I have always felt a strong bond to my family, but I can wholeheartedly tell you now, never, ever let petty quarrels get in the way of loving them. I will never forget that now that I have seen literally thousands of people separated from their loved ones, some of whom they will never see again. One cannot experience the utter desperation of those who have lost family members, neighbors, and best friends through television newscasts. But let me tell you, you sure experience it when hundreds of people come to you begging for help to find them.

Over the course of my trip, I helped approximately 50 people reunite with their families. But despite all of my efforts, I was not able to help hundreds of others. Some of them will have found family members by now, but many others remain seperated from al they knew and loved, some by death and some by such an unconscionable lack of coordination at the relief level that it boggles my mind.

So let's talk about loss. How would you respond if a strange woman came up to you in a shelter in Covington, Louisiana a few hours after you had left desolate New Orleans and told you that she had lost her house and her three cats in Chalmette, and that she may have been abandoned by her sister, with whom she had been staying. What would you do if she sobbed and screamed, "I am lost. It's all gone. I don't know what to do. Please help me." The volunteers in the William Pitcher Junior High School shelter in Covington were some of the most dedicated people I met in Louisiana. Some were from the area, others were from as far away as Pennsylvania and Oregon. All of them slept in the shelter with 100 evacuees, mostly families with children. They did their best in every way, despite limited supplies and even less training. Thankfully, the shelter was one of the limited number of small red cross facilities that had a nurse on duty to help the sick, of which their were many. Colds, flu, and other illnesses were rampant. But they were at a loss to help Baryl.

So what did I do? Well, when I arrived in the shelter, I was the only one with a working cell phone. Now you have to realize that many evacuees were still in shock from their ordeal, even seven days after the flood. One impact of shock is that it affects a person's ability to use even simple reasoning. Basically, a person in shock cannot tghink straight. The trauma and deprivation is just too great. So even my suggestion to Baryl, the woman who had lost her home, her cats, and her sister, that she contact other out-of-area relatives to see if her sister had called looking for her and that she use my phone to do it, it took some time for her to react. When she did respond, it was with sobbing and a fear that she would not be able to reach them.

For ten minutes I held her closely to calm her down. When her sobbing finally broke, she remembered that she had a brother in North Carolina and I handed her the phone. Her sister-in-law and answered and Baryl explained her situation between sobs. I held her hand and helped her find the words to relate her story. At the end of the conversation, her sister-in-law said, "of course we will come get you and you can stay with us."

When Baryl hung up the phone, she collapsed in a seat, exhausted to the point of catatonia. Baryl's family had offered to come get her, but it would be at least 24 hours before they could get on the road. Thankfully, an hour later her sister and brother-in-law from Covington showed up at the shelter. With tears in his eyes, Baryl's brother-in-law told us that he had lost Baryl when he and his wife had gone to find a place to do laundry while Baryl waited on an interminable line for relief assistance at an SSI office. Baryl had gotten frustrated and left to fnd them, but to no avail. When they returned to get her, they found she was gone and they had no idea where.

They had spent hours to tracking her down because most people were so focused on their own losses, the town had been hit hard by Katrina, that they had not taken the time to learn where the local shelters had been set up. The very small police force had been assigned to protect shelters and were unavailable to provide information. Later that evening Baryl went to her sister's home, safe in the warm embrace of her family, while the rest of the evacuees remained in the shelter remained, with no place to go and no life to look forward to.

For me, Monday ended in my sleeping bag on the floor of that shelter in Covington. I stayed up past midnight trying to bring a little cheer to exhausted evacuees and volunteers who had been working several days of 12-16 hour shifts. To help, I offered to help pepare and serve the next morning's breakfast for all 100 residents and 15 volunteers. As sleep came, so did visions of canned fruit and breakfast sausage.

I am writing this five days in, so things are starting to get jumbled. I thought that I would be able to write an update every day, but it has been pretty hectic here, so I apologize for not writing more earlier.

I am now sitting in the Hampton Inn in Gulfport, Mississippi, which just had power and water restored after over a week. I'm not staying here. I got five hours of sleep in my car in the parking lot of the empty Wendy's next door and came over here to use the bathroom.

I arrived in Gulfport last night around 10:30pm. Although some electricity has been restored, most of the city is still dark and all traffic signals are out, so drivers have to be very careful crossing intersections. There are military Humvees patrolling the streets. Derrick Bush, the very generous night manager here, told me that his apartment complex had not received much damage, even though other properties next door were reduced to kindling. He rode out the twelve hours of the storm in the hotel. When he got to his home, he found it had been looted. They stole his 40" TV and all of his other electronic equipment. In spite of that, he has been a bundle of good cheer. Some of you may have read that Gulfport took the worst storm damage of any city. It was too dark to see clearly last night, but if the trailer park I saw when I tried to get to the military guarded central shelter here is any example, this is a city in ruins. At least half of the trailers were torn apart, with some of them thrown across a 100 foot wide highway. Winds here hit over 200 miles an hour. The storm surge reached 40 feet and inundated areas up to six miles inland across Mississippi.

Yesterday, the Yucaipa Democratic club made a very generous donation of nearly $1000. Because of that, I was able to buy a new stock of supplies. I delivered some food to one shelter here late last night. It was the seventh shelter I have visited since arriving in Dallas. Like many of the shelters throughout the region, it was in a school. 160 people are housed there in squalor that makes it feel like a Caribbean shantytown. The shelter still has no electricity or gas. The volunteers, who have come from across the country, provide light with flashlights alone. So it is pretty dangerous.

I have enough supplies left to donate to three or four more before I leave on Saturday. By the way, American Airlines has been great. They let me switch my flight to a later date at no charge whatsoever.

So let's jump back a few days. My last journal ended with me still in North Louisiana. On Sunday, I was able to make my way down to Baton Rouge, stopping at two more church shelters along the way. In Baton Rouge, the main shelter is in the convention center/arena, which is called the River Center. When I first arrived there, it housed 6,000 people. There are hundreds of volunteers working there. I met a few people from LA County, but most are from the eastern part of the country.

For several days, I used the River Center as a base of operations, giving Blow Pops to hundreds children, helping register new arrivals, and assisting at the information and missing persons desk. I served as a runner at the Registration desk. When people sign in to the shelter, I was responsible for getting them blankets, cots, food, and for finding them space in either the convention center hall or arena. Both of them are lit by horrible fluorescent lighting. They have concrete floors. Being there really gave me a sense why so many homeless people do not like staying in shelters. The big shelters are very cold and impersonal. Smaller ones have much more of a sense of community about them.

Not surprisingly, due to it's size, the River Center shelter has some organizational problems. As of Sunday, they did not have a room set up to accommodate the sleeping needs of volunteers. There is no one running the entire operation, just leaders of various elements. Therefore, we all just do whatever we can to help, with some natural leaders stepping up to coordinate. One of my contributions was to convince the Red Cross to set aside a sleeping room for volunteers. I slept in my sleeping bag on the floor there Sunday night.

On Monday, the President of Jefferson Parish decided to allow people back in for a few hours to assess the damage to their homes and get personal items. Jefferson Parish is just outside New Orleans by the airport. While I was working at the registration desk, a wan and exhausted looking David Gallagher came to the table looking for a ride to his home in Jefferson parish. I offered a ride and we drove towards New Orleans, first on the 10 and then, as we got close, on the Airline Highway. It turned that David had been traveling for three days. He had dropped his wife in South Korea for a new job and had returned to Houston, where he told me that tensions were high. According to David, people at the Astrodome were fighting with each other over the smallest perceived slights. He was thrilled to be out of there.

Amazingly, the traffic heading towards Jefferson parish was not too bad. We made the 60 mile trip in two hours, arriving at about 1PM. David lifts just outside the outskirts of New Orleans proper, by the River Road. Thankfully, the damage in his section of Jefferson was not too bad. David's house sustained almost no damage, just a few small trees in the backyard uprooted. We had to jimmy the lock on his back door to get in because his children, who had been staying at the house, forgot to leave keys when they fled before the storm. David lives right next to a hospital, so his street was one of the few in the New Orleans area that had electricity, phone service and running water. All of the other streets in the area had no services.

While David called family members and inspected his house, I stood out in the street greeting the few people who had stayed through the storm. I met Papa Joe, a tattoo artist from California who had moved to New Orleans two years ago. Tattooed all over and tough looking, I didn't know exactly what to expect when he greeted me. He walked over, introduced himself, and then broke down crying. He told me that he had cowered alone in the small guest house he lived in down the street for the entirety of Katrina, terrified that he would be killed at any moment. To top it off, he and his girlfriend had had a fight about leaving before the storm hit and she had gone without him. Joe was so distraught all I could do was hug him for ten minutes straight with tears in my eyes. Thankfully, his girlfriend had called him from California and vowed to return to pick him up within the week.

Now let me tell you about David's bravery. David is a middle-aged man with three children, one of whom was still in college at Tulane. He is a civilian working for the division of the U.S. Navy that repairs damaged naval facilities. I told David that despite the fact that New Orleans was closed and under martial law, I wanted to see if we could get in to provide some food to any residents we could find. He agreed immediately.

At my suggestion, we drove down the River Road, passing other people returning to their Jefferson homes. The closer we got to the city of New Orleans, the less people we saw. After about ten minutes, we reached St. Charles, which is the main street in the Garden District that runs into the heart of New Orleans. We turned onto it and headed towards downtown and the French Quarter. There were few civilians there, but police and army troops were arrayed along the street every few blocks. Surprisingly, they made no effort to stop us. The Garden district is where Tulane and many of the most beautiful homes in New Orleans are located. We saw a lot of cosmetic damage, but, thankfully, little structural damage - only one church steeple collapsed.
As we got closer to the convention center and downtown, we found that we were the only civilians driving on the street. There were military and police convoys and repair teams scattered throughout the city. But for the most part, the city was empty. The convention center area was filled with empty shopping carts, thousands of chairs, signs and fences collapse in the street, and fetid, stinking garbage. Every few blocks, one of the old two story brick buildings built in the 19th century had collapsed. A few were on fire, and we could smell smoke from blocks away. Once again, however, most of the area seemed to have sustained very limited damage. We stopped to speak to an electrical grid repair crew. They said that the violence had been pretty bad and that snipers had taken shots at them at night. But they expected to have electricity restored to a few parts of the city shortly.

We left them and drove on to the French Quarter. Amazing, the Quarter appeared to have received almost no damage. It looked like there had been a particularly bad Mardi Gras evening - nothing more. So the heart of New Orleans is saved!!! I did see many broken windows where looters had broken in and stolen anything they could get there hands on. Seeing no damage and sensing that we were safe, we drove through the French Quarter to Faubourg Marigny, a poor neighborhood to the South and East of the Quarter. Here was the horror that Katrina had wrought.

Like many New Orleans boulevards, Decatur Street has a grassy median separating the four lanes. The storm and water had ripped huge oak trees from the ground, blocking half of the road and forcing us to drive on the wrong side for blocks at a time. Roofs had been torn from the houses they covered. The road had clearly been covered with water and as we drove further in, we began to see cars in the middle of the road and on the sides sunk halfway in mud. There were few residents still there, but we did find an old man, with almost no teeth, whose face had the character of a denizen of 1930s WPA photographs. We offered him as much food as he could carry. When I asked if he wanted a toothbrush. He smile a big toothless grin and said, "Not sure what I'd do with that now."

We reached the water one mile in. To the right of us (south) and the straight ahead (east), the streets and the homes were deluged with water. We could see water rising all the way to the second floor of the homes. Above the water level, the tops of street signs and lights poked out like buoys. The stories are true, the poor sections of New Orleans are gone and I would guess they are gone forever.

One scene particularly affected me. We had seen hundreds of pets, cats and dogs, roaming the streets in their collars looking for their masters. In the middle of the road at the point when we could drive no further, independent but still wearing their harnesses stood five donkeys roaming free. They were the donkeys who pull the tourist carriages and trolleys of New Orleans. They still wore there harnesses. We watched, fascinated, as they ate grass on the median and on a small hillock to our left.

As we reached the waterbound area, so did two SUVs with five newspaper photographers. It was getting close to sundown, around 6 PM, and they told us to leave before the sun set to avoid being shot at. We took their warning seriously. On the way out, we drove to the convention center to see if any refugees remained so that we could give them some supplies, but they had all been evacuated.

The best way I can describe what New Orleans looked like is to compare it to the London portrayed in 28 Days later - a ghost town suffused with an incalculable loneliness. The wealthy, downtown, and tourist sections of New Orleans will return to life soon. Given what I saw, the people who live in the Garden District, near downtown, and in the French Quarter should be back leading a semblance of a normal life within a few months. If that doesn't happen, it will only be because of government incompetence. But isn't it a tragedy of life that the worst of these disasters always befall those least able to afford it. Most of the poor of New Orleans will have to start over wherever they can. So far the Red Cross, FEMA, and state agencies have been so disorganized that they have only just begun providing help for many of the survivors. Many may never recover. It is a terrible, terrible thing to behold.

It is 7:45 AM here in Gulfport. I need to brush my teeth in the motel bathroom and go volunteer at the main distribution point now. I will write again as soon as time permits.

Here I am sitting in a Starbucks not far from LSU ready to share with you the first extraordinary day of my mission to help some of the dislocated people of New Orleans. I wish I could tell you I was doing this from a shelter, but unfortunately Internet connectivity has not been a priority for the disaster relief groups - they're more focused on food, water, and beds. So please just grit your teeth as I write from this bastion of banality, iced chai latte in hand.

I flew from LAX to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, arriving at 1PM on Saturday, September 3rd with no contacts in Louisiana. All I knew was that I would get my rental car, buy as many food and non-food supplies as I could fit into the car, and head towards Baton Rouge, stopping at small shelters along the way to offer whatever I had. Of course, Dollar Rental Car managed to screw up my reservation, forcing me to scramble to find another car. Two hours later, after being told by just about every other car rental company at DFW that they were out of everything but SUVs, the lovely folks manning the National counter came through. Thank you National Rental Car.

From the airport, I drove five miles to the nearest big box store. I don't know if any of you have ever seen $1,500 worth of groceries and dry goods at one time (I certainly hadn't), but it's a heck of a lot. In fact, it took me almost another two hours and five huge shopping carts to collect everything.

Here is what $1,500 bought: Pens, Pads, Peroxide, 96 rolls of Toilet Paper, dozens of men's and women's underwear, t-shirts, and socks, 28 tubes of toothpaste, a gross of AA, AAA, and C batteries, 72 bars of soap, 400 plastic cups, 48 rolls of paper towels, 320 diapers, 5 huge boxes of dried milk, 528 Nutragrain bars, 144 granola bars, 248 fruit cups, 20 huge bags of raisins, 80 packs of gum (for adults who hadn't been able to brush their teeth for days), 288 juice packets, 40 lbs of apples, 120 bananas, 200 bottles of water, five huge containers of Ice Tea mix, and other sundry odds and ends. Phew.

At 5:30pm, I set off. Unfortunately, however, all of the Louisiana maps in Dallas were sold out. But I knew how to get to Shreveport, just over the border. From there I figured I'd just wing it, hoping that the events depicted in the movie "Deliverance" were truly fiction. My goal was to get rid of all of the supplies by the time I reached Baton Rouge, the staging area for most of the state's disaster relief efforts, where I would join up with one of the relief agencies.

That takes me to the name of this blog, "Coldwater Comments." It refers to two themes. First, and obviously, the storm and the flood spared no one in their path. But more importantly, it refers to the first shelter I visited, a place of love and assistance, with no expectations: The Coldwater Baptist Church in little Natchitoches (pronounced Nakadoshe), Louisiana.

I found Coldwater Baptist by asking a clerk at the BP station just off the highway if there were any shelters in town. To give you a sense of the scope of the refugee crisis, Natchitoches is nearly 200 miles from Baton Rouge and 270 from New Orleans, but still had at least three shelters operating. I explained that I wanted to help someplace that could really use the supplies I had bought, which meant to me a non-Red Cross shelter.

The clerk directed me to a church about three miles away, but while driving there, I came upon Coldwater and it's sign, "Evacuees Welcome." I had to jam on the brakes to make it into the parking lot, causing huge bags of paper towels to bounce off of my head and ricochet around the car. At first, the pastor, whose name turned out to be Jerry Ford, thought I was either nuts or an evacuee.

It took a few minutes for me to explain why I was there. Jerry told me that the church had just set the shelter up that day and that until a few hours before, it had been empty. Then all of a sudden, a bus carrying 29 people pulled up to their door. Now they were caring for almost 40, most of whom had no cars and had lost everything. Although they had help from their friends and congregation, they were very short on supplies. Now you have to realize that unlike Red Cross run shelters, these little church shelters get no help from outsiders. So it was a bit of a shock for them when they saw what I had in the car. Even though I am of Jewish heritage and not a religious man, I have to say that Pastor Jerry and his wife's blessings practically had me crying.

Helped by the Pastor, his wife, and his son Shayne and daughter-in-law Melannie, we brought about 25% of the supplies in my car into the church. It was enough to put a few days worth of food in the bellies of those for whom they were caring. Oh, I left one thing off of the list of supplies I had purchased -- Charms Blow Pops, 200 of them. Now I don't know much about relief work, having never participated in an evacuation before, but one thing I do know is that there are few things in this world that put a bigger smile on the face of a little child than a Blow Pop. There were about 20 children and teenagers in the shelter, and every one of them got their pick of cherry, strawberry, watermelon, or green apple. I have been taking photographs. When I get back to LA, I'll show you little KK, who has one of the greatest smiles of all time, and Karton and his Grandma Connie.

Once a little bit of joy had been spread with Blow Pops, which, by the way, most of the adults also took, I had the chance to sit down and talk with Pastor Jerry and his family. To them, it was only natural to take in anyone who needed help -- no questions asked. I asked Pastor Jerry how long he expected to keep the church open as a shelter. He said, "As long as it takes." I also spoke with several of the people staying in the shelter, most of whom had come from sections of New Orleans that had been completely inundated, including the Ninth ward, one of the city's poorest, and St. Bernard parish. A man from St. Bernard told me that he had been trapped in the city and only made his way out by wading through chest deep water to the levee, where he was able to get a boat. On the way, he had to push away floating bodies.

Pastor Jerry was so generous that he invited me to stay the night and share everything they had. But I did not feel it would be right for me to take a space that could be better occupied by someone from New Orleans. I decided to look for a motel room, which turned out not to be a very good move. I stopped in the local Hampton Inn. They had no rooms, but night manager Celina Torres, just back from a stint at a hotel in Disney world, treated me to free Internet access and hot chocolate. There I also met Robert Mullen Jr and his son Roderick, who had played on both of the Green Bay Packers 1990s Superbowl teams. He insisted I try on his ring and that we take a photograph. You'll see that one too. Robert had come from Baton Rouge and Rod had come from Dallas to provide for family members from New Orleans. After they finished, they figured they might as well have some fun and stayed in town to enjoy a restaurant by the riverfront. By the way, Robert says that Baby Back Ribs are for sissies and can be made in a microwave. He also says that LSU would have kicked USC's butt two years ago. But Rod says his dad is just a bandwagon jumper. On the plus side, he is a Yankees fan.

In the end, after unsurprisingly finding out that every motel room from Shreveport to Baton Rouge was sold out, I pulled back behind the BP station and fell asleep . . . for 45 minutes, before the area's obnoxious flood lights drove me back onto the highway for another 50 miles. Just before Alexandria, I pulled off the road again and found a dark spot behind another service station. It seemed as good a place as any for a few hours sleep, which is what I got.

Tomorrow - Day 2
Towards Baton Rouge.