A Personal Hero

My friend, Cynthia, is a good woman who has never taken life’s gifts for granted.

A solid business investment 11 years ago in Georgia left her with enough free time to invest in handling her own home improvements. She has torn out carpeting, installed tile flooring, replumbed her bathroom (and mine), rewired parts of my house and painted every surface in all of her homes (and in some of mine).

She’s a can-do lady.

But on Aug. 30, 2005, one day after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Cynthia’s priorities changed. Cynthia, 52, had often worked as a volunteer, spending time at an Atlanta children’s hospital with youngsters dying from cystic fibrosis and using her career as a makeup artist to teach people with disfiguring diseases how to apply corrective makeup.

So Cynthia called the Red Cross center in Louisville, where she now lives, and asked to be sent somewhere in the hurricane-stricken South, anywhere where she knew she could help.

But the Red Cross staffers, overwhelmed with the task at hand, said they’d have to get back to her. As she awaited deployment, Cynthia fielded phone calls at the Red Cross call center on E. Chestnut Street, helping frantic family members locate loved ones via a computer database. She usually worked the overnight shift.

The stories she heard were heartbreaking.

“One woman was getting released from a (Gulf Port area) hospital the next morning. She had lost her home,” Cynthia recently recalled. “She was looking for a place to stay. She had nothing, and she didn’t want to be on the street. All I could do was give her the phone number for the local Red Cross chapter. They could guide her to a shelter.”

Another call came from a woman from outside the hurricane area who was trying to help an ill family member, a survivor of the storm. Her relative had numerous health problems, and she was out of insulin and other medications. She had no water, no electricity and no way of getting out. Both women were panicked.

“This woman’s body was shutting down,” Cynthia explained. “I notified the Coast Guard to come in and do a rescue. It was such a desperate situation.”

After a few days of gut-wrenching phone work, Cynthia had to do more. “I knew I had to be there, even for just a day or two. I had to do something more to help somebody, ” she later told me.

She asked Red Cross officials again to send her south. Same reply, same overworked staff. Finally, Cynthia decided to go on her own. She chose Biloxi.

She then sent an e-mail to a handful of her closest friends, asking them to sponsor her trip so that she wouldn’t be a burden on an already overburdened disaster relief system. In the e-mail, she promised them, “The monies I receive will be used for my bare necessities only. Any monies I have left over will be put into the hands of the victims. I will not give it to the agencies, but to the people I meet while working in Biloxi.” The response was immediate. Friends’ donations totaled more than $1,500.

On Friday, Sept. 30, she packed her old Volvo with water, food, cleaning supplies, tools and camping gear and pointed her wheels toward Mississippi. She knew someone who knew someone there who had agreed to put her up ... maybe.

Her arrival, unannounced, at the Biloxi Red Cross headquarters, located in a Navy Seabee’s base, shocked local officials who told Cynthia that she was the first person from out of state to simply follow her heart and head to where she was needed.

During the day, she helped orient newly arriving volunteers. At night, she toiled side by side with those workers, assisting them with the tough task of making the lives of the evacuees livable. Once again, she was hearing stories that tore at her heart. But this time, she was seeing firsthand what total, life-changing devastation had been wrought by Katrina.

After six days, Cynthia had to leave Biloxi. But before she left, she gave away all of her donors’ money, and she took pictures. Lots of pictures of what she had been living with for the last 144 life-altering hours.

What can’t be photographed or even described sufficiently, she said, was the smell. The awful stench. “Every time you go outside or open the car window, you smell it. It reeks. It’s everywhere, inescapable,” she said.

Inescapable, like the memories of the families and volunteers with whom she toiled, unavoidable and tragic reminders of the months and years it will take to recover and rebuild and heal from the nation’s largest natural disaster.

But Cynthia’s role isn’t over. This tireless Southern woman will be going back.

“After what I’ve seen, I’ve made a decision,” said Cynthia from her cell phone as she drove out of Biloxi on Oct. 6. “I’m going to be doing a lot more disaster work. A lot more.”

You go, girl.