I'm having trouble finding words for how I'm feeling right now so I'm going to try to figure things out by writing. I grew up with hurricanes. Some of my earliest memories are of losing power during Hurricane Hugo and watching the tree blow about as if they were no longer attached to the ground. Everytime a hurricane threatens any of the coasts, I glue myself to the news, the radio, and the internet to keep track of where it is headed. I had a hurricane tracking map (which of course was reusable throughout the season) on the wall so I could enter the coordinates and try to predict the path myself. But when Hugo came the biggest diaster I could see was that it was my brother's birthday and all of his icecream was melted. There was also an eruption in the yellow jacket population that year and we had to go down to my dad's work apartment in South Carolina for awhile because my granddad who was dying of cancer and visiting us at the time needed a heating pad at all times. I was five. I remember all those things but it was easy to get through because the entire world consisted of my family.

Now Hurricane Katrina has devastated other parts of my family. My Southern family, my American family, and my "family" I adopted along with a lot of my friends at NU in Jonestown, Mississippi. I also have an aunt and uncle in Lousiana not to far from New Orleans and even though no one has heard from them, my mom tells me not to worry to much. I was so happy today to talk to Erica because she also is worried about the people we met last year on Spring Break working for Habitat with our Catholic center. We met so many blessed people in this little town who don't even have a proper sewage system and most of the houses look like they were constructed out of hurricane wreckage to begin with. Jonestown is in the northern part of Mississippi but since Memphis, TN got a great amount of flooding and wind damage, I can only imagine that Jonestown got washed away. I wonder how Sister Kay is doing with her carpentry workshop and after school programs, and the Burnetts with the new church library. And what really gets to me is how helpless I feel.

I think I'm talking about Jonestown because it's a tangible part of this diaster I can hold on to. I really feel connected to Jonestown even after just a week of service work there. But at the same time I feel just as helpless about helping them as I feel about the entire region which was hit by this storm. I try not to watch the news reports much anymore because I just start crying. As I"m writing this I'm crying because I just finished reading about death tolls, damage estimates, cultural damage, and people who have lost many relatives. The NY Times article I read said that this could be the largest lost of life to a natural diaster since the San Francisco earthquake and fires in 1906. My favorite book when I was younger was about those fires and the earthquake and at the time I read that, I couldn't imagine anything worse.

I'm feeling a little small minded to because of the Tsunamis which hit last winter. Those were catastrophic as well and I know every year there are horrible natural diasters, not to mention the manmade ones, which devastate millions. My heart is with all those victims but despite what people may think about my political views, I'm a patriotic girl and when the people in my country are suffering, it means a lot to me. I won't go into how that supports my political views because frankly, hurricanes are nonpartisan and that's what I want to focus on.

It's all I can do not to walk across the street tomorrow and tell the registrar I'm dropping out of school so I can take a bus down to my South and help in any way I can - take care of orphaned children, pick up debris off the streets, anything. I won't drop out of school though because I am trying to hold on to that idea that with my education I will be given even greater opportunities to help people, which is my ultimate career goal in life - helping people. But even so, the immediate need to do something is hard to satisfy. I hardly have enough money most of the time to get by myself without asking my parents for money so financial aid is out of the question. I"m praying a lot so I've got that covered. But I still want to do something more. Crocheting scarfs and hats isn't going to do much since its 100 degrees down there and I don't even think they'd appreciate a nice blanket! Donating food poses the same problem as money and I'm a little to far to pick up an debris.

To me it seems a lot like how I felt after September 11th, honestly. That helplessness that we all experienced at first at how fast so many people died in so short a time. Of course anger set in later but initially the shock is all you can think about - even though that diaster was caused by human beings, the same helplessness was felt. In addition, I lived so far from NYC and DC that there didn't seem like much to do except pray and help collect supplies at school. I started volunteering at the Red Cross because I couldn't even donate my blood because I was "too young."

So I still can't find words for what I say. I have written a lot but I can only hope that out of my vague mutterings someone out there in the great big world can understand how helpless and unhelpful I feel. A few days ago my biggest worry was how to get all my stuff to my new apartment with my back injury. Now I'm more worried about how the city of New Orleans is ever going to recover and how those thousands of people with out jobs, homes, or anything are going to survive. I feel guilty for being alive and healthy in Chicago, away from that devastation, at a Big Ten school spending my nights in my dry, comfortable home.

So I'm going to bed now in hopes of getting some of this off my mind until tomorrow. I think I'm going to see if we can put together some kind of vigil or prayer service at Sheil for the victims of this storm as well as some sort of relief effort beyond collecting money on Sunday. And most of all, I want to see if Tim, our campus minister, can get ahold of our friends in Jonestown to see if there still is a Jonestown for us to go back to next spring.