As Some Storm Evacuees Celebrate New Digs, Others Return to Louisiana
December 2005
Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By: Mike Tierney
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They piled their paper plates high with spoonfuls of homemade dishes. Once the main course was polished off, they descended upon the dessert table, a colorful rectangle of confectionery treats.
They were the workers at ProCore Solutions, digging into a potluck holiday luncheon feast at company headquarters in Marietta. Among them were three of six Gulf Coasters chased off by Hurricane Katrina and hired in September, most at a job fair. President/COO Greg Steele said the transplants were not sympathy hires: "If they didn't meet the standards, they wouldn't be here." All are here still - a risk that has paid off for ProCore, a call center for utility companies and a staffing service. The company spent time and money to train some of the new hires for as long as a month. It could have lost them soon after, as some of the Gulf Coast's displaced began trickling back west. Not every employer that cast about at the job fair has been so lucky. The Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center on the school's campus recruited five workers. Two, a banquet server and a front desk agent, returned home within a month. "We'd hoped, obviously, that they would stay," said Kim Calvert, the center's human resources director. "But when you've been through that type of devastation, there is always that chance they'll go back to where their home is." |
Still, Calvert said the center had no regrets about the hires. "We would probably do the same thing again," she said.
ProCore employee Danielle Poindexter, placed by the company as a clerical worker at a Sandy Springs cemetery, calls herself an Atlantan "for now." She admits to homesickness, even though home  Danielle Poindexter, Bacardi Green, Valerie Miles was the especially hard hit 9th Ward, and she and her two children are packing to move into an apartment.
Others seem eager to set roots. "New Orleans was my life," said Valerie Miles. But after a trip to her now-unlivable home in Slidell, she decided: "I'm going to stay right in this area for a long time to come. When I go to Louisiana now, it's to visit." After striking out while searching for work similar to her past life's - customer service rep in health care - Miles, 39, remembers entering the job fair in prayer: "Lord, let somebody here have something that [matches] my background." Close enough. Miles handles service calls for customers struggling to pay gas bills. So does Barcardi Green, 18 and one year out of high school. She has yet to return home, or what's left of it, since fleeing with a contingent of 14 friends and relatives in two vans. |
Though their Christmas gift-giving will be scaled back severely, the evacuees said they feel gratitude amid the sorrow, especially from cashing a regular paycheck.
"It gives you a sense of stability," said Poindexter, 31. And of financial security; her pay is better by $4 an hour than that of her previous job. For Green, it's a relief "because I'm not used to staying home." More so, it's the restoration of self-worth, satisfying a need that her historically hard-working uncle - who also landed in Atlanta - craves. Green said he has consulted a psychiatrist to cope with the unfulfilled job hunts. "He feels like he's less of a man," she said. A year of living dangerously and penuriously is winding down for the three co-workers and 100,000 fellow newbie Georgians from the Gulf Coast - by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's latest count. The transplants miss beignets and genuine red beans and rice, shopping and the Saints football team. They complain about Atlanta's tap water and traffic. But "we have a roof over our head," said Green, who has an eye on attending nursing school here next year. "I like Atlanta." |