Among Elderly, a Strong Desire to Return Home to NOLA, but Nowhere to Go

[Rose Siding]

James and Delphine Lindsey, ages 79 and 70, are so strapped they have to make do with a diet of red beans and pig tails. They have family nearby to help, fellow evacuees from Hurricane Katrina, but if they lose their federal housing assistance, which they have been warned may happen any month now, things could get dire.

“We’re not going to be put out,” Ms. Lindsey insisted, looking around at her small one-bedroom apartment in Houston’s working-class Fifth Ward, a grocery cart parked in the corner beside her wheelchair. “We’re not going out on the street. No, no. We’ll just have to start the penny-pinching, that’s all.”

Thousands of elderly evacuees like the Lindseys still struggle every day to get by in cities hundreds of miles from their homes in New Orleans. But it is the elderly who want most to return, say social service workers, and who have the hardest time doing so.
...
In the storm’s immediate impact, 71 percent of the dead were over the age of 60, and nearly half were over 75. But the stresses and the vulnerabilities did not end with the storm’s passing.
...
Generally more frail and financially and physically vulnerable, they are also more prone to stress, beset by nightmares, isolated and ill-equipped to manage a new start in a strange city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/us/24elderly.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[ninkasi]

1. This is such a tragedy

These elderly people did not pray for a hurricane to disrupt their lives, and they are already living on the barest of assistance. A country as wealthy as ours could take care of people like them, if we would only insist that the mega wealthy paid a just portion of the taxes that are used for assist people like the Lindseys.

The gap between the bloated rich, and the skin and bones poor is not anything to be proud of. If Bush were truly a Christian, as he claims to be, people like them would be taken care of.

"I was hungered and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in. Naked and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.... Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matt. 25:35-40).