A blogger in Oklahoma posts her acount of delivering goods to an isolated FEMA facility for Hurricane Katrina survivors which feels to her more like a detainment camp than a shelter.
Two car loads of us headed over to Falls Creek, a youth camp for Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma that agreed to have its facilities used to house Louisiana refugees. I’m afraid the camp is not going to be used as the kind people of the churches who own the cabins believe it was going to be used.
Jesse Jackson was right when he said “refugees” was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It’s not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees.
(…)
We then started lugging in our food products. The foods I had purchased were mainly snacks, but my mother – God bless her soul – had gone all out with fresh vegetables, fruits, canned goods, breakfast cereals, rice, and pancake fixings. That’s when we got the next message: They will not be able to use the kitchen. Excuse me? I asked incredulously.FEMA will not allow any of the kitchen facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able to cook. In fact, the “host” goes on to explain, some churches had already enquired about whether they could come in on weekends and fix meals for the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won’t allow it because there could be a situation where one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs – and… it could cause a riot. It gets worse.
He then precedes to tell us that some churches had already enquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and “a sum of money” and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.
My son looks at me and mumbles “Welcome to Krakow.”
Link.
“Reminds me of that horror story related to FEMA called Rex-84,” says one Boing Boing reader who asks to remain anonymous.
Reader comment: Katherine Brownlowe says,
I am a psychiatry resident at Maine Medical Center and have been following all of this with horror.
One of our ER nurses is down there and after running a MASH-style hospital for a few days, he is now sitting on his hands, not doing much of anything. The Maine Emergency Management Agency is requesting health care volunteers, but interstingly they don’t ask for psychiatrists or psych nurses. Can you imagine the numbers of chronically mentally ill, as well as all the new horrors being heaped upone everyone down there–and they aren’t asking us to help?
One of the things that we know about trauma and the development of [post-traumatic stress disorder, or] PTSD is that people who have nothing to do will be affected much worse…so basically, we are ensuring that all the refugees are going to have horrific PTSD by not allowing them to get out and start picking up the pieces of their lives…even getting the refugees themselves to have some kind of project–like distributing food or clothing to each other–will help give people a sense of purpose, decrease the trauma risk, and also decrease unrest and irritability among the “detainees.” Instead our government is keeping people penned up like animals.
Guess they’ll need the psychiatrists for a while….and for a long while.
Reader comment: Nan Thrax says,
What everyone fails to understand about the Bush Administration response to Katrina is the underlying reasoning. My wife (who is an Evangelical Christian) explained to me that this is the beginning of the ‘End Times’. Katrina is just one of the portents. Bush et al are just marking time until Rapture. God smote the modern Sodom as a sign of his might (on this Dr. Dobson and Bin Laden agree). This event in just another sign of the Second Coming. By controlling the press, freedom of movement, etc. Bush is help people to get ready for the Rapture. None of the problems are the fault of Bush, they are controlled by God. So do not blame Bush, it is not his fault, God made him do it.
Update: President Bush has just declared a national day of “Katrina Prayer”. I will be praying on that day, too — for a government that does a better job of caring for its citizens.
Update 2: The FEMA facility in question has been “put on standby. Link (Thanks, Jake Appelbaum)