Oaklander swept up in storm relief

Oakland Tribune, Nov 12, 2005 by Momo Chang, CORRESPONDENT

Mimi-Cristien Nguyen was hoping to reunite with her childhood friends on her trip to Houston during Labor Day weekend.

But instead of hanging out with the friends she grew up with in Vietnam until they all moved to the United States and scattered across different states, the Oakland resident found herself helping out with relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina hit.

An estimated 55,000 Vietnamese were displaced as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Most fled to Houston, home to one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the country, to seek temporary shelter.

"People just started coming in all of a sudden, and the community was still trying to sort things out," Nguyen said, describing the chaos in Houston. "We thought, however we can help, we'll help."

She found herself driving donations to churches and purchasing soap, detergent and rice for evacuees.

Though Nguyen, 31, lives in Oakland, she continues to help out families along the Gulf Coast. To her, the Vietnamese community there is like extended family.

She returned a month later, on Oct. 6, to New Orleans, Houston and Port Arthur, Texas, and brought along four other bilingual volunteers as part of an adhoc organization called Viet Bay Area Katrina, or VietBAK. They said the experience was so intense and personal they wanted to be interviewed collectively.

The members are Mimi-Cristien Nguyen, who works at the AlamedaCounty Law Library; Loan Dao and Tuyen Tran, Ph.D. students at the University of California, Berkeley; Thien Nguyen, who works at a nonprofit in Oakland; and Vernon Phan, a Ph.D. student at San Francisco State.

They found some people who had to relocate twice, once from New Orleans to Port Arthur, Texas, after Katrina hit, and then again to Houston after Hurricane Rita. Most of them were already refugees from Vietnam. Mostly low-income and monolingual, many relied on the shrimping and fishing industries to make a living in towns along the Gulf Coast.

"Some of them have been displaced as many as three or four times," Thien Nguyen says.

They initially went to volunteer at the Hong Kong Mall in Houston, a large shopping center with many Vietnamese-owned businesses and services, a hub of the community. There, the Federal Emergency Management Agency set up a medical clinic, and the five of them volunteered with Houston-based nonprofit Boat People S.O.S. When they were there, the doctors and nurses were Bay Area volunteers from Kaiser Permanente.

The five wound up being informal translators for FEMA and given official badges. Some volunteered at the Houston Disaster Recovery Center set up by FEMA in a large warehouse with information kiosks. One booth had a big yellow banner that simply read, "Lost Children."

Many of the services required filling out forms, such as Medicare, FEMA immediate relief aid, unemployment insurance and housing vouchers -- none of which was printed in Vietnamese. They spent much of their time advocating for evacuees and translating.

They saw people waiting in line at booths for hours, only to be given an 800 number to call, with messages recorded in English or Spanish. They only knew of three FEMA staff who spoke Vietnamese. In total, the friends estimated, they translated for nearly 200 people a day.

They saw the Vietnamese community's deep emotional tie to New Orleans. Most lived in New Orleans East, including parishes such as St. Bernard and neighborhoods such as Versailles with large Vietnamese and African-American populations.

The group witnessed the first wave of residents returning to their homes after the devastation.

Though residents were allowed to return to clean up their houses in Versailles in early October, no one could stay there past 8 p.m. At the time, the soil in certain areas was being tested for toxicity.

"It was unsanitary, but people wanted to come back because it's a close-knit community with a lot of elders," says Mimi-Cristien Nguyen. "They just wanted to go home. They have this idea that they'll come back, rebuild, and live together again."

Some families have known each other for 50 years, tracing back to North Vietnam. In 1954, many evacuated to South Vietnam after Communist forces ousted French colonists, and then again to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s following the Vietnam War. After all this evacuation, they bonded like family.

VietBAK wants to provide long-term, direct assistance as much as possible. They say long-term efforts in the area should focus on rebuilding, housing and employment.

Much of the fishing and shrimping industries have been destroyed because of water contamination and the closure of shrimping plants.

The five Bay Area volunteers worked with the Rev. Vien Nguyen of Versailles' Mary Queen of Viet Nam Church, which has a congregation of

6,000 Vietnamese Catholics.

Though there was no electricity or running water, they slowly began cleaning up houses, a small step in the physical and mental rebuilding process.

Since the group left, the area has been open for people to move back. As of Thursday, the Rev. Nguyen says there was electricity in some parts of Versailles for the first time in three months.