A long way from home

The peculiar aspect of Advent is waiting. But at least in Advent, we know the fulfillment of our waiting is coming.

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 2 - They are the faces and voices of a city's desperation. Stepping wearily up to a Federal Emergency Management Agency help center here, all have a similar story of ruin in the past, anxiety over the future and frustration in the present, suffered differently each time.

Young, middle-aged and old, these citizens of New Orleans, wiped out by Hurricane Katrina and now urgently seeking government assistance, spoke Friday of sleeping in a truck and on a floor, living out of a car and waiting for the help that never seems to come. Trickling into the crowded center in the Uptown neighborhood here - hoping for a trailer, a loan, cash, anything - they were grimly resigned to waiting, and waiting some more.

"You come to these FEMA centers, you sit all day," said Myrna Guity, 43, whose import business was wiped out by the storm, along with her home in New Orleans East. "You get no answers to your questions. They're evasive. You're constantly 'pending.' What are you going to be doing, 'pending' for the rest of your life? I've lost everything."

Others wondered fearfully what was on the other side of their current privation. "We're almost begging them, 'Please, bring this trailer before Christmas,' " said DeLois Kramer, 43, who said she is "sort of living out of the car" with her 7-year-old daughter, Katlyn.

Three months after the storm, political figures here talk often of the progress that has been made - trash cleared, homes lighted, money spent. Louisiana, they say, is proving its self-reliance. But hidden behind these sometimes rosy declarations are tens of thousands of their constituents, living at the edge of their dwindling resources.

Adding to their anxiety is what these citizens describe as a frustrating paper chase through the bureaucracy of FEMA: repeat visits for help that always seems to be just one or two documents away, but the documents FEMA demands are often ruined, stored in flooded houses.

The real waiting is much, much harder. And even though it is not conducted under the glare of TV lights and during 24/7 cable news coverage, it is being conducted, nonetheless.

The homeless from Katrina deserve faces; and names.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long way from home, a long way from home.