Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Albertina “Tina” Batiste,was sitting in an Atlanta hotel before Thanksgiving with no real prospects for the future when the phone call came.
Batiste and her family had lost their home in New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina and her efforts to find new lodgings had not produced anything.
“I said, ‘I’m giving up,'” recalled Batiste, 50. “‘I’m not looking. I’m just looking to God.'”
That day she got a call from Sharon Pryor, a member of the leadership team at Crawfordsville Community Church, who’d seen a posting Batiste had submitted to a Web site for people displaced by the hurricanes. Pryor, on behalf of the church, had been seeking a family displaced by Katrina who could live in the church’s vacant parsonage.
When Pryor called, Batiste said, looked into housing situations in Atlanta, Houston and Baton Rouge, “but I never felt that’s where I should be,” she said. She’d even gotten a call from a church in Memphis, Tenn. that was offering housing, she said, but she never heard back from them.
Still, Oregon?
But given her prayers and the dead-ends she’d encountered, she wasn’t writing anything off. But she also was not overly optimistic.
I told Sharon that I won’t take this call if (Pryor’s group) didn’t believe in God,” Batiste said. “She asked if I’d thought about Oregon. I was like, no, I never thought about that. But I had been praying that day, communicating with God.
“That’s why I asked (Pryor) if she believed in God. Only God could do that. So I said, ‘Let me just come and see.'”
Batiste and her son Shonn Milton, 16, are scheduled to arrive in Crawfordsville this Saturday, Dec. 10, to live in the parsonage at the Crawfordsville church, which has been empty for several years.
Pryor said the arrival of Batiste and Milton will be the realization of preparations the church and Crawfordsville students have made to host a family displaced by the disaster.
“People voted almost unanimously to open it up to a Katrina victim family,” Pryor said of the church congregation.
Students at Crawfordsville School held a can drive and a penny drive that resulted in $465 and 319 pounds of food “for the people that didn’t exist yet,” Pryor noted. The children also planted flowers around the church.
“Crawfordsville School has really been supportive of this,” Pryor said.
But with the parsonage ready to go, the problem became finding someone to live in it.
“We were working with two different organizations on-line and not coming up with anything,” Pryor said.
The problem, she said, was that a lot of displaced people from the hurricanes did not want to relocate out of the South.
“That’s a big deterrent if you live in rural Oregon,” Pryor said.
Batiste had been a homeowner in New Orleans. Prior to the storm, she had been at her 92-year-old mother’s home and, as TV reports became increasingly urgent about the danger Hurricane Katrina posed as it moved in, her husband Wade, three sons and two daughters and and other relatives scattered. She said she found herself alone with no way to find out where anybody else was as the cell phone contact broke down.
She went home and “kind of packed up our stuff. I didn’t anticipate water,” she said. “When I saw the last news report and saw the hurricane on TV, I decided it would be better to be little way away than to be in the city,” she said.
She said she ended up riding out the hurricane at her cousin’s home in Baton Rouge, normally a one-hour trip west but one that took six hours the Sunday night before the storm hit.
It turned out that most of her family had wound up at the Astrodome in Houston. Wade, her husband, had stayed in New Orleans and was at the city’s Convention Center, one of the shelters from the hurricane.
She stayed in Baton Rouge a week, then went to Houston, where her children were. On Sept. 13, she and Shonn went to Atlanta, where she stayed until the day before Thanksgiving, when she returned to Houston.
The future is up in the air for the family. Their home was destroyed, and though they had
insurance, but haven’t seen a penny of that, Pryor said.
Taking in the pair will be a strain on the church, she said, but one they have taken on willingly.
“The church has undertaken to support them for the next three to six months, which is a huge commitment for a congregation of 50 people,” she said.
Right now, Batiste said, it will just be she and Shonn. Wade, who is a “Mardi Gras Indian,” a “tribe” of mostly African-American men who make costumes out of feathers for use in the carnivals in New Orleans, also makes souvenir “patches” out of canvas, beads and other materials for sale at festivals. Batiste said he and her other children are staying in Houston for now.
Brian Leeper, district director for American Red Cross in Albany, said that there are about 100 displaced families from Katrina in the district, which covers Linn, Benton, Lincoln, Lane, Douglas, Coos and Curry counties. According to Red Cross figures, there are 600 such families in Oregon.
A donation can for the “Katrina family” is available at the Sunshine Espresso at 1209 Main St. in Sweet Home. Those who would like to contribute can also send a check to Crawfordsville Community Church, Box 313, Crawfordsville, OR 97336, with a note designating it for Tina Batiste and Shonn Milton.
Batiste could also use a computer to search for a job, Pryor said. She worked as director of the nonprofit We The People, an economic development organization in New Orleans before the storm, she said – mainly preparing grant applications.
It will be a big change, Batiste said, but she’s decided to take a step of faith and see what happens.
“I’m noticing that everything that is normal and usual is becoming abnormal and unusual,” she said of her post-hurricane experience.