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PLAQUEMINES PARISH, LA---The big, beautiful log house is gone. The commercial orange grove has been destroyed. Even so, the plot of family land along Highway 11 North was where Jill Patten's grown children chose to spend their first post-Katrina Christmas.
"The kids wanted to come down here to open gifts," said Patten, as she waited beside the American Red Cross emergency response vehicle (ERV) for a hot Christmas dinner of chicken cordon bleu and green beans. The ERV was pulled up near the stripped orange trees. "They even wanted to come down in their pajamas."
From their storm refuges across southern Louisiana, three generations of Pattens gathered earlier Christmas morning to open presents inside a white trailer set up near the remains of the log house.
"It's kind of scattered in there," said Patten. "We took pictures. It was really nice."
The Patten home was one of several stops the Red Cross team made on Christmas Day along its regular route in Plaquemines Parish, where Hurricane Katrina made landfall Aug. 29 on its Gulf Coast rampage. Katrina's winds and the subsequent flooding lifted homes from their foundations, tossed cars upside down and flung fishing boats onto highways.
Responding to the biggest disaster in its 125-year history, the Red Cross is still serving devastated areas four months after the storm.
Before heading out that morning from Kitchen No. 44 in Algiers, La., 19 teams of Red Cross volunteers were cautioned that there wasn't a way to predict how many people they might find to feed on Christmas Day.
"We've never done something of this scale on Christmas Day," supervisor Terry Cooney told the group, indicating that they might be bringing back many leftover meals. "But if you go out and feed one person, that's one person who had a Christmas dinner because we were out there."
One Red Cross crew came upon and offered meals to a congregation of about three dozen people as they emerged from a Christmas mass held at St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church.
When the Mississippi River had come rushing over the levees, seven people who had not evacuated swam to the church, one of the few buildings left standing in Port Sulphur, to take refuge in the choir loft.
Eventually they climbed out of a window into a rescue boat. The window, the farthest on the left above the main entrance, was still propped open.
Inside the church, which had been cleaned up with the help of the National Guard, ruined wooden pews had been replaced by stacking chairs and plywood has been tacked to broken stained-glass windows. A high-water mark about 17 feet above floor level ringed the chipped and peeling walls. A marble altar swept away by floodwaters had been replaced by a temporary wooden model.
The Christmas day mass, conducted by Father Gerry Stapleton, featured no hymns, no altar boys and no collection.
"We have lost much, but we have not lost our faith," Father Gerry, whose rectory next door also was destroyed, told the congregation as they huddled in their winter jackets in the unlit and unheated church.
Later that morning at the Port Sulphur roadblock, about 45 miles south of New Orleans, a Plaquemines sheriff offered little encouragement to the crew of the Red Cross vehicle as they opted to proceed down State Highway 23.
"You won't find anyone around," he told the crew. "There's no one there."
But, soon after passing through the roadblock, the Red Cross vehicle stopped to serve meals to Lorena Allen and her son, Hector Leon, who had come from Nashville, Tenn., to work as volunteers with Animal Rescue New Orleans over the Christmas holidays.
Months after the storm, pets left behind by evacuees who thought they'd be back in a couple of days still roam the parish. Allen and Leon had found two dogs that morning, both now asleep in cages in their van. Giving up their Christmas to look for strays was not a sacrifice, according to Leon.
"We can't celebrate, knowing there's all these animals here," he said.
As they drove further down the peninsula, the Red Cross team found others in need of a holiday meal - shrimp fishermen working on their damaged boats at the Empire Shipyard and volunteer fireman Joseph Marange, who had a fire truck parked beside his trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Just north of Port Sulphur, Clarence Martinez surveyed what was left of his family compound, which had included a century-old Acadian home, a new three-car garage with workshop and his daughter's beauty shop. All three structures had been ripped away down to their cement slabs.
"All I have left is a light," said Martinez, pointing to a spotlight mounted high above him on an electric pole.
Martinez and his wife, Charlotte, lived in a tent on their property until their FEMA trailer arrived last week. Although quarters are tight in the trailer, Martinez - who said that he is "tired of walking sideways" - is grateful to have shelter while he rebuilds his home.
"I can't wait for daylight," he said. "We got blessed. We got a second chance. Even though we lost everything, we've got another chance."
Back up Highway 23, Patten and her partner, Lloyd Mahe, can't yet live in the FEMA trailer where their family opened their Christmas gifts. It doesn't have power.
Patten and Mahe haven't decided if they will rebuild, but if they do, they will raise their home on pylons, said Patten. The soil in the orange grove must be tested. After sitting underwater for more than six weeks, it could contain dangerous levels of arsenic and petroleum.
Even if the soil can be cultivated, it will take five years to get the orange grove back in production. Still, for Patten, Christmas wasn't a day to dwell on negatives.
"Thank y'all for coming down here," she called to the Red Cross volunteers, as the crew climbed back into their vehicle to continue their Christmas Day run. 12-29-05
Janet Rae Brooks is an American Red Cross writer deployed to Louisiana who spent her holiday with a Red Cross emergency response vehicle crew as they made their appointed rounds on Dec. 25, 2005.
© 2005 North
Country Gazette
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