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Katrina One Year Later: No Job, No Way to Pay Rent |
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Today, we continue a series of profiles highlighting the experiences of Hurricane Katrina survivors—and exposing the gap between Bush administration spin and on-the-ground reality for the tens of thousands of survivors whose lives are still torn apart one year after the storm.
When George W. Bush flies into New Orleans next week to boast about the progress that has been made in rebuilding homes and lives on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, he won’t be talking about people like Oveal Jackson.
Jackson, 50, a custodian at Charity Hospital, which closed after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, is out of a job, has exhausted her unemployment benefits, has been unable to get assistance from the Bush administration and doesn’t know how she’s going to pay the rent next month for a house in Alexandria, La., where she moved—225 miles from her destroyed home in New Orleans.
She and her four adult children lost everything, escaping literally with the clothes on their backs. Jackson says:
It’s been rough. I mean, real rough. When you lose everything, and you can’t save nothing. When you see your house split in half. And all that water.
I don’t even have a picture of myself. I don’t have a camera. I lost everything. The only picture I have is one I got from my mother’s house of me when I was 18. I don’t look like that anymore.
But the family’s biggest loss is not material. It is the loss of loved ones that hurts most. Since Katrina hit a year ago, Jackson has lost four family members, including her nephew, who was shot by alleged looters when he returned to New Orleans from college Sept. 4, 2005. Now, her father is seriously ill, and her husband is hospitalized in Alexandria because of the psychological trauma he experienced during the hurricane and the impact of the family deaths.
A year after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last Aug. 29, killing more than 1,800 people and causing $81 billion in damage, the Bush administration has failed to provide the resources and leadership to get the area back on its feet and help residents rebuild their lives, according to a congressional report released Wednesday.
If she could meet President Bush when he comes to the area next week, Jackson would tell him the people in New Orleans are hurting and he needs to do more to rebuild the city so people who want to go home can return to their lives.
Jackson, who was trapped in the hospital for a week after the storm, has been separated from her family for a year, because they were evacuated before she was rescued. She was able to find the place to rent in Alexandria and furnished it with what she could find and with the help of neighbors. Now, she is trying to keep her spirits up as she faces the prospect of having to move out of her new home because she can’t afford the rent.
Jackson, a member of AFSCME, the union of public local, state and municipal workers, was on the job as a custodian on the mental health ward at Charity Hospital in New Orleans when the storm hit. For three days, she didn’t know if her family was alive or dead—and they didn’t know where she was:
My whole family was in the water for three days—my four children and my grandbaby—before they were rescued. They came to the hospital looking for me, and they told them nobody was in the hospital. They kept looking, and finally, they got to a cell phone and called me. I told them to tell somebody that we were trapped inside the hospital.
Everything we had we shared with the patients. Whatever food and supplies we could get, we took care of the patients. We did our jobs until they came and got us. I just kept saying over and over to myself, “Take care of the patients first.”
After they were rescued, her family was split up and evacuated. She had no idea where they were. She was especially frantic to find her 7-year-old grandson Joseph, who is blind:
They said his first words when they lifted him up out of the water were “maw maw” [his nickname for his grandmother].
It took two more months until she found her family through the Internet listing of evacuated families. Her beloved grandson and his mother, Shontele, Jackson’s oldest daughter, are in Fort Worth, Texas. Joseph is in a good school for the blind, but he doesn’t understand why his “maw maw” can’t send him gifts as she has in the past—necessary items such as a computer for school and a guitar. He needs the guitar because he is musically gifted and needs to practice and play music, Jackson says. She would love to see him, but she can’t afford the fare to visit.
She and her husband are renting the house in Alexandria, a four-and-half-hour drive from their former home in New Orleans. Until July, they paid the $500 a month rent using their unemployment checks. But the unemployment benefits have expired. Jackson used the little money she received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay back neighbors who helped her to get started when she rented her house. Now she has nothing. The Red Cross paid her rent for July and August—and as September approaches, she doesn’t know how she will pay it.
What she needs badly is a job. She is not alone, according to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). The study, The Women of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: Multiple Disadvantages and Key Assets for Recovery, Part II. Gender, Race, and Class in the Labor Market, found that unemployment among women remaining in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region who had not returned to their former homes was 4.2 percent, but among evacuees who had not returned to their homes, it was 23 percent, more than five times as high.
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