Hurricane Katrina Experiences by a Care-giver and Social Worker - losing loved ones, helping others "return home" to New Orleans, find peace, reaching out to God and others.

Hurricane Katrina Reflection: A Call to a New Vocation - Reaching out to Evacuees in Need

"If you give me one more phone number, I think I'm going to kill myself!" Those haunting words still echo through my mind and heart as I ponder the upcoming 4th Anniversary of Katrina. I actually heard that told by a client to one of the Case Managers I was monitoring at a Call Center where I was working a few years ago. We were helping displaced folks from New Orleans who were trying to get back to New Orleans from all around the country. Everyone's story was and is significant and needs to be told and heard.

After many years of working professionally in health care and dealing with all sorts of crisis firsthand, nothing had prepared me fully for that call. Sure, I knew the protocols for crisis counseling and certainly intervened in that situation to help that out of town caller directly to get in touch with the needed emergency interventions.

We had gone through extensive training prior to beginning the program to receive calls from evacuees who were: 1) trying to get connected to assistance where they were displaced to, 2) finding out what services were available where they had lived in the New Orleans area, 3) seeking the status of other family members displaced, 4) coping with multiple layers of bureaucracy per FEMA and other agencies set up to assist them and mostly, 5) wanting to be able to just talk with someone (for more than 1/2 minute) about what they were dealing with and not get an answering machine or constantly being referred to dead end numbers.

We provided a "Telephonic Case Management" service per the Call Center, so we would not only give out multiple referrals to callers about those concerns listed above, but we would develop a Care Plan for those individuals whom we thought could reasonably achieve a successful return to the New Orleans area. Through an assessment process, we would actually determine whether it was practical for the person to attempt a return - and actually, we would discourage someone when it was contraindicated to do that as a plan of action. Some folks actually lost important benefits or coverage when they had to relocate again from New Orleans back to Houston, Memphis, Atlanta or wherever.

As I would later share with colleagues whom I had worked with clinically in the hospital and other settings, I found that I actually spent more time with callers even if we never met them face to face, since we had no real time limits for these encounters. In my former professional settings, I would be lucky to be able to spend more than 10 minutes with clients or patients, since we always had such a heavy caseload and usually had to be geared mainly to "discharge planning" efforts.

On the lighter side, it was neat that our Program Leader understood the many types of call situations one could encounter, since he'd had many years of experience in that field. He noted once in training about when one of his other staff had gotten some "crank calls," and Caller IDs had just begun coming out. Well, after one of his staff received one of these types of calls from an obviously young teenager, the Leader was able to call back and informed the Mother of the caller what had happened, at which he heard the phone drop and he could hear a serious whipping going on!

On a personal basis, both of my parents, who were displaced from New Orleans on the Saturday before Katrina and never made it back there, died in 2006; Mom on June 1 and Dad on October 20. Due to my own responsibilities in caring for my parents, I had cut back earlier that year from management healthcare duties to doing marketing.

As I had realized that both of my parents were never going to make it back to New Orleans, I heard about the Call Center job that would be coming up in November 2006. Little did I know when I scheduled that interview for the Call Center job that it would be for the the day after my dad died. That was the toughest thing I'd ever done professionally but did it for mom and dad.

As a professional social worker with an emphasis in gerontology (study of aging), I certainly was blessed to truly learn the reality of caregiving for loved ones during that time when my wife and I were helping my parents - something I'd long preached to my own patients and clients.

And I was able to experience, in a direct and dramatic way, coping with caregiving per my involvement with my parents' home care, hospice and nursing home placement for my dad, funeral arrangements for them and after care. Thanks especially to the extended care and support of family, friends and especially the hospice staff, we have had someone to be there for us.

Sometimes, the main thing that FEMA nor any recovery agency can provide that we all need is for someone to listen to us and for us to know that someone cares. While we try to do our best per the limited, bureaucratic means that our programs may offer, may we always strive to "Reach out and touch somebody's hand, make this world a better place if you can," as Diana Ross has noted. Lately, I've been blessed to do Case Management Services for Katrina and Gustav evacuees.

No matter how important that email, Facebook and Twitter may have become for some of us to staying in touch and connected, we're all really wounded and displaced in one way or another and need each other and God to help cope and find hope.

Keith John Paul Horcasitas, LCSW, MHA, DHAP (Disaster Housing Assistance Program) Case Manager