It was announced in church this morning that between 200 and 600 victims from Hurricane Katrina will be relocated to Greensboro, NC (1,000+ miles from Mississippi/Louisiana) to be temporarily housed in our War Memorial Auditorium in the Coliseum Complex. Anyone else (not in Texas) expecting hurricane refugees?
On Friday the Gov. of Minnesota announced that up 5K refugees might be coming here. I was talking to some people who work for one of the local school districts and they are already planning on how to integrate the students into their schools.
Thousands, and I mean thousands, of the NOLA residents currently in Houston will be making Houston their permenant home, hoping to start a new life from scratch. My hope is that we can help these people in their efforts to relocate here by first and foremost providing them with employment opportunities, and therefore PLEASE if you are in a position to employ people at your company, consider hiring some of these individuals so that they can support themselves and relocate to our town and start up a new life. It won't be easy for them, and I hope we all can pitch in and help, because NOLA won't be rebuilt anytime soon, and most of these people can't simply wait that long, and therefore have to relocate elsewhere and start a new life. Thanks
The Red Cross is opening an emergency shelter in Cincinnati to host 100+ Katrina evacuees as of last Friday afternoon.
Tucson was supposed to get 1,000 evacuees today from New Orleans. They were to be housed at the Tucson Convention Center.
a lady at my church has a son who is very involved with this, as i understand it. he live up in minnesota somewhere.
Amazing how so many refugees are ending up across the country. But I'd speculate that many of them have family all over, and they go where they can be with family. Yesterday we had a very somber church service. The theme was basically, "What happens there, matters here." I won't go into too many details, but we had a guest speaker that had been displaced from NO, and her husband was a COO of a major hospital down there. Her testimony of what her husband has been going through was insane. They have patients in every hallway, every room, and every patient room is full. Most of the healthcare workers have been working 48+ hour shifts with little sleep, and they have run out of food and water. Workers were afraid to leave the hoospital because of angry and armed people trying to get in the hospital for food and shelter. There were two police officers guarding the hospital entrances....TWO! They eventially had to flee for fear of losing their lives. Of course, this was before the troops finally managed to bring in some relief. Now it is somewhat under control. One thing I didn't really think of was mentioned by our pastor. There will be many children enrolled into our kids' schools. Dallas and surrounding cities have lifted the capacity limits in major school districts to accommodate the number of children enrolling. But these kids will be scared, alone, and without new or cool clothes, etc. You know how mean some kids can be. So we were asked to pray for these kids, and to also help our kids understand that they should not only accept them into the school, but open up to them. Invite these children to sit and eat with them at lunch. Make them feel welcome and loved. I really hope these kids can come in and just return to a sense of normalcy and acceptance after what they have been through.
