One year later, Katrina survivors are still hurting

The images that haunt me these days are of the people left behind.

Nola King, who lost her home in Bay St. Louis, Miss. Ola Wilson, who is slowly rebuilding hers in Gulfport. Ernest Ratliff, who is trying to make a living at his New Orleans service station amid the crushed cars and debris spit out by Hurricane Katrina. And I can still hear the heavenly balm offered by Pastor Patrinell Wright and the Total Experience Gospel Choir. I traveled with the choir last week as it visited the Gulf region to perform and do some relief work.

We were shocked and humbled by what we witnessed. But as one day rolled into the next, those feelings turned to embarrassment and anger.

A year has passed, and still, one of America's most distinctive — and divided — regions has been left battered and defiled, seemingly forgotten.

While the rebuilding has started in some areas, many towns still have rubble in the streets, homes uninhabitable and businesses that are now just memories. I even saw roaming packs of dogs.

Worse, so many of the people who love this place had no choice but to leave it.

Some 250,000 of the million Gulf Coast residents that fled Katrina will not return, according to a new study by Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit environmental-research organization.

For the poor who stayed, their struggle is daily and indefinite.

The $2,000 checks people received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were used — or sometimes squandered — for immediate needs, like food and hotels. And that money, doled out in the days after the storm, was spent long ago.

The tens of thousands of FEMA trailers and mobile homes are shelter, but only through the end of the year.

"How can this government be so generous away from home," Wright fumed, "and sit on its own citizens?"

It's unfair to blame FEMA for everything. The truth is the Gulf states were crippled by poverty, unemployment and dysfunction long before Katrina hit. So when she arrived — 400 miles wide, packing a storm surge 27 feet high — any stability that existed was blown apart and swept out to sea.

Far away as the Gulf may seem in our everyday lives, these people are still our neighbors. What can we do?

Wright has her own very practical to-do list for the government and for those of us who live amid the mountains and millionaires.

The communities need: public rest stations where people can shower and wash clothes; soup kitchens where they can eat or work for minimum wage; and mental-health services for adults and the children of Katrina whose lives are scarred by the storm.

The churches, as always, are on the ground and making a difference: CityTeam Ministries (www.cityteam.org/katrina/howtohelp) has set up camps, hosted volunteer workers, served meals, found shelter and listened with compassion to a parade of refugees.

Katrina Aid Today (www.katrinaaidtoday.org), part of the United Methodist Committee on Relief, engaged the choir in its mission to help the most vulnerable survivors.

Give what you can. And if you work at Starbucks, surely there's a pound of coffee you can send to the Hancock County Food Pantry, at 716 Herlihy St., Waveland, MS 39576.

As a country, we may think we have done our part, but, as Wright said as her choir headed home to Seattle, "We haven't even left a thumbprint."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

Her favorite: "Excellent"