Storm Survivors Long For the Normal Hassles Of a Day on the Job
14 September 2005The Wall Street Journal
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TONY DICARLO was having a good year. He got married, a license to practice law and a job at a firm in his old neighborhood of St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans. Then Hurricane Katrina mowed through the Gulf Coast -- and through his best laid plans.
He fled the storm to Little Rock, Ark., and the first thing he did was look for work. "I got here at two o'clock on Wednesday and by three o'clock I was looking for a job."
Rather than just a salary, he was searching for a sense of purpose. After borrowing clothes, Mr. DiCarlo began work this past Monday, albeit as a law clerk. "It's just nice to be in an environment where I can be productive and not just sitting at home," he said after his first day.
The will to work is one of the few things Katrina didn't destroy. It's one of the things the survivors are trying to do to reclaim some semblance of normality. But it won't be easy for many. Economists estimate that as many as one million people are out of jobs in the affected areas. Some companies still can't find their employees, and their employees still don't know whether there is a job to go back to.
Nancy Martinsen, executive director of the Staffing Association of Arkansas and one of the countless good souls trying to help Katrina's victims find work, says work may be the only source of stability and identity for them. "A lot of who they are is in the swamp water in New Orleans and the Gulf," she says.
SUSAN JOHNSON, a legal administrator who fled New Orleans with 10 members of her extended family, has been trying to get her kids in school without documentation and take care of her invalid mother while worrying about her nephew, a New Orleans policeman, and about medical insurance, because her husband was told by his company his insurance would run out.
She would give just about anything to have to deal with the little hassles of her job, like having to redo old documents that grew stale. "Right now I'd love to be able to reprint those jobs again," she says of her bosses' work. "I worked for lovely people."
Brandy Wilkinson, a high-school physics teacher from Metairie, La., crammed into her friend's apartment -- along with six other people -- in Tupelo, Miss. She's talking to local schools. "I really hate grading papers and I hate grading homework," she says. "But I'd grade every paper in the world just to be back there."
Work also seems to ease a sense of indebtedness that thousands of people feel as perfect strangers in newly adopted towns across the country have given aid. The outpouring of help breaks up Troy Fink who evacuated his family from their Chalmette, La., home on Aug. 28 and headed north, landing in a hotel in Tupelo, Miss. The plumber rented a modest home for his family and suddenly the man from the bank he visited brought some furniture. When he visited the staffing firm Manpower, a woman there pulled a television and microwave out of the offices and gave it to him. "She said, `If you don't bring it back, that's fine,' " he recalls.
He already has had a job interview. "If we get back into a daily cycle of me going to work and my girl in school, it'll be kind of like it was back home," he says.
Whereas home often provides a refuge from work, Katrina's destruction has turned work into a refuge from homelessness. "To focus in on work and relationships we have at work has been the best catharsis I can think of," says Robbie Vitrano, founding partner of the New Orleans advertising firm Trumpet.
WITH HIS PARENTS, two kids, his wife, and a cat and dog, Mr. Vitrano evacuated before Katrina slammed the city, staying with friends in the wooded area of Covington, La. After the storm hit there, he spent two days chainsawing his way out and ended up in Atlanta, where an affiliate firm offered his company office space. They just opened the office on Sept. 1. "The ability to be useful again and be in a functional mode was something we were all drawn to," he says.
For most, a job would be a distraction from the destruction. Zon Palmer, a 38-year-old preschool teacher from Mandeville, La., who ended up in Little Rock, has found a job waiting tables. "The more I slow down and stop," she says, "the more I focus on it and depression sets in."
Work is the easiest way to not deal with the horror, adds Beth James who is trying to figure out if she can reclaim the soap-making equipment she used to employ single mothers, now scattered throughout the South, to produce Queen B soap. "You feel like you're moving forward," she says.
Ms. James herself missed the storm because she was home nearby in Opelousas, attending to affairs after her father died three weeks ago. She called her husband, a musician, and told him to pack as if he'd never return. "So, I have about 20 guitars and nothing else," she says.
Brenda Dugas, a data-entry clerk, lost her home in New Orleans East and is now living in a Red Roof Inn in Arkansas. "It's kind of lonely being here by myself," she says. She misses her brothers and her aunts. "I miss everybody," she says, adding, "all the people I work with."
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