Most folks don't realize that Katrina didn't just impact NOLA, the damage stretched from parts of Alabama (Bayou La Batre) all along the MS Gulf Coast INto LA, to include, but not be limited to NOLA.
The Day After
It looks okay, thought Regina Benjamin, as she maneuvered her light blue Toyota pickup through the mud-slick streets of Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Maybe we missed the worst of it.
It was August 30, the day after Hurricane Katrina, and all along the bayou, shrimp boats lay tossed onto dry land, masts and rigging tangled in tree branches. Crumpled piles of lumber marked where homes had stood, and a wash of slime inches deep seeped from the open doors of shops and restaurants. Benjamin pulled up to her medical clinic. The tidy gray building looked unscathed. But when she opened the door, the stench was almost enough to make her sit down. Seawater, old fish and dead crabs mingled with raw sewage. Chairs and tables were tossed about as if they'd been in a washing machine.
Dr. Regina Benjamin, 49, had laid out $800 to open her family-practice clinic in this impoverished community in 1990, and many thousands more to keep it going. If people couldn't pay -- and many couldn't -- she treated them for free. Clearly, she wasn't in it for the money. But now her head swirled as she stared into the ruins of her life's dream. Then she steeled herself: I can be sad and depressed later.
Bayou La Batre is a hapless little village tucked along a waterway that reaches like a long blue-black finger from the Gulf of Mexico several miles into the pine-dotted Alabama interior. Seafood is the town's main livelihood, but foreign imports and rising fuel costs have driven the industry into decline. One-third of the population is from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and more than one in five families live below poverty level.
More at the Reader's Digest link
http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/dr-regina-benjamin----a-healing-force/article19591.html Regina M. Benjamin, MD
Dr. Benjamin is founder and CEO of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. She is former associate dean for rural health at the University of South Alabama's College of Medicine in Mobile, where she administers the Alabama AHEC program and previously directed its Telemedicine Program. She serves as the current president of the Medical Association, of the State of Alabama. In 1998 she was the United States' recipient of the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights. In 1995 she was elected to the American Medical Association's board of trustees, making her the first physician under age 40 and the first African-American woman to be elected. She has also served as president of the American Medical Association's Education and Research Foundation.
Born in 1956, Dr. Benjamin attended Xavier University in New Orleans and was a member of the second class of the Morehouse School of Medicine. She received her M.D. degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and completed her residency in family practice at the Medical Center of Central Georgia. After entering solo practice in Bayou La Batre (a small shrimping village along the gulf coast), Dr. Benjamin spent several years moonlighting in emergency rooms and nursing homes to keep her practice open. After receiving an MBA from Tulane University, she converted her office to a rural health clinic.
Dr. Benjamin is a diplomate of the American Board of Family Practice and a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians. She was a Kellogg National Fellow and a Rockefeller Next Generation Leader. She serves on numerous boards and committees, including the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, Catholic Health East, Medical Association of the State of Alabama, Alabama Board of Medical Examiners, Alabama State Committee of Public Health, Mobile County Medical Society, Alabama Rural Health Association, Leadership Alabama, Mobile Area Red Cross, Mercy Medical, Mobile Chamber of Commerce, United Way of Mobile, and Deep South Girl Scout Council.
She was appointed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act Committee and to the Council of Graduate Medical Education, and is a member of the Step 3 Committee. In Alabama she has served as vice president of the Governor's Commission on Aging and as a member of the Governor's Health Care Reform Task Force and the Governor's Task Force on Children's Health.
Dr. Benjamin was named by Time Magazine as one of the "Nation's 50 Future Leaders Age 40 and Under. " She was featured in a New York Times article, "Angel in a White Coat, " and was chosen "Person of the Week" by ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, "Woman of the Year" by CBS This Morning, and "Woman of the Year" by People Magazine. She was featured on the December 1999 cover of Clarity Magazine and received the 2000 National Caring Award, which was inspired by Mother Teresa.
Consistent with her strong social conscience, Dr. Benjamin has spent time doing missionary work in Honduras and is on the Board of Physicians for Human Rights. Her interests include environmental issues and eco and adventure travel.
http://www.bayouclinic.org/default.aspx?id=21
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