Jennifer Beeman loves New Orleans. Some of her best memories were formed in the Big Easy, and she had family members living there. When Beeman, director of the Campus Violence Prevention Program, saw on TV how Hurricane Katrina had devastated the region, she could not stand pat.

So she volunteered for the American Red Cross, as did other UC Davis employees who wanted to lend a helping hand to the Gulf Coast. All were able to take advantage of Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef's offer of paid leave for anyone who volunteered for service in organizations like the Red Cross or the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As Beeman put it, "I thought, there needs to be more I can do than sit in front of the TV crying. I just really needed to do something. I felt so helpless."

After taking a training course in disaster services in Sacramento, Beeman arrived in Louisiana on Sept. 4 and was immediately put to work. Because she had experience managing a battered women's shelter, she was assigned to manage a shelter at a high school in Hahnville, a town about 25 miles outside of New Orleans. Her residents were 180 seniors and adults with disabilities who had been on their own for two days.

"There were people who had been without their blood pressure medication, who had been in the same wheelchair for two or three days," she says. "I don't even know how to describe it."

The high school shelter was condemned days later because of contamination, and its residents were evacuated to Baton Rouge. Beeman moved to nearby Landry Jr. High with two other Red Cross volunteers to manage a shelter of about 70 displaced families. She would stay there for almost three weeks.

Beeman had several experiences she was unprepared to handle while in Hahnville. There were the trips she took with the National Guard to her beloved New Orleans.

"After I went into New Orleans for the second time, I decided I wouldn't go back," she says. "I loved that city and it was just devastated."

Then there were the intense reactions of evacuees upon receiving Red Cross aid.

"It's hard to comprehend an adult man who bursts into tears when you give him a bottle of water," says Beeman. "I was not prepared for that. I had this moment of, 'Oh my gosh, I'm going to start sobbing,' then I had a moment of 'This man does not need my tears.'"

But Beeman saw positive signs and was stunned by the efforts of relief workers.

"The National Guardsmen would purify water all day," she says, "then come to the shelter at night and their doctor would see all of the residents, write them prescriptions and give them the medicine on the spot. This would go on till midnight, one in the morning."

Even FEMA, oft maligned in recent weeks for its sluggish reaction to the hurricane, got good reviews from Beeman. FEMA workers "would come back to the shelter at one in the morning, exhausted, and would still take the time to talk to the residents, answer their questions, and get up at 6 a.m. the next day."

'A fresh outlook'

Beeman's shelter residents affected her strongly. She was struck by how they "managed to maintain their sense of humor and their dignity" in the face of losing their homes and, for many of them, their life savings. Beeman spent many a late night playing cards, drinking coffee and talking with her residents, who affectionately called her "baby girl."

Beeman was also with her residents in the junior high school gymnasium when Hurricane Rita began threatening the Gulf Coast. Families crowded around a television donated by Circuit City to follow the storm's every movement. That was a difficult time for many, she says.

"When Hurricane Rita was coming," says Beeman, "people would literally sit in front of the TV saying, 'Dear God, we can't take any more of this.'"

Beeman's shelter was evacuated, though Rita spared Louisiana. By the time she returned to California on Sept. 26, she felt transformed. Everything that had been happening in her life before she left, from the stresses of her job to her daughter's approaching wedding, had seemed suspended while Beeman was in Louisiana. She came back with a fresh outlook.

"It reduced my stress level, seeing how people handled that kind of stress in their lives and how they handled it with dignity," she says. "I've been able to step back and say to my daughter, 'We have a roof over our head, we sleep in our own beds every night — – if the color of the party favors doesn't exactly match the wedding dress, we'll live.'"

Beeman mourns the loss of a city that may never be rebuilt, but she is thankful for the relationships she formed and the lessons she learned while at the shelter. And she will never forget the people she lived with. The people who called her "baby girl."

Beverly Wilcox, policy development coordinator for Human Resources, says the department knows of at least three campus employees who took time off to participate in relief efforts. (See sidebar "Volunteer lends expertise.) Several health system employees, including physicians, have also volunteered.

Another campus employee who served was Mike Bavister, a programmer at Shields Library. He spent Aug. 30 to Sept. 15 with a FEMA urban search and rescue team sponsored by the Menlo Park Fire District. A communications specialist, he worked with radios, computers and a Global Positioning System as the team navigated New Orleans' flooded streets in a boat and rescued people from their homes. He has been part of a FEMA search and rescue team for nine years.