Five years after Katrina, Spike Lee returned to New Orleans to film If God Is Willing, and Da Creek Don’t Rise. This is being shown in two parts, with several showings this week (August 22d - 28th, 2010) and through about September 14th. The preview is here: the documentary includes the BP oil spill.

I know of two organizations that have been on the ground in Haiti. They are

The William Clinton Foundation, which has a donation page that provides direct links so that you can donate to them, AND (or) also donate to other organizations. This is the link:

http://www.clintonfoundation.org/haitiearthquake/

One of the organizations on that page deserves special mention.

UNICEF has been on the ground in Haiti for many years. It has already begun attempts to recover prepositioned supplies and is receiving flights carrying emergency supplies. You can follow their day-to-day efforts on their blog at

http://fieldnotes.unicefusa.org/2010/01/unicef_speeds_relief_to_haiti.html

The impressive thing about UNICEF is that 100% of your donation goes directly to relief efforts. They are absorbing the administrative costs so that everything donated goes to Haiti and the Haitians. This is phenomenal. We know that the American Red Cross counts on disaster appeals to fund the administration of their organization as well as particular and future disaster relief. Nor did they acquit themselves particularly well during Katrina. Still, they also have people on the ground.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Organizations has been active in maintaining a locator system, for people separated by the loss of their homes, varied relief efforts, traveling for help, disorientation, and many other reasons. More on this later.

There were not too many responses; I added my voice, and wrote the following:

December 05, 2008 11:21 am

Thank you for this article. It breaks my heart all over again. I started personlinks.org as a voluntary effort to (re)link families that had been blown apart by Katrina. Fortunately there were many web sites doing that work; unfortunately, could the most affected families gain access to computers and use them? Perhaps not.

Solutions to an individual’s problems don’t lie entirely with the government, or the school system, or the parents. At some point something has to be available that remedies a lack, that a child or teen or adult can grab onto and take hold of, and make her or his own.

Can we build intelligent programs that do just that, in New Orleans with its particular mix of problems, or on the Gulf Coast? Can we build prevention programs that move into disaster areas and prevent the worst aftermath of a disaster? The mantra is “Yes, we can.”

If, nationally, we are in our own massive recovery effort, how do we help that part of ourselves as a nation that are most disabled, by disaster, poverty, ignorance and illiteracy, and physical and emotional disability? We have done so before, in the midst of war, when we launched the War on Poverty. The community action centers established in that legislation provided NOT church people to go out and sell religion, NOT added school services, NOT added government welfare services. Instead, people who lived in the communities affected, and knew them well, and were themselves affected by the same forces — and who had, or could be trained in, leadership skills — took a major role in identifying community problems, assisting individuals to take advantage of programs, transporting people who had no cars, arranging for local distribution of government surplus food, translating a guide to available services into Spanish, and more yet that could be described or imagined. What this did, and I’ve seen it, was to enable those intelligent choices that are so lamented. What this did was to enable pride, when a community could march for and obtain the first township level open-housing ordinance.

Oh, yes, and there was Head Start. Because of Head Start, children who were showing signs of kwashiorkor could get proper nutrition — we do still have the federal WIC - Women and Infant Children Program that provides for essential nutrition for pregnant women and their children.

I now live between the memory of that world, where the United States ended many discriminatory practices in the law books, launched the War on Poverty, and put a man on the moon — while drafting young men to fight in Viet Nam.

New Orleans is a symbol for what we cannot do. It is not enough to point a finger at President Bush and his poor choices. Where were we, when we knew better? Where were we, when idealistic young people had practical-minded parents who wanted them to major in economics and business subjects, and graduate to a Wall Street Job?

I want to close with sloganeering, because these slogans are meaningful to my theme, and because they stay in the mind, and may help to keep aspects of the problem front and center:

1) Walt Kelly put in the mouth of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

2) “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.”

They date me, and also indicate, without explaining, why I am not now on the frontlines in New Orleans or the Gulf.

— Compassion101, Philadelphia

Now, the resources for locating one another after an evacuation are in place.

The news about Hurricane Ike has been full of the devastation to Galveston and the Bolivar Peninusula. Wherever people evacuated, the concern seems to have been finding how much they have lost, rather than reuniting with loved ones. If evacuees from Gustav and Ike have been “blown apart,” I am not getting the news about the needs and resources.

Personlinks is therefore suspending operations. This once useful volunteer effort seems no longer necessary. Thanks for your support in the past.

A note: for the devastation to homes on the Gulf Coast:

This short description is a wrenching essay on losing everything, losing a whole community of year-round residents on the Bolivar Peninsula, in East Texas.

http://www.lapatienttrack.com/

If the web site is slow or links are not working, there are two solutions: one is to stay with this page — Personlinks.org — locate the link you want, and keep trying only that link. That way, the load on the government computers is less, for one thing. For another thing, you are not frustrated by trying the sequence of links on the FEMA site, having to wait for one, and then the next, and then the next.

The other option is to call the “bottom line” — at the bottom of the FEMA page of links is a small contrast color block that says “If you prefer, you may use the telephone:

I prefer the telephone: 1-800-588-9822
Report/Search for a Missing Child: 1-866-908-9570

The links begin with a general “Hurricanes” page.

Then, clicking on “find family” takes you to this page, the FEMA National Emergency Family Registry and Locator System.

Then, at the FEMA National Emergency Family Registry and Locator System page, you will see four blocks that represent links to specific services.

Big links for people registering, or displaced, or searching:

I am Displaced
Update My Registration
Search for a Displaced Person
Report/Search for a Missing Child

There is a problem here. The first block (a) takes you to an overview of the system, but doesn’t tell you what to do. If you go down the page, there is an easily missed link with the single word “next” that takes you, not to a registration page, but to a legal disclaimer about using the site — a NEFRLS Privacy Act Statement with two check boxes. *Then* you get to the Registration page, that says “Begin by answering the questions on the screen” - except there are no questions on the screen — there are three tabs - Back, Delete this Registration, and Next. Obviously, if you want to register, you click Next. NOW, three pages later, you get to register.

The second and third blocks (b) and (c) assume that you have registered by the obscure process detailed above, and have provided a password, that you remember. The fourth block takes you out of the FEMA site to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - where having a picture of the child is extremely helpful.

Big links for people registering, or displaced, or searching:

a) I Am Displaced
b) Update My Registration
c) Search for a Displaced Person

d) Report/Search for a Missing Child - Two links: The FEMA page, and The National Register for Missing and Exploited Children.

Then there is the nice, sensible, bypass mentioned at the beginning of this post:

I prefer the telephone: 1-800-588-9822
Report/Search for a Missing Child: 1-866-908-9570

Never give up — keep trying.

Person Links — Locating the Missing and Separated

Lists set up to bring together those blown apart by Katrina - update in progress for Gustav

A summary of the links, searches and other resources that were once established to bring together people who were blown apart by Katrina and her aftermath.

These are now being updated, three years later, for Hurricane Gustav. Right now, the place to start is with the revised main page from the original Personlinks site. The links and phone numbers that did not operate, or were out of date, on August 31st have a line through them.

Basically the only working link for locating missing and/or separated family members is the excellent software database set up by www.familymembers.org. Unfortunately, although the site was up and running and updated for Gustav last Sunday, it has been swamped ever since.