September 13, 2005

• I've been in Houston since Friday. I got in after a really long flight, with basically no sleep since the previous morning.

  My first offical act of volunteerism was to accompany my dad on a trip up to the Methodist conference center in the piney woods of east Texas, near Crockett if you want to look on a map. The conference center is hosting about 150 evacuees, around 80 of whom have severe mental or physical disability. The rest are family of, or caretakers for, those with the disability.

  We went up there because they needed an electric wheelchair charger, and we were able to deliver one. This was on Saturday. Three hours up, three hours back, dinner with my sister and her husband in Conroe, which was along the way.

  Sunday was blow-off day. I could have gone down to the Astrodome area and volunteered, but instead I spent Sunday and much of Monday morning freaking out in a slow-burn Aspie kind of way. I did get some nice pictures of the Edith L. Moore nature sanctuary...

  Monday afternoon, however, I ended up at Reliant Center. My dad went through the volunteer orientation process with me, as a kind of hand-holding, I think, and also because he was curious to see the process and the realities.

  I was ostensibly there to help people use the computers to locate loved ones and friends and so forth. I showed up and the guy in charge said, "Can you be flexible and work with kids?" So I spent the next two hours helping kids from about age 6 upwards use computers.

  Finally the kids' computer section closed down and I got to help some adults find people. One couple might have found their kid at Texas Children's Hospital. I say 'might have,' because the way the databases are set up it's hard to be sure, and it wasn't appropriate for someone in my position to help them follow through with that information. But they were appreciative anyway.

  Other folks weren't so fortunate, and we couldn't find anything for them. If anyone out there really wants to help out, you can volunteer to do some data entry for the Katrina PeopleFinder project. This effort is scouring the message boards and putting the info into a central searchable database. The more data in the database, the easier it will be to find. Google has indexed this database.

  I was hoping to be back down there today, but I've managed to get a really late start. I'll only get a few hours in before I have to pick up my dad at work, since I have his car. Ah well.

  • 1:16 pm
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