Anonymous heroes stand, deliver for Katrina’s evacuees
Published: September 9, 2005
Just before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the South, the U.S. Census Bureau moved Detroit to the top of its list of the country’s poorest cities. But the storm that chewed up and swallowed New Orleans reminded us that, when it comes to deciding who is poor and who is rich, spirit counts, too.
New Orleans’ heroes included many ordinary people whose stories you might never see on the news: the restaurant workers who created meals from leftovers and scraps, the mechanics who hotwired cars and kept generators humming, the nurses who manually forced air into the lungs of unconscious patients, the doormen who pried people out of shut-down elevators.
They weren’t wealthy, but had spunk. Meanwhile, our local heroes include a Detroit woman who has come up with a novel plan to help at least a handful of the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Melinda Lewis is best known for teaching people to combat diseases by leading healthy and spiritually wholesome lives. She and her husband, John, are the founders of Great Joy Health Ministries. They conduct classes in which participants learn the healing benefits of meatless meals, natural foods, exercise, stress management, colon cleansing and water drinking. The classes are usually held at Detroit’s Holy Hope Heritage Baptist Church, 18641 Wyoming.
A frequent visitor to New Orleans, Melinda Lewis has been keeping track of 34 people displaced by the storm, the oldest of whom is 93. Some are Lewis’ friends, and some are affiliated with RhemaWord Enterprises, a Christian audio visual program production company in New Orleans. Members of this group are now scattered throughout the southwest, living in hotel rooms, mobile homes and apartments in Houston and Dallas, Texas, Alta Loma, Ca. and Lithonia, Ga. Lewis has a list of their clothing and shoe sizes and other special needs, including support hose.
She wants people to rummage through their closets and basements, scoop up bundles of clean, used clothes and shoes, stuff these items into boxes and ship them to some of the families on her list
Melinda Lewis has no trouble identifying with people forced to flee their homes and leave everything but their memories behind. She has never forgotten the fire that broke out in a former apartment and kept her away from her belongings for a week. She had nothing but the clothes she was wearing and a pair of flip flops, which she wore to church.
“I just remember how people rallied around us and brought in clothes, sent money, made me feel like we weren’t alone,” she says.
In dollars and cents, Detroit is indeed the nation’s poorest city, but in 2000, the Detroit Branch NAACP raised over $250,000 to aid homeless flood victims in southeastern Africa, $500 of the money raised single-handedly by an 11-year-old girl.
I’m willing to bet that people here and elsewhere will be even more generous to victims of Katrina, a disaster worsened by people poor in planning skills, poor in leadership and, it often seemed, poor in humanity as well.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: