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Katrina survivor, 81, sees ray of hope again
LR Rotarians help Louisianian rebuild

BY Amy Upshaw ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Editor's Note: A reporter and photographer visited Louisiana with a group from the Rotary Club of Little Rock, a service organization, on Feb. 9-11 to report on the community that the group is helping rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

LACOMBE, La. - Augustine Palmer bends over, reaches for a pan in a cabinet in the galley of her travel trailer, stands up again and - WHACK.

Her head smacks the upper cabinet door.

"I forgets," the 81-year-old says with a giggle, revealing deep laugh lines that frame her smiling lips. Augustine has hit her head so many times that she jokingly wonders if she's caused any brain damage.

She stands a statuesque 5 feet 10 inches, so that makes her travel trailer - provided in December by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina gutted her home - a bit cramped.

That's not a complaint. Augustine feels blessed - truly blessed - to have a place to live, no matter the size. Still, she longs to live in her own home, where she raised a son and mourned a husband.

Like many in this unincorporated community on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, Augustine doesn't know when she'll move back in. But, make no mistake, she's moving back in.

"Yes, indeed," she says, and then slowly repeats her signature phrase. "Yes, indeed."

Nearly six months after Katrina triggered Gulf Coast flooding, Augustine and others there say they have finally turned a corner - they have hope again that life in this community will be as it once was.

The residents, many of whom are lifelong Catholics, have battled back after natural disasters before. Recovering from Katrina, however, has been distinctly more difficult.

Friends and family who helped residents recover from weather events before, including a flood a few years back, are busy gutting their own homes, finding places for their own families to live. And, with so many storm victims in so many other cities still struggling, government hasn't been able to help them all.

Augustine has done what she could to save her house - rescued some items and cleaned the yard - but age and arthritis keep her from the more physical labor. If her husband, Leroy, were still alive, she knows he would have done all the work himself. So like many of her neighbors, Augustine depends on the kindness of strangers to take her home.

Until Aug. 29, she had lived there for 45 years.

***

Augustine, a northern Louisiana gal, met Leroy in the 1950s at a picnic in Lacombe, the bayou community of about 7,000 people where Leroy had grown up.

They married in 1958 and lived with Leroy's mother while building themselves the house at the end of East Orleans Street . In all, it took the couple about six months to frame and finish the all-wood home.

They built it large enough - two bedrooms, a living room, a great room, kitchen, dining room and one and a half baths - that when their son was born they still had plenty of room. Over the years, they added a garage and a room for entertaining.

Soon Leroy, an elementary school teacher, and Augustine were fixtures in their close-knit neighborhood, says 40-year-old native Althea Ducre. Augustine became known as the "queen of the frozen cups."

Children paid 25 cents for one of Augustine's Zips: sweet treats of Koolaid, fruit and a secret ingredient that Ducre suspects is syrup. Augustine advertised her Zips on a homemade sign that she hung on the corner of East Orleans and Lake Road , the main road in town.

In 1982, Augustine retired as a cafeteria supervisor from the psychiatric hospital in nearby Mandeville, which still employs many who live in Lacombe. Soon after, doctors diagnosed Leroy with cancer. He fought it for eight years, until he died in 1993 at age 75.

Though she had lost her husband, Augustine still had the home they had built together more than 30 years earlier.

Then came Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29. Before the storm hit, Augustine left her home, which like most of Lacombe is in a low-lying area in the middle of marshland, and headed to her son's house about 40 miles away in Hammond, La.

"I couldn't have stood this baby," Augustine admits. For one, she doesn't know how to swim.

She returned only after neighbors called and told her that the 6 feet of water that had submerged the home had finally receded.

"It broke my heart," Augustine says of seeing the house for the first time after Katrina. "Broke my heart. We worked so hard for this."

Like most of her neighbors, Augustine lost almost everything. She salvaged a few pieces of furniture, some collectible ceramics and - God willing - the water heater she had bought just before the storm.

But the actual cleaning up and rebuilding of her home seemed daunting.

The list of things to replace was long: floors, ceilings, wiring, walls, appliances and part of the roof. The frame was OK. Homeowner's insurance didn't cover all the damage.

***

Help pulled into Augustine's driveway a few weeks after the hurricane hit. A neighbor had told volunteers with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Arkansas, which had picked two streets in Lacombe to help clean up and rebuild, that Augustine needed help.

"They just showed up," she says one day recently, standing in her driveway.

Augustine did not live on one of the two streets that the Baptist group had chosen, but Charles Ray of Little Rock , disaster relief coordinator for the group, decided to help her anyway.

The group had picked Lacombe, a place where huge oak trees shade many of the streets, in part because it wasn't getting a lot of attention compared with its neighbor to the south, New Orleans .

In the fall, Ray spoke to a Little Rock church group about the cooperative's efforts. Sam Chaffin, a member of Rotary Club of Little Rock, was in the audience. Eventually, the Baptists and the Rotarians decided to team up so they would have more volunteers and money to assist residents in Lacombe.

"There was an obvious demand," Ray says while leaning against a bare wall in Augustine's house.

Chaffin was in the first of Little Rock Rotarians to arrive in Lacombe about five weeks after the storm. That's when they met Ducre, the woman who had bought frozen cups from Augustine as a young girl, and Ducre's mother, Pat Pierre.

Chaffin and a few others helped clear Pierre 's house of its rotting contents. Ducre calls their aid "miracle-like." Both Ducre's house and her mother's had been devastated by the storm, and they could not revive the structures on their own. More than anything, Ducre says, she and her mom needed a spiritual boost.

"No government in the world can touch what these people have done," she says of all the people who have come to her community's rescue. "FEMA needs to go talk to the [volunteers]."

Though Lacombe is a poor, rural community, many people there own their own homes and didn't want to start over somewhere else, Ducre explains.

Augustine, who is living in a trailer parked in front of her house, certainly didn't want to leave. So her house became one of five that the Rotarians adopted. (The Little Rock club has applied for a $2 million grant from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund so club members can rebuild even more houses.) Every other weekend, volunteers work on the house. Thirteen Rotarians from Little Rock arrived Feb. 10.

"Ms. Palmer, you're going to watch that disappear today," Rotary President French Hill says of a stack of drywall sheets piled in Augustine's garage. "That's going to go up on your walls faster than a speeding bullet."

Augustine, who had changed from her fuzzy pink slippers to rubber shoes to meet her guests, stood quietly for a moment.

"There's a lot to do, I can tell," one of the volunteers says aloud to no one in particular.

"Yes, indeed," Augustine says. "Yes, indeed."

The house had been gutted. The dark, aged wood that Augustine and Leroy had nailed up all those years ago stood exposed but still strong.

"It was beautiful - before," Augustine reminisced. While the volunteers busy themselves, Augustine was getting back to her routine. She went to the beauty shop but most of her curls of long white hair went limp when a rainstorm blew in.

When she returned, she stood on her front porch with a plastic bonnet covering her hair. Nearby, the volunteers had hung a Rotary symbol on a wire hanger from a rusting plant hook.

Through a large, open window, Augustine had a perfect view of the volunteers inside. The walls and ceilings were quickly being covered by the drywall.

"It's beginning to look like my house again," Augustine says with that distinct smile.

She already has plans to make a pot of red beans and rice, one of her specialties, in her roomy kitchen. There's no way Augustine could hit her head in there.

But, she says, she won't be putting together those frozen cups that she's famous for. She quit making them years ago.

It's too bad, really. One of the few things that Hurricane Katrina didn't touch was Augustine's homemade sign advertising ZIPS in big, black letters for only 25 cents.