If I hear one more white person who lives in their own house and drives their own nice new car say that the sorry state of affairs in NO is the fault of the people who didn't leave on Sunday, I am going to scream.
I never had to leave some place with just the clothes on my back. When we came to the States, we had some luggage. Not much, but still. And it was a conscious decision, and we had time to pack and leave. And yet I have an experience that in a very small way illuminates for me what the flood refugees are going through.
You see, I grew up in Kiev, Ukraine. I was there in April on 1986, when Chernobyl blew up. (more on the flip)
I was not yet 12 years old. The government there evacuated people in the immediate zone of the disaster (well and fast), but then proceeded to lie to the world and its own citizens about the extent of the problem. The reactor blew up on April 26. They didn't admit the extent and start evacuating schools from Kiev until about May 12th. (They were only evacuating children for the summer--sending them/us to pioneer camps all over the country. My husband's school, got a real good deal. My school--not so much.) By May 8th, however, my family has had enough with the lying and the cover-ups.
But my parents are engineers. We lived in a one-room apartment (that right--one room, not one bedroom). Paycheck-to-paycheck. Meaning we had no money to get on the train or a plane. My aunt and uncle weren't doing much better. But my grandfather was a disabled veteran of WWII, and because of that, he had a car. A tiny little thing. The size of a Ugo. About VW Beatle, but smaller, I think.
So we piled up into the car-- my dad to drive, my mom on the passenger seat next to him, my aunt and I in the back seat. If you are counting, you might think this is it for room in the car, right? Well, not quite. We had two preschoolers spread across our laps in the back seat-- my sister and my cousin. My sister, not yet 4, and my cousin, who is 10 month older than my sister.
The realization that my daughter is almost as old as my sister was that May made me want to cry this morning. All of a sudden, I could feel the primal fear my mother must have felt, OMG, almost 20 years ago now.
The gas was cheap in the USSR. We pulled our resources, and our grandparents, who stayed behind, helped. That is the only way we were able to leave. We headed for Crimea. It was very hard to find a place to stay--we weren't the only refugees looking for housing. And that was on top of the usual summer crowd. After a very long time looking in our destination city (I seem to remember it took a whole day), we found one room with access to kitchen facilities--that was all we could afford. The day after, my dad turned around to head back to Kiev and go to work. Knowing my father, I doubt he ate more than once a day that summer--he was saving money for us.
We stayed with my mom and aunt for 3 months, and then my dad and uncle came, and the women left. That lasted another month. You see, the only way for us to stay there was for someone to stay behind and work. Both my parents said that the weirdest thing was that the city was so silent over that summer. Usually, it's full of children's voices. Not that summer.
I remember that after we finally found the room, we saw on TV in landlord's kitchen Gorbachev giving the Victory Day speech. It was May 9th--the day USSR celebrated victory over Nazi Germany. I don't think he said a single word about Chernobyl. I remember my dad saying he has had it with this guy (my dad was very enthusiastic about Perestroyka. Right up until Chernobyl).
I remember we had to go to these special clinics to get tested for radiation exposure. They didn't find anything wrong with us at the time.
We were lucky-- we returned four months later to our homes in our city. It didn't look the same-- they took down almost all the old trees because the trees trapped the radiation, but then started to slowly release it. But we had our apartments, and my parents still had jobs.
Had we had to leave altogether, with sick grandparents, we couldn't afford it. Knowing my family, they would have pulled the resources to try to get the kids out of the city and they would have stayed behind to try to help the grandparents survive.
Memory is a funny thing. I remember being annoyed at my parents for taking me out of school. BTW, watching attendance shrink day by day as other parents were doing what my parents would eventually do was the weirdest experience of my life at that point, I am sure of it. I also remember being annoyed when I found out that about a week later my classmates who at that point were still in Kiev got to go to a summer camp, all of them together, for the whole summer. I really wanted to go there. I was upset I didn't get that adventure. Now, as an adult and a mother, I see how silly my complaints were. They meant the world to me. To my parents, we, my sister and I, meant the world. And they were trying to save us.
Memory is a funny thing. I almost forgot this whole story. I don't think about it very often. I wake up in my nice house. I can take a shower any time I want. I get to decide what I am having for breakfast and whether I am going to bring or buy my lunch. My husband and I watch the images on TV in horror, but sitting as we are in our nice house with a two car garage it's hard to comprehend.
There are thousands of people in NO who lived paycheck-to-paycheck. They didn't have the money for the bus tickets for their families. And nowhere to go because how do you pay for shelter once you get there? On CNN this morning there was a man who was turned away from the Astrodome, because it's full. He said "I guess I have to buy a newspaper to look for a job."
Memory is a funny thing. Yesterday, I understood on a cerebral level that the people on my TV had nowhere to go. Today, after the memory of that long-ago trip flooded (no pun intended) my mind, I feel it. And the next person who tries to tell me they are getting what they deserve because they didn't leave in time will wish they never said it. At least not to me. I swear.
Society should be judged by how we treat the least of us. Our government has failed that test. The mayor of NO and the governor of LA couldn't have commandeered busses, trains and planes to take these people out. They couldn't have ordered Navy ships from Norfolk to head for Florida and hang out there so they could arrive in NO as soon as it was safe. The president could have and should have. Instead he played golf and had cake.
Memory is a funny thing. But I promise--this I will not forget.