For repeat hurricane victims, much more is needed

    In one sense, the names have changed – from Katrina to Rita to Gustav to Isaac – but in another sense, the names of the people pushed from their homes into the latest day-to-day struggle have not.
    As Dr. Elmore Rigamer and his health care team from Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans visited Red Cross shelters after Isaac last week, the thought struck him: While agencies such as Catholic Charities and the Red Cross have raised their effectiveness in responding to multiple hurricanes over the last seven years, the “profile” of the repeat storm victim, sadly, has not changed.
    By and large, Rigamer said, the people who have found themselves in the hurricane shelters time after time are those who are unemployed or marginally employed, undereducated and don’t have the financial wherewithal to get out of town because they don’t own a car or can’t afford the gas to high-tail it, much less pay for a place to stay. And, in large numbers, they have chronic medical conditions.
    Catholic Charities often calls itself an “early and forever” responder, and that was on display last week as teams of social workers and case managers fanned out to assess how best to fill people’s needs. Sometimes that simply means listening to the people’s stories; sometimes it’s procuring the prescription medicine they had left behind; sometimes it’s directing them to right place for direct assistance.
    But as a psychiatrist who spent 18 years as medical director of the U.S. State Department – which included counseling victims of terrorist acts such as the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1998 and the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983 – Rigamer has been trained to look at underlying realities and causation.
    The ministry of “presence” is a spiritual gift to someone who is suffering, Rigamer says, but the people he keeps seeing in the hurricane shelters have more immediate needs.
    “When we were there, they wanted money, they wanted food and they wanted medicine,” Rigamer said.
    God knows south Louisiana has been visited by man-made and natural disasters over the last seven years. Besides the flurry of hurricane activity, the BP oil spill in 2010 virtually wiped out the fishing and shrimping industry in lower Plaquemines, St. Bernard and Jefferson for more than a year, and the long-term effects still are being felt.
    Rigamer says the second and third victimization can lead almost anyone in that boat to think: “My God, if this happens again, what am I going to do?”
    That’s why Rigamer sees a  broader, three-part mission for Catholic Charities beyond their early and effective response to the immediate need. It comes down to job training, literacy and health care.
    “The thing I am really pushing is literacy – just literacy about your job, literacy about getting a job,” Rigamer said. “And health care is not just about delivering direct services, because that’s government’s job. But how can people learn about their health and learn to live a healthy lifestyle and learn how to manage a disease. They have to take a more active part through knowledge and active participation. That’s what we need to build resiliency. It’s a three-legged stool – jobs, education and health.”
    Rigamer noted an interesting phenomenon last week at the shelter in Belle Chasse. When he visited the shelter on Thursday, there were about 500 people. When he returned the next day – as the people were being prepared to take buses to Shreveport for more long-term accommodations – there were only about 100.
    The way Rigamer figures it, many of those who left the shelter will remain in the shadows but re-emerge at local church parishes when their immediate needs cry out.
    “These are people who are going to show up on our doorsteps,” Rigamer said.
    Just like the next hurricane.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald,org.