Louisiana, Katrina & the Red Cross, Page 9
Monday, October 3, 2005
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The next stage in the distribution of gift cards is to go out to the Parishes in the Central Louisiana area. We are starting at Harrisonburg, LA in the Catahoula Parish. In addition to distributing cards, we will also start doing new intake forms designed to produce checks that can be mailed to clients rather than new cards. The theory is that by now many clients will have some kind of permanent mailing address, something that was not available at the beginning of the disaster.

We planned to start at 10:00AM, but the parish staff announced a starting time of 1:00PM. That gave us lots of time to set up. Harrisonburg is a small town - the courthouse is the largest building. The local jail is also in the building - prisoners actually wear stripes! They have a drug store next door that is the closest to a general store I have seen in quite a while. Wonderful people - one of the red cross workers needed a prescription filled; she didn't have her insurance card but the druggist filled it for the cost of the co pay and asked her to mail in a copy of the card.

The room we worked out of was the parish governance room. The air conditioning was broken so it was quite warm. Overall, we handed out about 20 cards & did around 100 new intake forms.

Catahoula Parish	The Jail	The Card Files

After closing, two vans went back to Tall Timbers & we used the third to take the cards back to the chapter headquarters.

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