A volunteer’s experience at the City of Houston shelter after Katrina
By Tim Campbell
September 16, 2005
All rights reserved
At about 5:00 p.m. Friday, September 2, the Houston affiliate of ABC News announced that the City of Houston was opening up another shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center here, and that volunteers should just go down there. Previously, Harris County, not the City, had opened large government shelters at the Astrodome and Reliant Center.
I went right down to the GRB. By 6:00 p.m., I was helping to sort donations of clothing, toys, toiletries, bedding, baby items and food.
By 8:00 p.m., I was calling forklift drivers at the GRB Center for hundreds of more tables for the sorted items. Houstonians were donating supplies faster than we could set up tables. Volunteers with initiative just did what was needed to meet the occasion.
Saturday, Sunday and Monday (this was Labor Day weekend), the line of walk-in-off-the-streets volunteers stretched half a block. People were waiting an hour in the Texas summer sun just to volunteer! Now that’s good Samaritanism! Oh was I proud of Houston.
By Monday night, somebody decided to stop accepting donations at the Convention Center itself and donors were directed to nearby warehouses.
Evacuees finally started arriving in large numbers. Gov only knows why it took they nearly three days to make the eight hour trip from New Orleans to Houston. But we were ready. Air mattresses were in flated and there were sheets and pillows on every one of them. There were towels and soap. There were baby cribs and bassinets. There was new underwear and good clean used clothes. There was a shoe collection bigger than Imelda Marcos’—all spread out on the Convention Center floor for easy selection. Oh was I proud of Houston.
I went back to volunteer Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. One night, I stayed until 4:30 a.m., but the other evenings there were so many volunteers no one really had to stay long hours. I mean, this operation was cool.
During those days, leadership was provided mostly by volunteers from CenterPoint. I was impressed by how well and how humbly they lead us other volunteers. There was a lot of group problem solving. Questions were thrown out and people spoke up with possible answers. Other times, a volunteer ran off somewhere seeking answers. We were working like a fully functional family. I was impressed.
But the most amazing thing was this: Between Friday and Wednesday, I only saw two angry incidents at the Convention Center. One involved a thirty-is male evacuee, apparently the father of one or two children. Within minutes, Houston volunteers managed to answer his questions or help him and he left the area calmed.
The other angry incident involved a Houston woman who claimed she wanted to offer a family shelter in her home rather than in the big Convention center. At that point, our instructions were simply to let such host families (and there were lots of them) walk around in the Convention Center meeting people and then extend their invitation to lucky evacuees themselves. The previous informal system moved a lot of families out the GRB almost as fast as they arrived. Now that’s Texas hospitality. I was proud of my home city.
This one woman was angry, in a sanctimoniously soft-spoken way, because there wasn’t more structure to adopting families. She went away promising to file a complaint somewhere. I suspected she had some other agenda. And I was real curious where she might go to file a complaint. I surely had no idea but I hoped she’d find a way.
My volunteering ended almost as quickly as it began on Thursday, September 8 about 6:00 p.m. When I got to Convention Center, all volunteering had been taken over people organized by Ed Young’s mega-Second Baptist Church. Second Baptist volunteers had assumed posts at the volunteers’ entry and were only letting in volunteers who had gone through their training or who would wear their t-shirts. They seemed hell-bent on imposing their name on the whole project. Born Catholic, I was not amused.
I wore one of these t-shirts for about an hour. Then I bumped into another off the street volunteer I had come to know. She was refusing to wear the t-shirt. "On strike," she said. I empathized and took off my t-shirt too. We off-the-streets volunteers had come to associate this t-shirt with Second Baptist Church.
Furthermore, said "Operation Compassion" in three-inch letters across the front. That name made me and many others cringe. If you needed help, would you want someone to come to your assistance wearing a t-shirt bragging about their compassion? I wouldn’t.
When I settled in to work at the Information Center where I had been working previously, I quickly noticed the Second Baptist volunteers had xeroxed flyers with the wrong zip code for the GRB and were entering this in all the Internet posts for people looking for loved ones. I set out to correct this error and met surprising resistance from lead people from the Second Baptist group. I ended up suspecting the Second Baptists had decided to send all the mail addressed to evacuees at GRB General Delivery back to sender. I was ashamed of my city.
After working to resolve this problem for about an hour, I told off the Second Baptist leaders without mincing my words. I even forgot to speak in a sanctimoniously soft voice. I was surrounded by security trained at Second Baptist and physically forced out of the Convention Center. This probable assault on my person was the closest thing to violence I saw at the GRB shelter all week. I was not a happy camper.
During subsequent conversation later with Rogene Calvert, the employee of the City of Houston in charge of volunteer staffed projects, I learned because of fears expressed by the Second Baptist people, Houston families are no longer allowed to sponsor evacuees out of the center as before. People looking for lost family and friends are not allowed to enter the GRB shelter. Houstonians wanting to drive evacuees around to look for housing or jobs have to meet their friends outside the center or go through a procedure that takes about half an hour. This has virtually ended any new contacts between evacuees and Texas hospitality. GRB is under virtual lockdown. I am shamed again.
If more Houstonians knew, I think they'd be pissed too.
I was really proud of my City of Houston during that first week of volunteering at the city shelter. Now, I’m pissed. The City should never have turned its shelter so completely over to a religious group. Most importantly, these Second Baptists should have shown more respect for volunteers not organized by their church. And they should not have been allowed to set up their own security with cops and soldiers standing by. The evacuees at the GRB shelter were really lovable and admirable guests, especially considering what they had already been through.
As far as I am concerned, Second Baptist can take their t-shirts and store ’em where the sun don’t shine.
Tim Campbell
208 Caylor
Houston TX 77011
713 928-6119
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