A Poignant Story From Katrina
I stumbled upon this poignant story from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in our local paper, the Paradise Post, during the Katrina catastrophe. It was originally published in the L. A. Times/Washington Post by journalist Ellen Barry. It’s entitled:
A Boy Named Love
In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a six year old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.
They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3 year-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The six year old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.
Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.
Transporting the children alone was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, knowing their parents are either dead or that they had been abandoned,” said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans.
“It goes back to the same thing,” he said. “How did a six-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?”
“So far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children missing, but that number is expected to rise,” said Mike Kenner, of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which help reunite families. With crowds churning at evacuation points, many children were parted from their parents accidentally. One woman handed her baby up onto a bus, turned around to pick up her suitcase, and turned back to find that the bus had left!
At the rescue headquarters, a cool, tile-floored building, swarming with firefighters and paramedics, the children ate cafeteria food and fell into a deep sleep. Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. His father was tall, and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number, and the name of his elementary school.
He said the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that the two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building.
The children were clean and healthy. It was clear that time had been taken with them. The baby was fat and happy. All evening Thursday, as strike teams came and went to the flooded city, volunteer Ron Haynes, carried one of the two year old girls back and forth, playing with her until she was calm enough to eat dinner. “This baby child was terrified,” he said.
As grim dispatches came in from the field, one woman in the office burst into tears at the thought that the children had been abandoned in New Orleans. Late the same night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a shelter in Thibodeaux was searching for seven children. People in the building started clapping at the news, but when they got the mother on the phone, it became clear that she was looking for a different group of seven children.
The children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department of Social Services, with rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors from the Big Buddy Program were on hand day and night.
posted by Judy @ 1:40 AM
