Last night a group from our parish met at the George R. Brown Convention Center here in Houston. That’s where a lot of Katrina evacuees are being temporarily housed. We were very much an ad-hoc group, assembled by email by one of our priests on about 24 hours notice.
We were there for an organizational meeting of Neighbors2Neighbors. This is a new interfaith grass-roots effort, reportedly instigated by Houston mayor Bill White, to help get Katrina evacuees get themselves settled in “real” housing. If you’re a Houstonian, go to the group’s home page to sign up as a volunteer neighbor.
The home page, apparently thrown up hastily at an e-commerce site, describes its mission thusly (extra paragraphing is mine):
Neighbors2Neighbors.org is a program commissioned by The City of Houston that mobilizes local volunteers to provide a personal touch of Houston hospitality to new neighbors who have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
The mission we have been tasked with is to match 20,000 volunteers with 20,000 individual new neighbor families to help them settle into life in our local communities for as long as they wish to stay.
We work with and through the Nieghbors2Neighbors.org Consortium, a group of faith-based leaders from diverse regligious [sic], ethnic, and cultural communities across the Greater Houston Area.
The organizers stressed that volunteers are not expected to make financial contributions to our “new neighbors” (what a great term), but simply to help them get settled in Houston, temporarily or permanently — to help them deal with getting their utilities turned on, putting their kids in school, and all the other chores that go along with relocating, and to meet them periodically to check on how they’re doing.
Our meeting was a train-the-trainer session. Attenders are expected to go back to their faith communities to train others to be volunteer neighbors — and, I surmise, to recruit them; that’s a clever way to sign people up as recruiters, by telling them they’re going to be trainers.
Some observations:
• Friendly volunteers in yellow– or red T-shirts were everywhere, hauling supplies, cleaning the kitchen, helping newcomers find things.
• We saw a very orderly chow line as we wandered the (enormous) building looking for the meeting.
• It was nice to be at a public meeting where the speakers weren’t afraid to talk about God. One speaker, a worker from a relief agency, said, “if you ever start to feel that you’re being the hero, rescuing these poor folks from their misery, you have to remember that it’s not about you, it’s about them. Be spiritually ready, and always put God at the center of your efforts.”
• As we were leaving, my wife and I peeked into the main hall of the George R. Brown. That’s where all the cots are set up. From the door, it looked very squared-away.
• Outside, a large crowd of evacuees was quietly hanging out on the street by the convention center. A few young kids were running around laughing, with their parents looking on.
• Where would we have been without the Internet to help with all the myriad organizational chores?
• Mayor Bill White has been doing a truly impressive job. By all reports, he’s one hell of an executive. He has ordered that previously-scheduled events scheduled for the Astrodome the George R. Brown be canceled so that evacuees can stay there, and has commandeered vacant buildings for relief work. He says that if people want to sue over that, that’s OK. (In that regard, it undoubtedly helps that in a former life he was a business litigator, a partner at one of the city’s premier law firms.) He and his family attend a Methodist church a couple of blocks from our parish. One of his many smart moves was to recruit the local faith community to provide volunteer leadership early on.
• I’ve been hearing and reading reports that evacuees in Houston are being resettled into regular housing pretty quickly. The Astrodome is expected to be empty sometime in the next week or so. It astounds me that our city can absorb so many people so quickly. I’ve never been more proud to be a Houstonian.
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