dead babies all around me, but mamma told me just not to look…”

“My daddy stayed down there because he didn’t want anybody taking our stuff. He said the government forgot about us…”

“Just come and see about us…”

Children echoed these phrases through the evacuee camp, just a few miles from my university. I listened and cried. ‘They have seen more horror in one week than will see in my entire life,’ I thought to myself.

Barely two weeks ago, Hurricane Katrina slashed through the gulf coast, shredding homes, businesses, churches, and identities. Over a million people woke up homeless and hopeless. The Big Easy is underwater, her inhabitants scattered. The same story is horrifically repeated in numbers of coastal towns in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. As of this weekend, people are still being fished out of houses in New Orleans.

My family is from southern Louisiana. While most of America watched the news unfold through CNN, I was forced to watch it unfold at my fingertips. The weekend after the hurricane hit I traveled to Louisiana to see for myself the devastation, and to offer any help I could to ailing friends and family members. I had been numb to the misery until I stepped into fellowship-hall-turned-evacuee camp at the local Methodist church. Only a minute into a three-hour conversation with a 16-year-old girl named Christal, and misery had injected itself straight into my heart.

“I just made the cheerleading squad,” she half-heartedly reminisced. “I don’t think we have anything to cheer for now.”

Her father, Tracy, a pastor in New Orleans, shared a similar observation, “We just finished laying the carpet in the church. My congregation has been saving for eight years to finally have a building to meet in. Now, we don’t have a congregation.”

As I interacted with more children and youth at the evacuee camp, I learned to read the trauma on their faces. Some are still confused, most are angry, and all are wondering where the life they knew has gone.

Effects of the hurricane are far-reaching. Arkansas is seeing an enormous amount of evacuees, even in tiny Siloam Springs, the location of John Brown University. We have over 500 evacuees in my town of 8,000. That’s over 500 people, clinging to all they do not have and desperate for even a pair of shoes that fit. But, I’m noticing a trend. Hope is prevailing. Prayers are being answered and tattered lives are being patched together. Make-shaft support communities are developing among the hundreds of displaced people as older kids looked out for younger kids and mothers wipe away tears from all crying eyes. Communities throughout the south have taken in thousands upon thousands of displaced families, such as Korah and Deac and their two children. They hitched a ride with a group of students from JBU traveling back to school after delivering supplies and food to Gulfport, Mississippi. “Adopted” by a local church, Deac’s family will begin to adjust to life in Northwest Arkansas. Tracy, the pastor, told me he hopes to return to New Orleans one day, but for now will try to start a new life for him and his family in Ruston, Louisiana, building from the ground up…again.

Most of America sits on the unaffected side of the TV screen thinking, “how could this happen in our country?” It did, it’s still happening, and it won’t get any better by changing the channel. As the Body of Christ, we are called to give our extra coat and walk the second mile. An encouraging note, the five pairs of jeans you never wear, your home, your money, your physical aid, prayer—anything is more than they have. Our brothers and sisters need more than our pity. Don’t wait for the next hurricane. Pray fervently and act now.