Summary
"It's stuff that contractors get paid a lot to do," says Madisonian Sarah Weiss, who hasn't done this sort of work before. "But the contractors work only in the rich parts of town. Here they don't even pick up the trash."
Still, returning home was hard. "I left right after [Rita] hit and didn't get to say goodbye to my patients," says [Kathy Walsh]. "They felt like family by then." She is still struck by the depth of the evacuees' gratitude. "I don't think they expected to be helped. These people aren't used to being helped.""They don't want us to be out after dark," he says. "It's pitch black and they feel that it's dangerous. The whole town is under pseudo-military rule, with checkpoints you can't get through."See the full content of this document
Extract
Responding to Katrina
Three weeks after hurricane Katrina ravaged the nation's Gulf Coast, Wajid Jenkins got on a bus loaded with people and supplies and headed South. He's still shocked by what he saw.
"I was more profoundly affected than I had imagined," he says. "I've been dreaming about it, with such an element of grief. Everybody we met there was grieving."Jenkins' well-written (though horrifying) Relief Caravan Journal is available on www.madison.indymedia.org. He describes scenes of devastation, as well as tales of ingenuity and resourcefulness, such as a sheriff in Hattiesburg, Miss., who broke into a mili...See the full content of this document
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