Catholic Media Journal

Al Tompkins of The Poynter Institute, a professional school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists, writes a daily online column with story ideas for and from journalists. Today, the day before Thanksgiving, he shares from his heart about a recent volunteer trip he took to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and issues a call for all journalists.

Jim Coyle

Thanksgiving in a FEMA Trailer
by Al Tompkins, The Poynter Institute

To many of you living and working in the storm-damaged Gulf Coast area, this may seem pretty obvious. I am not speaking to you. I am speaking to the rest of the country, which may have put your region on the back burner after months of focused attention.

A million or so people are not celebrating Thanksgiving in their homes this year. They are spread across all 50 states, living with family, friends or strangers. They are crammed into one of the 125,000 FEMA-purchased mobile home trailers that are serving as temporary emergency housing.

I just returned from giving a measly few days of work to the effort to rebuild southern Mississippi. I met people there who have been doing the work, week after week, since the storm passed. They will go back many more times. Their dedication made me feel like a tourist. I was one of a large team of people who mostly spent our days hanging and mudding drywall in houses that had been gutted by other volunteers. I didn’t muck out mud and debris, gut any moldy houses or clean refrigerators filled with rotten maggot-infested food. The volunteers who came before us did those awful jobs.

I can’t get the image of life inside a FEMA relief trailer off my mind. Those little white trailers are parked in driveways, line narrow side streets and occupy open spaces in Mississippi and Louisiana. My mind is on the thousands of families who will not sit down around a big Norman Rockwell-esque banquet table tomorrow. They are still in those crammed little FEMA trailers waiting for their homes to be rebuilt. The trailers I was in were barely larger than a popup camper that a family of four might take on a weekend outing to a state park. One minister I met asked the (rhetorical) question, “Can you imagine living in one with a wife and two teenagers for a winter?” He says he knows such a family.

To get an idea of how bad things are for people in places like D’Iberville, Miss., you have to watch as one of these little campers arrives in the front yard. Families rejoice, because a trailer with bathrooms the size of coat closets has arrived. It says something about how they had been living before that trailer was parked in front of their destroyed home.

Larger FEMA trailers will soon be in use at a school where we worked, near Vancleve, Miss. Sometime after Christmas, kids will be able to have their own classroom trailer there. They will no longer have to share a school building in a split day — students attend from 7 in the morning until lunch time, then another set of kids attend from early afternoon to early evening — sharing the same classrooms.

Some Floridians who fell victim to Hurricane Charlie in 2004 are still living in FEMA trailer communities. Those people need our attention too.

Time magazine today has an insightful package of stories about the difficult lives of Katrina victims on this Thanksgiving eve.

Like an ice cream truck driving a small town street in summer, a Red Cross truck crept through the streets of D’Iberville at dusk Sunday. A cheerful woman called out over a loudspeaker “hot meals — hot meals.” Shadows trudged to her truck window, then carried Styrofoam boxes filled with warm food. The lady offered relief workers food too. She said it was “steak.” We didn’t take it — but I wish now that I had looked inside the box to see what Sunday dinner would be for those who didn’t have a choice.

I suspect a fair number of families will be sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner that arrives in one of those Red Cross vans tomorrow. They are on my mind today. I hope they have sweet potatoes. I hope they have pie.

For thousands of families who do eat dinner together tomorrow, it won’t be the same as before. Some told us that they are still living elbow-to-elbow with extended family in crowded homes. One woman, for whom we hung drywall in the home that her husband built, told us that there were three families — 10 people — living in her son’s house. If disaster teams keep coming, she hopes to be back in the little frame house for Christmas. If they allow “disaster fatigue” to set in, if the relief workers stop coming, who knows when she will get her home back. Her home was uninsured; she cannot afford the sheetrock, the labor, the supplies that it would take to rebuild. Churches she has never attended, from towns she has never heard of, have donated everything.

I am thinking today of the volunteers at churches and relief centers who are cooking Thanksgiving meals for disaster workers and victims — just as they have cooked meals for weeks upon numbing weeks — and will be, for months to come. You can see them as you drive down the streets of cities like D’Iberville, Miss. Some are working out of big white tents, called “Volunteer Villages,” that have popped up because of the need for housing for out-of-town volunteers. The repeat volunteers must be bone-tired from it all. But I did not see one — not one — who was unkind, and I did not hear one volunteer say an unpleasant word.

I am thinking today of the journalists who have covered so many painful stories, while their own losses and the stress they were (and continue to be) under were just as great as those of the people they covered.

I also heard from those who live in the storm-damaged area, but who survived with minimal damage. They have a different burden — a sense of guilt that others have suffered so unjustifiably.

I say all of this to urge you journalists, especially those of you outside of the storm-damaged area of the Gulf Coast, to keep telling the stories of the local relief crews that travel from your town to work in the hurricane-cleanup areas. There is so much more that needs to be done.

Some of these relief workers are idealistic young people. Others are senior citizens — lifelong do-gooders who have donated their time and hands around the world. They gather from around the country and work in homes choked with drywall dust. They arrive as strangers, and yet the relief teams quickly grow curiously close.

Keep reporting the need for more help. Your stories will encourage others to volunteer. Don’t think for a minute that the need for fundraisers, relief work or attention has passed. Don’t stick those stories at the end of your newscasts or on inside pages because you think interest has waned. Do your best work — there are lots of hurting people who need you still.