Faith, Friends, And Family Sustain New Orleans Evacuees In Newtown

“You cannot do a kindness too soon,

 for you never know how soon

it will be too late.”

               —Ralph Waldo Emerson

By Nancy K. Crevier

One woman lived alone in New Orleans, except for her two greyhounds and the occasional rescue dog. The other was raising her young family alone in a parish the other side of the levees. Their lives never intersected in the Crescent City, but the winds and waters of Hurricane Katrina have carried both to new lives in Newtown.

“Unloading the car is admitting we might not go home. It’s scary to think you have to go home, re-build your home, your business. When does life get normal enough for extracurricular activities? How many kids will come back?” These are the questions Charlene Hibbs, a single mother of three boys and former owner of Charlene’s Dance Academy in Kenner, La., asks as she sits at a kitchen table in Sandy Hook.

Ms Hibbs, her sons Ty, who is 11, Austin, 9, and Zane, 6 and their dog, Sunshine, are guests of Herb and Dody Flynn and their two children of Watch Hill Road. Until Hurricane Katrina obliterated the New Orleans area on August 29, they had lived their entire lives in Louisiana, weathering many hurricanes and Katrina, as well, thought Ms Hibbs. But by Sunday morning, August 28, newscasts predicting a storm much more powerful than any she had endured alarmed her.

“Once they say the Red Cross will not set up shelters because it’s not safe, it’s time to go,” she says. “You can’t put a price on your safety.”

She gave her boys the same advice she has given them over the years when hurricanes forced them out: “Take one of your favorite things. You can’t take it all.”

She knew the storm was fierce as she followed friends to the safety of their relatives in Centre, Ala., but she did not expect that this would be the last she would see of her hometown for weeks, and possibly for months. Nor did she expect to entertain driving to Connecticut, even though shortly before the hurricane hit, Ms Flynn had emailed her cohort, offering her refuge.

Dody Flynn owns Dance Dimensions in Brookfield and has known Ms Hibbs for six years. “We met through a Dance Masters of America [DMA] National Convention,” she explains. The women bonded quickly and look forward to their yearly get-together at the conventions. “We’ve always called it a DMA family, but it’s really gone beyond that now,” says Ms Flynn.

The short notice of evacuation did not give Ms Hibbs time to respond, and the family spent several days in Alabama while she tried to sort out her next move. Fortunately, as she tried to absorb the impact of how their lives had turned upside down, her Centre, Ala., hosts (including a cat named Katrina) entertained the children. “They took them fishing and played with them. It took their minds off what was going on,” Ms Hibbs says.

She had plenty to worry about without adding the boys to her list. She was unsure as to the whereabouts of one of her three brothers for most of the week. All of the siblings lived in the path of the hurricane.

To top it off, her father had been admitted to a hospital in New Orleans a week before the storm. With communications to the city in shambles, it was days before she was able to find out that he was being cared for in the hospital still, which was running on generators. She was told that all of the patients were weak, but were being kept hydrated, the best she could hope for in the circumstances.

The same day she received news of her father, her brother, Branch, called to say he had been able to access her neighborhood. Near to tears, he told her that he had rescued some pictures off the walls and a few legal papers, but the nine inches of water in a hot, closed up house had caused irreparable damage due to mold and sewage. She assumes the house will be razed.

“I thought my little house might be washed away,” says Ms Hibbs, “but never the whole New Orleans community. It’s a very strange feeling. The kids wonder about their friends. You just hope they’re okay. The worst thing of this is people you see every day you can’t see right now.”

“As soon as we knew Kenner had gotten water,” says Ms Flynn, “the offer to come here immediately went out [to the Hibbs family].”

Says Ms Hibbs, “You go through denial of what happened. You don’t know if you should stay or go. It was hard to decide to go so far away, but I knew it was best for the boys.”

Ms Flynn received an email at last saying, “I’m 99 percent sure I’m coming.” She put out the word to friends and neighbors, and contacted the schools to let them know the three boys would be enrolling, and that they had no paperwork. “Sandy Hook School has made it easy right from the beginning,” she says. “Many people donated a lot; clothes, beds. We shifted things around so it was like home.”

“Better than home,” adds Ms Hibbs, who arrived September 10. She is exhausted and still in shock, but says that on the whole, her sons have found the evacuation quite an adventure.

What stays with Ms Hibbs the most is “the kindness of people. We’re so blessed with that.” Even on the long drive north, she encountered the goodness of strangers. “I stopped for gas in Kentucky and the cashier said that the lady ahead of us had paid for my gas. It’s unbelievable, there are so many wonderful people in this world.”

Right now, she is focused on giving some semblance of normalcy to her children’s lives, and trying to regroup, financially and emotionally. But she wants all of the people who have come to her aid to know how grateful she is, saying, “Faith, family, and friends will get you through.”

The Escape Of A ‘Grobanite’

The dance connection and friendship paved the way north for Ms Hibbs, but it was friends and the unlikely combination of a love for Josh Groban and dog breeding that helped Diana “Sunni” Plaisance escape the wrath of Hurricane Katrina.

Ms Plaisance wears a T-shirt that says “Grobanite” beneath her denim overalls, carries a bag emblazoned with Josh Groban’s photograph, and around her wrist is a pink leather bracelet that proclaims “JOSH” in sparkling pink gemstones. Along with a few of the popular musician’s CDs, they are all she has left of the extensive Josh Groban collection she left behind when she fled New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Katrina earlier this month. Indeed, besides her two greyhounds, two pair of jeans, three pair of shoes, a few T-shirts, some vital papers and a couple of family photos, they are all she has left of her ten years in New Orleans.

Call him her lucky charm; it was her passion for Groban that helped her escape the Big Easy. Through a Josh Groban fan site, she had become friends with Donna Laird from Slidell, La. When evacuations from New Orleans and the other southern cities became imminent, her Groban buddy drove from Slidell to New Orleans to pick up Ms Plaisance, who because of a disabling spine disorder has no vehicle.

“I hung in there till I knew we had to do it [leave New Orleans],” Ms Plaisance says.

They had planned to take refuge with Ms Laird’s mother in Baton Rouge, but arrived only to discover that the mother was at Tanglewood in Massachusetts — at a Josh Groban concert. And she had left no key. A neighbor took in the women as the storm bore down on the city and so, with two dogs and four cats, they waited out Katrina with a relative stranger.

“She was about 70 years old, and so nice,” exclaims Ms Plaisance.

Meanwhile, in Newtown, Sheila Maher was frantic about her friend, Diana. The two women, both dog breeders, had become fast friends 16 years earlier when Ms Plaisance lived in Brockton, Mass.

“I couldn’t get in touch with Diana once the storm hit,” says Ms Maher. “The communications were so bad.” Finally, she was able to reach Ms Plaisance’s father in Oregon for reassurance about her safety. She had issued an invitation to Ms Plaisance several times to visit Newtown, and now she fervently hoped that her offer would be taken up when they could get in touch again.

After five days without power in Baton Rouge, Ms Plaisance was able to get information about New Orleans. Satellite images showed that all of the trees in her neighborhood were gone, and that many homes had sustained roof damage. But she still held out hope for the 135-year-old home she rented.

“I lived in the highest, driest part of New Orleans,” she recalls. Her hopes went down the drain, though, when she heard that they had opened floodgates to relieve the pressure on the remaining levees. “The sewers all backed up. And when you have a house closed up, 90 degrees with 90 percent humidity, you lose everything to mold. Sewer damage and mold.”

It became clear to her that she would not be returning to her home. She had lost everything. “You can’t dwell on it. I’ve only had two minutes of crying. There’s too much to do,” she says.

“Is the offer still open?” she asked Ms Maher when communications put them in touch on the fourth day after the storm.

“Come up! Come up!” was the excited reply.

Her brother arrived in Baton Rouge on September 7 from Brooklyn, and together they drove to Connecticut, where Sheila Maher waited to share her home. It was something to look forward to, as was a sight somewhere between Chattanooga, Tenn., and New York that lifted her spirits.

“After 9/11,” she says, “Louisiana started a fundraiser to build a new fire truck for one of the New York City fire stations that had lost their trucks. On the side of the truck is the State of Louisiana and it says ‘From your friends in Louisiana.’ The truck is named the Spirit of Louisiana.” As she and her brother drove north, they passed the Spirit of Louisiana. Loaded on a flatbed, it was headed back to its birthplace to offer aide to the city. “It was so amazing,” she says.

Ms Plaisance did not have renters’ insurance. Living on a disability check of less than $900 a month, buying insurance was not at the top of her list. She has not been able to contact FEMA for the promised direct deposit of emergency funds, so she is without means to purchase needed items, such as clothing and a comfortable mattress to relieve her constant back pain. On Monday, Ms Plaisance and Ms Maher planned to make a stop at the Red Cross in Danbury a priority, in hopes that they could aide her in receiving funding, as well as offer counseling.

“I’m not super ‘thing’ oriented. But losing my music, my pictures, and my violin is hard. Right now, I’m so numb, when it breaks, it will break bad,” worries Ms Plaisance about her emotional state. She is counting on counseling from trained Red Cross volunteers to help her deal with the losses she has experienced.

One thing neither woman has to worry about in the near future is a roof over her head. Ms Maher is happy to take in her friend indefinitely, and says Ms Flynn of her guests, “They’re here as long as they need to be.”

“Day by day and piece by piece we’re trying to put life together,” says Ms Maher. It is kindness delivered none too soon.