Students welcome a family

Schools in the Albany Diocese are pitching in to help children in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina.

An example is Holy Spirit School in East Greenbush, which has welcomed a former family that returned to the Albany Diocese after being flooded out of its new Louisiana home.

The school has also "adopted" Resurrection Elementary School in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and is sending supplies and prayers its way.

Family returns

One student at Holy Spirit School appreciates the efforts to help hurricane survivors more than most: First-grader Michael Kelly's family returned after losing everything when Hurricane Katrina ripped apart the military housing in Gulfport, Louisiana, where they lived.

U.S. Navy Lt. Ian Kelly, his wife Jennifer, and their children Michael and 13-month-old Madeline had moved to the Gulf Coast just a year ago, when Lt. Kelly was transferred from Okinawa, Japan, to the U.S. before being deployed to Iraq.

Mrs. Kelly, who grew up in the Albany Diocese, assumed she and her children would be living in Louisiana for the next two years while her husband was deployed. Instead, she found herself being evacuated to Pensacola, Florida, with other military families when the hurricane hit.

Gone forever

The Kellys learned that half their apartment complex had been demolished. Their own building was still standing, but the roof had been ripped off, and water had ruined nearly everything they owned.

Lt. Kelly, who stayed behind in Louisiana with a Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (NMBC) to help with cleanup efforts, managed to get into the apartment. He saved a few family photos that had been stored in a plastic container and a couple of his son's toys.

Meanwhile, "we bought plane tickets and came up here," said Mrs. Kelly, who is now living in Kinderhook with her parents. They are parishioners of Nativity/St. Mary's parish in Stuyvesant Falls. "We arrived here with one suitcase of clothes."

In shock

Mrs. Kelly told The Evangelist she's still in shock: "It's still so new. Some days, I get very angry; answers don't come quick enough. Small tasks seem very hard to get accomplished, like making phone calls to change our address. My main goal is to get the kids settled."

When the family first arrived, she noted, baby Madeline was "very stressed" and wouldn't sleep in the unfamiliar surroundings. Michael cried for his lost toys, books and friends.

Adapting

But "people have been absolutely wonderful," Mrs. Kelly said. Michael has received enough uniforms and school supplies to attend Holy Spirit, where he already knew many students from the last time his family was stationed here.

Mrs. Kelly doesn't think the six-year-old really understands the extent of the devastation down south.

"He asked his daddy if he was able to get some Rescue Heroes stuff, and I think he saved a couple of Rescue Heroes" action figures, she said, referring to her husband's trek to their waterlogged living quarters.

Much to do

Mrs. Kelly is struggling to get through the major tasks of dealing with paperwork and insurance agents to replace their lost possessions.

"The insurance people said we have to fill out an inventory of our whole house, down to a roll of toilet paper," she said.

Remembering everything seems impossible. "It's so weird to go to a store and say, 'Oh, yeah, I used to have that,'" she explained.

She worries about the effect on her husband of seeing the damage firsthand. "It's more traumatic on him," she explained. "It'll hit me more when I try to move and there's nothing to move."

Future

The Kellys plan to stay out the school year in the Diocese, since Lt. Kelly will probably be sent to Kuwait after the holidays and then to Iraq. Harder than losing everything, said Mrs. Kelly, is being apart from her husband.

"My husband has a job; we're thankful for that," she noted. And "that wasn't our home. We knew we were only there for two years. There's people down there who've lived there their whole lives. The devastation is unbelievable. The church we used to attend is gone; the Catholic school is gone. Even big stores like Wal-Mart and K-Mart are gone."

Mrs. Kelly urged people to donate all they can to relief organizations. People in the affected areas, she noted, are still wearing the same clothes they had on when the hurricane hit.

Adopting school

Holy Spirit's efforts to twin with a Mississippi school came about as a result of the internet. Resurrection School lost all its supplies and its library.

A parent from Holy Spirit read about Resurrection's plight on the internet and alerted principal Sister Maureen Moffitt, CSJ, who began "Operation Backpack."

The goal is to collect 200 backpacks of school supplies, enough for all the Resurrection students and additional students who now attend Resurrection because their own schools didn't survive the hurricane.

Prayer chain

In addition, Holy Spirit School is donating library books to Resurrection. In each book, a student writes a note: "We're so sorry about your troubles," or, "Our prayers are with you."

Sister Maureen said that one student wrote, "Mom and Dad and all of us say a prayer for you every night."

Holy Spirit has also created a "prayer chain" of prayers written by students and hung around the school; students take a moment every morning to collectively pray for victims of the hurricane.

(9/22/05) [[In-content Ad]]