On this anniversary, shelter volunteers are remembering that intense time of coordinating care and services in Shreveport. These are the voices of some people who had a role at the Red Cross shelter at LSU Shreveport that housed more than 1,100 evacuees from New Orleans.
“I was a floater. I had a clipboard. The first day I came down, there was a woman who was the shelter manager and she was being torn in every direction by tons of people asking her questions. She couldn’t keep her thoughts straight. So, I just followed people around and wrote down the questions people had and the answers. I helped remind her of what she had to do next.” – Dorothy McDonald, Shreveport
“We know that food, clothing and shelter are the basic needs that everybody has, and the Red Cross was very good at putting that together. But people need more than that when you have 24 hours a day to fill. You’re sitting somewhere where your stuff isn’t there and you don’t have a role to play.” – Dorothy McDonald, Shreveport
“There was this little girl, and I was in the gym with her. Her mother had been hospitalized. She was there with her uncle. Her uncle had left during the day to work. So he was earning money. She was left in the gym with her little brother. I talked with her and she didn’t want me to leave her side.” – Meredith Nelson, director, master’s in counseling program, LSU Shreveport
“Some of the Red Cross national mental health volunteers showed up about two weeks into it. They actually became traumatized working with a lot of people who had evacuated. We provided support to national Red Cross counselors because they needed some counseling themselves.” – Meredith Nelson, director, master’s in counseling program, LSU Shreveport
“I saw them setting up what I called the ‘puppy hotel’ outside my conference room. I knew then that this was going to be a different situation. I’m a dog lover. You can’t just create tents for dogs. They ended up bringing in air conditioning units.” – Timothy Winter, chair, Department of Kinesiology and Health Science, LSU Shreveport
“The back stairwell to our building was the storage area for all of the baby supplies. We could barely walk up the stairs with diapers and boxes of food all the way up. We were using every space that we had.” – Timothy Winter, chair, Department of Kinesiology and Health Science, LSU Shreveport
“It’s unquestionably – and I don’t know if this is the right word to use – one of the most rewarding professional experiences I’ve ever had in terms of really, really recognizing where need is, and how little you have to do sometimes to fulfill a need.” – Jean Hollenshead, clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychology, LSU Shreveport
“I kind of had the mental health team, and we were meeting every week. We began to see the horrendous increase in suicide among this population. So we just morphed into a suicide prevention coalition that is still in operation today.” – Jean Hollenshead, clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychology, LSU Shreveport
Hollenshead says the Northwest Louisiana Suicide Prevention Coalition was born out of Katrina. She says the planning for its 10th conference is underway.
