Facilitating one miracle after another
Published: October 10, 2005
They need ice. They need water. They need food. They need clothes and diapers.
The lucky ones need cleaning supplies, because they have something left to clean. But all too often, they need tents.
They need directions. They need advice. They need someone to talk to. Some need a hug or a shoulder to cry on.
The truth is, these days the hurricane-ravaged people of Hancock County need guardian angels. Here, in the parking lot of the Bay Plaza shopping center on U.S. 90, they find the next-best alternative in the form of caring volunteers, who are like angels on earth.
“Whatever these people need, we try to give them,” says Tricia Myrick, a 35-year-old resident of Oak Grove, near Hattiesburg. “If we can’t provide it, we try to find someone who can. The Lord put us here to provide.”
Myrick, her best friend, Jessica Beane, and Michael Smith run a distribution center that serves people who come through in 400 to 500 cars per day. The people often arrive hungry and thirsty, with grim, sunburned faces and vacant eyes.
They are people such as Waveland resident Ann Manning, who evacuated to Somerset, Ky., before Hurricane Katrina hit and didn’t return until Thursday. As so many have, she found her home and the place where she works both destroyed.
“I’m so sorry,” Manning says, weeping. “I’m usually not like this. It’s just that I was so incredibly happy here. I had saved and saved to move here. I finally felt like I was home, and now it’s gone.”
After a career in the Army, Ann Manning moved to Waveland, a town where she often had vacationed, in May. Katrina left her with next to nothing, she says.
She at least had Myrick last week to provide basic needs and much valuable information, such as where to go, whom to see and what data she would need to start putting her life back in some semblance of order.
Says Michael Smith: “Tricia just saved that woman 24 to 48 hours of standing in lines.”
As Manning leaves, Myrick returns to her work, giving orders to Air National Guardsmen who are unloading another truck filled with supplies.
“Let’s get a supply line going,” she says.
And they do.
Says Maj. Dale Neaves, of the 255th Air Control Squadron: “We do what that lady says, because she obviously knows what she’s doing. She missed her calling. She should have been a general.”
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: