S. Florida charity touches Katrina victims in surprising ways
Published: September 7, 2005
He has a Nobel Prize, but no home.
They live in an assisted living facility, yet they are assisting others.
She is a government official, but now curses bureaucracy.
They’re working to save lives — not just people, but pets.
As the number of Katrina’s victims finding refuge in Broward County topped 300, South Florida’s charity touched people in increasingly unexpected ways Tuesday.
Nobel prizewinner moves lab to Miami for good
Among the most high-profile of evacuees to now call the area home is Nobel prize winner and cancer researcher Andrew Schally, who watched with horror as the New Orleans floodwaters surrounded and then damaged his sprawling lab building at the VA hospital two blocks from the Superdome, and then saw on TV that his neighborhood in nearby Metairie looked uninhabitable.
With the two pillars of his life gone, a distressed Schally called a friend at the VA Medical Center in Miami and arranged to move his project there. He was carried to safety by soldiers in a military convoy evacuating the hospital’s patients and doctors. He plans to set up a lab here and stay for good.
“There’s nothing for me there now,” said Schally, 78. “What worried me most was my research would come to a standstill for two or three months. It’s a tremendous relief to be among friends and be able to do something practical to continue my research.”
Assisted living residents ready to provide help
In contrast to how the hurricane made a powerful man like Schally powerless, it has given strength to those some might consider in need of help themselves. Marie Celestin, a program coordinator at Homewood Residence at Coconut Creek, an assisted living facility, said that residents are organizing a fund-raiser Friday to benefit the Red Cross, asking for money and donations of items that help the elderly, including adult sanitary garments.
She said many of the residents and staff have been distressed at the numbers of elderly people who were left to fend for themselves in their attics or on roofs, as well as those who were evacuated improperly from medical facilities and who now have no identification or memory of who they are or how to contact their families.
“We were very disturbed by that. When we had the hurricane, we all spent the night. We made nametags so everyone who knows who everyone was,” she said. “This [fund-raiser] gives the residents a sense of helping.”
Breaking down bureaucracy
Suzanne Boisvenue, an emergency room nurse and Oakland Park city commissioner, returned Tuesday from a trip to Pensacola, where many Mississippi residents have taken refuge and where she flew after organizing a list of local residents willing to house those made homeless by Katrina.
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