There are adjustments to be made. "It's really hard to accept gifts
or people giving you money. We have a hard time accepting the face that
we're disaster victims. Because you're so used to what you have, and you
still have most of it. It's really hard to accept that you really are
unemployed and have no income."
"It will eventually be normal," says Bill Spillers. "And it will be
different. And each individual will become normal at a different time. I
don't know how to predict when it will be normal for me."
ANDREW LEFT VALERIE VERNON WITH little more than her dead mother's
ring, a TV, and the family bible. In a matter of hours, her world went
from marginal to desperate, and landed her, a 41 -year-old grandmother,
under an olive-drab roof in Homestead's tent city, with her 20-year-old
daughter Kysha Vernon, Kysha's three children aged one to four, and their
father, 25-year-old Michael Eutsey.
By camp standards, they have a penthouse suite-two of their cots
have mattresses, and the TV works. It was salvaged from their South Miami
Heights home 30 minutes away, now enveloped in mildew and decay. Valerie
bet against the dreaded Big One by letting her $32 a month renter's
insurance lapse. Things were tight and the money was needed for the $39
monthly exterminator.
Before Andrew, Valerie lived with her daughter's family in a house
that had three bedrooms, two baths. The rain came and the ceiling began
to leak. Then it caved in. They ran into a bathroom. Two pin-size holes
began to drip. They feared another collapse. They heard people yelling
outside; neighbors were running for cover. They called for help from a
neighbor. "He heard us," says Kysha. "But he wouldn't answer," says
Valerie.
Nine people wound up huddling in one of the bathrooms; 11 took
refuge in the other. When it was over, Valerie found her front entrance
barred by a door that had blown off another house.
"The first thing we saw was looters.' Valerie reports. "There were
guys running around with shopping carts loaded up with food. At first I
thought they had children and were running scared", adds Kysha, her voice
still filled with disbelief. "It was disgusting. How could they steal
food? They didn't even have a place to put it." She pauses. "We lost
everything."
Before Andrew, Valerie had a job she liked and had just been
promoted; in theory, she still has the job, even though four of the five
Subway stores she was to manage were crumpled. Kysha was working as a
nursing assistant and studying to be a medical assistant, with a 92.5
grade point average. She has been laid off while the nursing center is
being rebuilt. That could take more than six months and put her back on
the welfare rolls. Eutsey worked for the school system as a porter. Their
lives read like warning signs of a trauma checklist.
Valerie worked a few days at some other Subway stores. "Then I told
them, 'Look, I can't-work like this.' You sign up for FEMA (Federal
Emergency Management Agency) assistance, you stand in line for hours. We
went for disaster unemployment, we were there from 11 in the morning till
4:30 in the afternoon. I can't go to work in that kind of pressure and
then be here to try and get up and wait for my time to take a shower. And
there's only one car between us' "
The family depends on a 1978 Delta 88. The roof is hurting and most
of the molding is missing. 'But it runs," she says-again, the disclaimer.
Everything has a "but" when grief is reconciled.
They struggle for a sense of normalcy. There's a plank leading to
their tent, an aquamarine bath rug near an opening that serves as a door.
It seems both out of place and inviting-a welcome mat for a place they'd
rather not be, where people live under military rule and eat their meals
in mess tents, where privacy is a memory-the tent is shared with six
men-and generators hum life into light bulbs without shades.
"The kids are cranky," says Valerie. "We're cranky." Gatorade goes
into baby bottles. There's not a lot of milk- And while they have an
insulated chest, ice melts fast in the humid Miami summers that end only
on the calendar. The babies cling and climb. They run in the muck
barefoot. AU the children have had fevers. They have had earaches and
ringworm. They are prey for mosquitos, ants, sand bugs, and horse flies.
"It's a stress test," says Kysha Vernon.
Two-year-old Branden and four-year-old Brittany now wet their beds
often. They've been sucking their thumbs more. At least they have not
woken up screaming in the night.
Others have not been so fortunate. Children who have heard over and
over about the eye of the hurricane now have a new fear: they conjure a
one-eyed monster that comes by night. In this land near the Everglades,
the men seem especially listless. "It's tearing them apart to ask for
anything," says Barham.
"It's a nightmare:' says Michael Eutsey. "I play with the kids.
just go out there and do something, try not to think about it." He says
he's not a religious guy, but he's been praying.
"I feel strange," he says, lying on his cot. "Like I don't believe
it really happened ." Click. "I think it's going to get better, one day
at a time.'
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