Spoken from the Heart (57 page)

Some of the most pioneering humanitarian work in Africa is being done by American religious institutions. A special project of the organization World Relief encourages local ministers to be tested for AIDS and to share the results with their congregations. Inside a circular church with rough wooden benches, a concrete floor, and simple cream walls, Jenna and I held feverish small children with HIV on our laps as a Rwandan minister preached to the congregation. Just that year he had announced to his worshipers that he'd tested positive for HIV/AIDS. By speaking openly about his disease, he was hoping to help break the stigma and to convince them to be tested as well.

The toll from AIDS is enormous, but the numbers cannot capture the consequences. One in particular is orphan children running their own households. In Rwanda I met a girl named Tatu, who had lost her father to genocide when she was only two; her mother had died of AIDS when she was eleven. Now twelve, she was caring for three small half brothers, ages eight, six, and three. She had been abandoned a third time by an older brother, who after their mother's death had returned to the family house, sold it, and disappeared with the money. Tatu had dropped out of school to work and was hawking fruit at a market stand to provide for her younger siblings. She sobbed as she spoke, and I took her into my arms. American church groups were building a home for her and her young brothers.

Rwanda is, of necessity, a society of women. In the genocide, hundreds of thousands of men were killed. By 2005, women held nearly 50 percent of all the seats in the National Assembly. Before we left, Cherie and I, accompanied by Kay Warren, wife of Reverend Rick Warren, whose Saddleback Church has been active in Rwanda, attended a dinner hosted by Jeannette Kagame, Rwanda's first lady, who had been born in a Rwandan refugee camp in the Republic of Burundi and who had herself fought as a Tutsi soldier. Seated with us, amid candlelight, overflowing flower vases, and white linen tablecloths, were some of Rwanda's most prominent women. The ministers of justice, the environment, education, labor, and economic planning, as well as the head of the National AIDS Control Commission and female senators and parliamentarians, were all in attendance. At my table were leading government ministers. We talked about the many challenges facing Rwanda. At one point, I asked a simple question: How many of you have had malaria? Malaria is a debilitating and even fatal disease carried by the bites of mosquitoes: the United States eradicated it from its swamps and marshlands decades ago. Each of the Rwandan women seated at the table answered, "Yes, of course I've had malaria." All of them had been bitten, had fallen ill, and could have died.

I have been changed by Africa on each visit, in large measure because of the tremendous hope I have seen among its people in the midst of overwhelming despair. When George and I returned in 2008, we traveled again to Rwanda, where we stopped at a school for teenagers. Some were orphans who had lost a parent to AIDS or to genocide. As we left the school, we saw a group of teenagers waiting outside to greet us. One had a sign, "God is Good." George nodded and said, "God
is
good." And these teenage children replied, in unison, "All the time." To suffer as they have suffered, with genocide, disease, and poverty, and to still believe "God is good. All the time"!

"I Told You I Would Come"

Greeting Governor Habiba Sarabi, Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan.
(Shealah Craighead/White House photo)

On Tuesday, August 23, 2005, a cluster of rain and thunderstorm clouds coalesced over the Bahamas into what the National Weather Service named Tropical Depression Twelve. The next day the depression became a storm, with winds above forty miles per hour. It was the eleventh tropical storm of the 2005 season, and the weather service christened it Katrina. Within twenty-four hours, Katrina was upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane, and forecasters predicted that it would make landfall in Florida, then turn toward the Alabama-Florida panhandle. At 6:30 that night, August 25, Katrina arrived at the Dade and Broward county lines. Its winds were eighty miles per hour, its rainfall up to sixteen inches. Three people drowned as the storm hit; three others were killed by falling trees. More than 1.4 million homes and businesses lost power. Unsure of where Katrina would head next, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began positioning ice, water, and food at logistics centers in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina. Within three days the federal government would have finished the largest prepositioning of emergency assets in its history. But still, forecasters could not say with certainty where the hurricane would turn.

Katrina passed over Florida and then reached the Gulf of Mexico, but instead of heading north, it drifted west, its winds and rains growing stronger over the warm, late summer waters of the gulf. At the end of the afternoon on August 26, weather forecasters began predicting a new path, saying that the storm would now make landfall in the Mississippi-Louisiana region. They also predicted that it would be a Category 4 or 5 storm. A Category 5 is considered a catastrophic storm, with winds in excess of 155 miles per hour. It can produce, as weather scientists clinically put it, "complete building failure" in its immediate path. There are only three Category 5 storms ever recorded in the United States; one of the worst was Hurricane Camille in 1969. When it came ashore in Mississippi, it caused a twenty-four-foot storm tide, about one-quarter the height of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

At five in the afternoon on Saturday, August 27, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin called for a voluntary evacuation of the city. Early on August 28, Katrina officially became a Category 5 storm.

George and I were at the ranch for a late-summer break. Inside the secure federal trailers on the property, White House staff members, including Joe Hagin, deputy chief of staff for operations, were monitoring the storm around the clock. The National Hurricane Center began issuing advisories warning that the levees in New Orleans could be "overtopped" by Lake Pontchartrain and "significant destruction" would likely be experienced far from the hurricane's center. In the morning of August 28, George began calling the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco; the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour; and Michael Brown, the head of FEMA. When he reached Kathleen Blanco, at 9:14, he told her that she needed to issue a mandatory evacuation order for New Orleans. She responded that she did not think everyone could get out in time.

But by 9:30, Governor Blanco had heeded George's advice; along with Mayor Nagin she did issue a mandatory evacuation call, the first ever in New Orleans's history. Residents now had only hours to leave. By nightfall, heavy rains and high winds began to lash the Gulf Coast. At 6:10 a.m. on Monday, August 29, Katrina made landfall in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, a peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico. It arrived as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 115 miles per hour and gusts of 130 miles per hour. Katrina sliced through Plaquemines with a twenty-foot storm surge, killing nine people. It continued northeast, clipping the eastern edge of the giant Lake Pontchartrain and St. Bernard and Orleans parishes, along the Mississippi border. Its main track was now over Mississippi, and after it made landfall, its force began to weaken. By 1:00 p.m. Monday, Katrina had dropped to a Category 1 storm; by 7:00 p.m., it was downgraded to a tropical storm. And it had passed east of New Orleans. But the damage was done.

The Gulf Coast storm surge had been as high as twenty-seven feet. Flooding extended six miles inland and up to twenty-three miles along rivers and bays. But all day Monday, the first reports George and the White House received from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense and Army Corps of Engineers were that New Orleans's levees had held. When Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin asked Governor Blanco for an update on the status of the levees during an 11:00 a.m. conference call, she told him her information was that New Orleans's levees had not been breached. Instead, she reported, the main floodwaters were engulfing another, smaller parish to the east. Not until after midnight, early on Tuesday morning, nearly eighteen hours after the hurricane had swept through, did the Department of Homeland Security report widespread breaches and flooding to the White House. New Orleans's levees and floodwalls gave way; pumping stations that had lost electricity stopped working. Up to 80 percent of the city was filled with water that in low-lying sections was as much as twenty feet deep. First responders could not reach the city, but prepositioned Coast Guard units immediately swung into action. Over several days the Coast Guard rescued and evacuated more than 33,000 people. The first of their teams began searching for survivors just hours after Katrina came ashore.

On Wednesday morning, the day after we received word that the levees had broken, George returned to Washington. He decided against landing in Louisiana or Mississippi but flew over the devastated region instead. His decision was, on a much larger scale, the same one I had made not to go to Afghanistan in 2002, 2003, or 2004. Whenever a president, or even the first lady, travels, a huge infrastructure of personnel accompanies him or her. And there is another huge infrastructure waiting on the ground. In Afghanistan I had not wanted to use military assets, like helicopters, when they might be needed on the battlefield. With people still trapped in their flooded homes and thousands not yet evacuated from the Superdome, George did not want a single police officer or National Guard unit or any other type of first response team to be diverted from the rescue efforts to assist with a presidential visit. He had visited Ground Zero in New York on September 14, only when he knew that it was highly unlikely anyone else could or would be found alive. He did not want one single life to be lost because someone was catering to the logistical requirements of a president. He did not want his convoy of vehicles to block trucks delivering water or food or medical supplies, or to impede National Guardsmen from around the nation who were arriving to help.

By Friday, September 2, nearly twenty-two thousand National Guard soldiers and airmen had reached the region. Sixty-five hundred troops were in New Orleans alone. Over fifty thousand guardsmen and -women from all fifty states, as well as U.S. territories and the District of Columbia, would ultimately assist along the Gulf Coast. That morning George traveled first to Mobile, Alabama, and then to two of the most devastated cities, Biloxi, Mississippi, and New Orleans. I flew to Lafayette, Louisiana, to see some of the six thousand people who had fled New Orleans and surrounding towns and were now huddled in the Cajundome.

Already, people from across the country had arrived to help. As soon as the storm hit on Sunday night and Monday morning, Red Cross volunteers, many of them retirees, had begun driving from Iowa and other states to Louisiana and Mississippi, prepared to live out of their cars if necessary. By the end of the week, thousands of men and women from the Southern Baptist Convention began to arrive. The Southern Baptist Convention has the third largest disaster relief organization in the United States, after the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Like many Red Cross volunteers, with whom they often partner, the Baptists rolled out sleeping bags and unfurled hard cots inside local churches. When one team of sixty first arrived, the only dry and empty place they could find to stay was a local jail. For weeks these volunteers cooked thousands of meals each day, sometimes on generators that they had hauled themselves in the backs of trucks. When they could, they used donated food from Walmart and Subway, but knowing supplies would be tight, they also brought their own. A single team of Baptist men and women from Oklahoma cooked sixteen thousand meals a day in Louisiana. Other sites routinely made ten thousand hot lunches and dinners. Red Cross volunteers helped distribute this food and also began gathering clothes for families who had lost everything.

Inside Lafayette's Cajundome, 137 miles west of New Orleans, many Katrina victims had been separated from friends and family; in some cases, mothers could not find their toddler children. And in these early days, they did not know if they would ever see their loved ones again. I served up plates of jambalaya and sat with elderly men and women who were struggling with the thought of a lifetime of memories having vanished and who were stunned by the prospect of having to start over again.

Sixty miles away, in Baton Rouge, I visited Acadian Ambulance, an ambulance service that covers a wide swath of Louisiana and Mississippi. Because it was in Baton Rouge, Acadian's communications facilities had not been knocked out by the storm or the flooding. When patients were left stranded, and state and city officials had either disappeared from New Orleans or were completely unreachable by e-mail or phone, Acadian and its volunteers almost single-handedly evacuated hospitals and spent days treating the sick and injured at the packed Superdome. The company, helped by spouses and siblings of its employees, located more than forty military and out-of-state helicopters, as well as 150 ambulances from other parts of the country, to transport critically ill patients, some of whom exhausted doctors were keeping alive by manually squeezing oxygen into their lungs. They packed newborn babies into cardboard boxes to fit more of them inside the helicopters. With their satellite telephones, a mobile antenna, a portable generator, and incredible determination, Acadian employees and volunteers saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. I wanted to thank Richard Zuschlag, the chief of Acadian Ambulance, and his team, who had done what some professional city, state, and federal disaster management officials had failed to do: help people and save lives in some of the most horrific conditions imaginable.