Before Louisiana

The following is an entry from my for-the-time-being-defunct Bemusings in Boise blog. It is dated roughly two weeks following Hurricane Katrina.

So the plus side of not being able to find a job is being able to leave town at a moment's notice for weeks at a time. This is exactly what I am doing in the next week or so with the Red Cross. I have never volunteered with the Red Cross before, nor have I been to the part of the country affected by Hurricane Katrina. This is going to be quite an adventure for me.

I wrote an email to the Red Cross explaining that I wanted to do something for those affected by the hurricane but that I did not have the money to contribute to disaster aid financially. I wrote that I was more than willing to go to the region and volunteer in that way. To my surprise, someone form my local Red cross called me the very next morning and asked me questions about my willingness to volunteer. The questions included:

"Can you make a commitment of three weeks?" pretty mild,
"Do you feel comfortable sleeping in an open-air dormitory?" and the ever popular,
"Do you have any open wounds?"

After several more questions, the volunteer on the other end of the phone told me that they were at that moment (this was the tenth of September or so) compiling a list of people interested in volunteering. e told me that I would probably hear from them in the next couple of weeks. He asked if I had any questions, but I told him I couldn't think of any right then; he told me that is how everyone felt, no one knew exactly what was going to happen and when with the disaster or the response.

To my surprise a nice lady from the Red Cross called on Friday morning. I was not home when she called, but she left a message with my living-with-me-again-ex-boyfriend, asking me to call as soon as I got in. After returning from a lovely afternoon at Art in the Park, I returned her call. The lady asked if I could attend pre-deployment training on Tuesday and Wednesday evening. Wow! This was moving much faster than I had anticipated. It was very exciting.

I have to admit that I have been in kind of a rut, getting quite depressed about not being able to find a job. This is exactly what I need; a way to get over myself while helping others who really need it.

I will keep you posted as to the contents of the upcoming training sessions.

(It is interesting for me to read this over two years later; hopefully it is for you too. I think it is really interesting that I felt that I was depressed because I wasn't able to find a job. I am sure that that is part of it, but I now know that there is a lot more to it than that, the largest part of which was my living-with-me-again-ex-boyfriend; he made me feel horrible, and I didn't even realize it as it was happening. I had lost myself. I had no idea who I was. Louisiana helped me.)