story from Houston, today

Read this long post by Pheret1 about her Sunday at the Houston shelter. I know that the stories she tells are only a few of the people she talked with today.

I keep thinking about how the Houston Chronicle's domeblog started out honest-sounding, like a real blog, with human, personal reactions; and then it turned into this gross PR thing, not a blog at all. Not honest. Too slick. Like, "let's have a heartwarming story about how great things are going." Rah rah!

The honesty in Pheret's story of her day! Compare to that article the other day about how people are "afraid" to leave the big shelters. Or the commenter on this blog lately who made it sound like the place wasn't chaotic or confusing.

It came out that Michelle had been approved for her housing but hadn't moved in yet. She even knew her address. Unfortunately, she had gotten housing through some other agency and didn't want to actually move in until she knew that she had been approved for FEMA housing assistance - it's bad to move in and get kicked right out for not paying rent. The girls were starting school tomorrow. Apparently, the public school they were to go to required uniforms, which she could not afford, and the girls were supposed to just wear their street clothes. As we walked from the train, I asked her what she had left to do. She didn't even know, because it hadn't been communicated to her what to do.

Her new apartment would be unfurnished, which she was slightly worried about. She did say that she'd rather sleep on the floor in her apartment than on a cot in the Arena (where the lights are never turned off - 24 hours where it is bright as day and you don't have privacy, and, well, it's just not that great). This is the part of the conversation where she mentions that she had been in the convention center in New Orleans for six days with the kids.

One of the worst roadblocks I saw in the Dome was housing - people went through all kinds of hoops just to be able to apply for housing help, and then could never figure out where to pick up their section 8 housing vouchers or anything else. Or people were told that things would be mailed to them at the Dome.

Praise where praise is due. Criticism can be rough, rough-edged, angry, hard to take. The newspapers need to keep telling the TRUTH, the rough truth, and not smooth stuff over & unworry it.

Instead of any authority left in that shelter actually helping.... you can see that Michelle with her 3 kids is telling her story to a stranger on a streetcar and frankly... more likely to get help that way than from going up to a Red Cross paid "volunteer".

The Red Cross, bless its heart... needs to train its people on how to help individual people. The Red Cross needs to empower its workers and its volunteers to get the job done. Houston volunteers, and people in other areas, get off your asses and get in your car and go find people like Michelle, babysit her kids, help her figure out what to apply for, and buy her a mattress for her apartment... It will be the kind-hearted taxi drivers from Nigeria who end up helping people like Michelle... not the official "volunteers"... That is just a shame when so many people have good intentions and want so badly to give practical help.