‘So Desperate’

While New Orleans has grabbed much

of the post-Hurricane Katrina spotlight,

many rural and poor Gulf Coast

communities are still waiting for help.

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Susannah Meadows
Newsweek
Updated: 12:33 p.m. ET Sept. 17, 2005
Sept. 17, 2005 - For weeks, Andie Gibbs had been trying to get food into Ovett, Miss., a rural community knocked down by Katrina. Gibbs, a lesbian activist, had gotten some assistance from gay organizations around the country, but the food was quickly gone. She hounded her local Red Cross chapter, calling daily to see if any shipments had arrived, but the answer always came back: not yet.

She stalked the food banks as well, but to no avail. Finally last week she spotted a Red Cross truck in town. But when she saw it wasn’t going to stop, she jumped into her car and chased the aid down, screaming at the driver to stop and unload. Some of the townspeople gathered around and started clapping. “I literally hijacked the Red Cross truck,” she says. “People are poor, they didn’t have anything before the storm. I was so desperate for my community.”

Gibbs’ car chase aside, the scene outside of New Orleans doesn’t make for the most dramatic TV footage. But in the poorer cities and towns of Louisiana and Mississippi, where the power is still out and jobs were washed away, people are struggling to find enough to eat. The Red Cross’s necessary focus on doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people has left those in more obscure towns feeling forgotten-and hungry.

The Red Cross’s extraordinary response to Katrina has reached hundreds of thousands of people, including providing financial assistance to 236,000 victims and serving 9.2 million hot meals, as of Friday. But aid to some of the less obvious areas of need has been so lacking that Boston-based Oxfam America, citing massive institutional failure, has gone into Mississippi and Louisiana to administer aid directly inside the United States for the first time in its history.

“In some of the more rural areas, our presence is not as strong as we would like it,” says Armond T. Mascelli, vice president of response operations for the Red Cross in Washington. “We’re trying [to branch out into other areas]. It’s an issue of knowing where they are, and being able to get the resources there.”

But in some areas where the Red Cross is present, local officials complain that the organization is inaccessible to the most dire neighborhoods. In Biloxi, Miss., city councilman Bill Stallworth says he’s been asking the Red Cross for weeks to serve food in the hardest hit section of town, so those people—70% of whom lost their cars—can walk to get a meal. Instead, he says, the relief group opened a feeding station eight miles up the interstate in an area where residents have power and cars. “I can’t figure out who’s in charge and who’s making these idiotic moves,” Stallworth says. “You would think the people in charge of disaster relief would focus their effort on the hardest hit part.”

Sarah Walker, who runs Vision of Hope, a Biloxi social services agency, is frustrated by the lack of attention as well. “We’re three weeks out now, and people still don’t have anything,” she says.

The Red Cross insists that a lot of their people are in the Biloxi area. “There are 60 mobile feeding vehicles covering a five-county area [that includes Biloxi]. We’re distributing goods. We have four service centers and mental health people going door to door,” says Red Cross spokesperson Devorah Goldburg, who plans on following up with Stallworth.

How well those workers penetrate the neighborhoods is dependent on the local volunteers. One of the limitations of the Red Cross is that because it relies on volunteers, the decisions of where they operate, reflects the culture and social background of the people who volunteer, says an official at another humanitarian organization, who did not want to be identified because the group works closely with the Red Cross. “If they don’t feel comfortable going in and setting up shop in certain areas of the city, then they don’t—even if that’s where much of the need might be,” says the official.

Biloxi, at least, may now be starting to get the attention it’s been craving. On Friday, the Red Cross met with several local organizations, to discuss the coordination of resources. And there are plans for more meetings about how best to serve the area. Vision of Hope’s Walker led Red Cross representatives on a tour of the most devastated neighborhoods. “So now, without a doubt, they see, and they know,” she says.

With reporting by Sarah Childress

Link Here