Jasmine's Amazing Hug
I left Lake Charles for Lafayette on the morning of September 22. The people in the Lake Charles shelter had been evacuated the day before. I had gone to a resort on the west side of the lake, and got a room for the night after the days work was done.
When I arrived at Lafayette, preparations were well underway to evacuate the 800 people and Red Cross staff from the Cajun Dome. Rita was expected to come ashore at Lake Charles, and Lafayette, 50 miles to the east, was being evacuated as a precaution. A group of Red Cross volunteers listened in sober, stunned silence as the man in charge of transportation for the evacuation described what was planned. The authorities were hoping to acquire school buses as soon as the Parish schools were dismissed in the afternoon. The buses had no storage for the bags of personal belongings that the people would be bringing. They would have to hold their belongings with them on their seats. There would be no toilets on the buses, and since the buses would be in a long convoy, no stops would be made on the seven hour trip.
As these grim facts were being recited, a Red Cross volunteer next to me repeated softly "I can't do this...I can't do this". I felt sorry for her. After we were dismissed, I took her aside and gave her my Red Cross car keys and said, "Drive this car up to Shreveport, I'll get it from you up there".
I spent the next several hours gathering up supplies for the trip. I decided that I would build a makeshift latrine on the bus. I found plastic garbage bags, duct tape, empty pop cups, diapers, paper towels-- anything I thought might come in handy. Of course, I had never built a toilet on a bus before, but I was sure going to try. I also acquired baby bottles, infant formula, snacks, latex gloves, and anything else I could scrounge.
The people in the shelter had been assigned sections, based on the seating sections in the upper deck of the auditorium. I was assigned section 230. I had an hour to relax before the trip, and sat on the floor against a wall in the staff lounge with my eyes closed. I began to have doubts about what I had gotten myself into, and thought about how nice it must be back at Baton Rouge Headquarters.
At 5:30 in the afternoon, I went into the auditorium and up to section 230, and introduced myself to the 28 people who were waiting for their bus, and handed out some jelly beans to the children. The adults were tired and somber, and the children apprehensive. After waiting an hour, our section was called, and we hurried out of the auditorium to our bus. Instead of school busses, tour busses had been located. Soon after we loaded the bags of belongings in the storage compartments on the side of the bus, and everyone was seated, the bus convoy left Lafayette heading north on I-49. It was a long trip through the night to Shreveport.
In the early hours of Friday morning, we arrived on the campus of Southern University. The bus pulled up in front of the campus gymnasium that had been set up as a temporary hurricane shelter. A single mother on the bus and her two small children had spent four days trapped in an attic in New Orleans after the levees broke. Her children were all right, but she had her left leg almost completely bandaged. I had set her leg on diapers and a case of water bottles on the trip up. She had numerous brown recluse spider bites, and she could barely walk, so I was helping her with her children.
As we walked up to the entrance to the gym, five year old Damon held my left hand, and I was carrying 2 year old Jasmine in my right arm, with her arms around my neck. As we got to the entrance, Damon said, “I have to go to the bathroom.” Having been the parent of a five year old, I knew that meant right now! So we rushed him through the metal detector, and a Red Cross volunteer on the other side took him off to a bathroom.
I turned around and watched the mother limping toward us. I was standing in a small crowd of Red Cross volunteers and National Guard. It was almost 3AM. I was physically exhausted, I was emotionally exhausted, but I felt that God was close and that this was a very special moment. I looked at Jasmine for a very long time. I wanted to remember forever how she looked. She was wearing a little blouse with embroidered flowers, and diapers. She had little red ribbon bows scattered through her coal black hair. She was precious and innocent.
She looked at me with big brown eyes, and I felt her arms tighten around my neck, and then she gave me a really big hug, and I responded with a really big hug that lasted a long time. As we hugged, I felt the only shirt I had with me on the evacuation trip get soaking wet as she overflowed her diapers. I stood there hugging her, as the dark spot spread across the front of my shirt.
Soon everyone was in to the shelter, where they had cots, blankets, pillows, and food. I got the two children cleaned up, tucked them into beds, and said goodnight.
I took a short bus trip over to the main shelter in downtown Shreveport. On the second floor there were rooms to house Red Cross volunteers. They were bare rooms-- no cots, no mats, no blankets, no pillows, just empty rooms. I scrounged around and found some burlap under a stairwell. At 4AM I curled up, wrapped in burlap, to sleep. I was cold, wet, and smelled very bad. As I fell asleep, all I could think of was little Jasmine’s amazing hug, and how a Bible verse I had heard a few weeks earlier at a church in Baton Rouge had finally made the trip from my head down to my heart.
“…lay up for yourself treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”