more on katrina......

ok so today is thursday....and i spent the day in typical thursday fashion....lent out to a sister health department miles from home.......but today would be less than usual........i had extraordinary encounters......some pleasant and others less so......lets begin with the unsavory.......i called the name a single client to come back to my humble thursday cubicle.....and half the room rose up to follow me.......oh no.......i have learned in my year in this position that as a gatekeeper i have only to serve the client...not everybody who chose to come to town with the client on that particular day.........and so i firmly halted the wave of moving bodies......and said to the client.....that i only needed her.....and that her 2 older children, and her mother and her spouse holding the hand of the toddler....that we would only be a minute and that i only had the one guest chair in a very small space.......that must not have set well with the spouse, for as we were finishing up the paperwork and rising from out chairs he had found someone to bring him back anyway and was forcing his way into my little space as we were coming out.....like there was something he was missing out on.......the nurse present in the hall told me later that abusers have a hard time with even 5-10 minute separations from their victims....like they will tell if allowed free rein........i found the experience chilling........but then there was the bright spot of my day....when i met with a pregnant mother and her 2 children, brought in by a host family who had driven all the way to louisiana to fetch them from a church shelter........when i weighed and measured the children, the mamma was quite upset that her toddler had lost weight since his last doctor's visit.....'from the ordeal'.....was how she explained it.......she related that her apartment had been damaged by a fallen tree.... and that she suspected that the landlord would pocket the money and not fix the place to allow for her return.....she was also concerned that the hospital that she was supposed to deliver in will not reopen due to flooding/storm damage.......she replied to my query that she and her children might just stay in kentucky for the near future........the host mamma and her daughter could not have been nicer, despite the bumper sticker on their van that read.......when we kicked god out of the classroom, the devil took over..............not necessarily a sentiment i agree with, but at least with this displaced family, their heart was in the right place........