Hurricane Harvey compounds the distress of homelessness
As I was working at the triage desk in the health center of NRG Center 10 days after Hurricane Harvey struck, James, a stocky man wearing a T-shirt supplied by the facility and ratty-looking jeans, was seeking mental health services. He also was begging for an air mattress.
“This place sucks,” he said, when I explained that there simply were not enough air mattresses to go around.
A more truthful statement could not have been uttered.
Housing several thousand refugees from the flood at NRG meant crowding folks into a single, massive, open space. The space had been divided by moveable barriers into sections for single men, single women and families.
Forget the bathroom bill. Within each space, cots were crammed into a checkerboard with rows that seemed endless. Personal possessions — suitcases, bedding, clothes, toys — were strewn between beds such that passageways between cots looked like airplane aisles clogged by too much luggage.
A person unlucky enough to be bedded at the back of the room could barely comfortably walk to the front to line up for meals.
While the food was edible, it was monotonous and absent choices, evacuees said.
One frantic mother came to the health center dragging along a 15-year-old boy with impacted wisdom teeth. His pain was such that he could not chew anything. Since the only meals served were hamburgers, chips and such, he had simply stopped eating.
“Why don’t you get him some ice cream?” I asked the mom. “Where would I get that?” she countered.
“How about just some ice chips?” Again, she looked at me as though I were speaking another language. “And where would I get that?”
In the end, we found some Pedialyte, and I watched him to make sure he could drink enough to remain hydrated until we could transport him the next day to the volunteer dentist.
Once I saw how people made homeless by the flood were living, the run on air mattresses made sense.
In such a place, of course, no one sleeps. Apparently not only was it noisy and cold (ridiculously over-airconditioned), but the cots were uncomfortable.
The run on the volunteer mental health services was equally understandable.
An elderly man clutching his cell phone approached the triage desk. He had been talking on it nonstop while waiting and was still involved in a conversation.
“I’m sorry, you’ll need to finish before I can talk to you,” I said. He slowly extricated himself from his animated part of the conversation, and I turned over his phone so he couldn’t see calls coming in.
“No, no, don’t do that!” he shrieked. “What if FEMA calls? I’ve been waiting for them all day.”
I held his hand and looked into his eyes, turning back over the cell phone.
“I understand,” I said as he became teary-eyed. “This is the first time anyone here has really talked to me,” he sobbed. “Are you married? I’m eligible.”
The last day I worked at NRG I found out that a few days hence the place would close.
George R. Brown already had shut down and its inhabitants moved to NRG. Closure of NRG would necessitate finding housing for the many hundreds still without a home.
I knew that every service agency in the area was working overtime to do just that. A few of the people I saw that day could move in with relatives, others had been promised hotel rooms. Still others had no idea what they would do, and the staff indicated they would be homeless. Most of these folks had been homeless before the flood and so I guess this made for fewer tears shed. But I found the idea of struggling through deluged streets, living in horrible conditions and still remaining homeless unimaginably painful.
James was right, but not so much about NRG. Everyone was doing everything in their power to help.
But hurricanes suck. Flooding sucks. Homelessness sucks.
Houston showed the generosity of our community, but then we went back to work. And the folks left at NRG were no longer headline news.
Poverty sucks. Henceforth, I am going to carry loose change and provisions in my car so that when I’m stopped by someone with a sign hustling at an underpass, I have something to give.