The Lord works in mysterious ways, and so
does the state of Illinois. Floyd Schleyhahn, a network administrator for
the state Department of Central Management Services, found that out
firsthand in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “My wife and I were watching
television,” Schleyhahn recalls. “We thought,
‘Gosh, here we are in the cover of our home. We can just turn
it off. The folks down there can’t. We’ve got to be
able to do something. They’re only 12 hours
away.’”
Schleyhahn called his pastor, who put him in
touch with Convoy of Hope, a Christian relief group that was
already in the hurricane zone. “They said, ‘When you
come, you’ve got to be self-sufficient,’” he
recalls. That meant bringing all of the food, water, fuel and
shelter he’d need to survive. Just renting an RV would cost
$1,200. That seemed a waste, so Schleyhahn figured that he’d
just write a check. That was on a Wednesday. The very next day, his
boss asked him whether he’d go to Louisiana as part of a
state effort to help administer public assistance to folks
who’d lost everything. “In a matter of hours, it went from not
going to going with everything taken care of, all expenses paid,
and I didn’t have to use any of my [vacation] time,”
Schleyhahn says. “It was just, like, wow.”
Schleyhahn and the 39 other members on his
team arrived in Bogalusa, 70 miles north of New Orleans, on Sept.
11. They were soon in the thick of things, setting up Internet
access by way of satellite so that money could start flowing to
folks with no access to ATMs or checking accounts. “To me, it
was what everyone was thinking Y2K was going to be,”
Schleyhahn says. ‘They knew the state of Illinois was coming.
There were thousands of people — the line waiting for us was
a mile and three-quarters long. The computer systems were down. If
they didn’t have cash on hand, they couldn’t use credit
cards; they couldn’t do anything. The week we arrived,
grocery stores were just beginning to be restocked with
food.”
The one-time allotments to purchase food were
piddly, ranging from $149 for one person to $611 for a family of
six. But no one complained. “These were people who’d
never been on public assistance before,” Schleyhahn says.
“No one was protesting that this was too little. No one wasfighting. There was no anger. They were just
appreciative to get what they were getting.” An 8 p.m. curfew was in place, but one of
Schleyhahn’s supervisors arranged to have it extended so that
Schleyhahn and his colleagues could do their laundry. Schleyhahn
admits to a bit of apprehension as he headed to a Laundromat.
“It was right in the ’hood — a rough
neighborhood,” he says. “It was getting dark.”
Instead of muggers, residents were waiting with quarters.
“They said, ‘We’ll do your laundry,”
Schleyhahn says. The same hospitality awaited them when it was time
to eat. “These people lost their homes, and they wanted to
make us meals,” Schleyhahn says. One family in particular stood out. While
walking down a line of people waiting for food stamps, Schleyhahn
chanced across Paul Sanders, a cattle rancher. Sanders didn’t
need food stamps. He wanted to know the way to the closest FEMA
office. He, his wife, and their two daughters, ages 1 and 3, were
sleeping in a pickup truck because the hurricane had destroyed
their homes. Even worse, the truck’s air conditioning had
gone out, leaving the family the choice of sleeping with the
windows open and being eaten by mosquitoes or closing them and
putting up with sweltering heat. After other evacuees complained
that their children were making noise, the family had refused to
stay in shelters. It turned out that this wasn’t the
first disaster to hit the Sanders family. In August 2004, their
home in nearby Harahan was destroyed in a fire. Harahan Fire Chief
Todd St. Cyr vividly recalls the disaster. Each time firefighters
thought that they had the blaze under control, it would pop up in a
different part of the house, which had numerous false ceilings and
spaces between walls resulting from additions that had been built
over the years. “It was unreal,” St. Cyr says.
“It was the damnedest fire I ever fought in my
life.”
But Sanders, who lost cattle, sheep, and
goats in addition to his family’s mobile home in the
hurricane, took it in stride. “He kind of had a smile on his
face when he told me about the fire,’ says Schleyhahn, who
took up a collection and raised several hundred dollars for the
Sanders family. At last report, they were living in a tent. “These people, if they didn’t
have bad luck, they wouldn’t have any luck at all,”
Schleyhahn says.
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2005.
