Posted on 09/15/2005 7:13:52 AM PDT by WestTexasWend
David Phillips waved goodbye to volunteers as he pulled away from the shelter at the Reese Technology Center on Wednesday morning.
Piled in the back of a city truck were an acoustic guitar, three televisions, a microwave and bags of clothes - items Phillips and his family have amassed since landing in Lubbock a week and a half ago.
Within hours, the family of six had unpacked and settled into their new home - a two-bedroom apartment at the Salvation Army's downtown shelter.
"I feel good about this. We're making the best of what we have," said Cheryl Phillips, David's wife. "It's not home, but we'll make it home." Cheryl Phillips will work as a cook in the shelter while David, a former longshoreman in New Orleans, operates a forklift for the Salvation Army. The arrangement will allow the family to more easily care for David's blind, 80-year-old father, Louis Phillips.
The Phillipses were one of the last families to leave the temporary shelter at Reese before it closed Wednesday afternoon. Lubbock's hurricane victim shelter was among the nation's first to close.
The shelter closing is intended to help get the approximately 200 Hurricane Katrina victims staying in Lubbock back to a normal life.
"The longer you leave people in a mass shelter, the more dependent they become on us," said Assistant City Manager Quincy White.
For the past week and a half, the American Red Cross, Salvation Army and city of Lubbock have housed as many as 430 evacuees in a hangar at the Reese Center. The hurricane victims lived on cots or air mattresses, bathed in portable showers and ate at the center's cafeteria.
By Wednesday morning, the showers were gone, the portable rest rooms were being loaded onto trucks and boxes of food were waiting to be picked up.
All evacuees had either gone to live with friends or family elsewhere or moved into apartments throughout town.
The hurricane victims are spread across the city in about 100 apartments. White said the city tried to spread the evacuees out so that they would be better able to adjust to Lubbock with help from their new neighbors.
The city has purchased furniture from several area stores and will be delivering it to evacuees throughout the next few days.
The city and volunteer organizations will still assist and support all the new Lubbockites.
"The shelter is closed, but the work for the community is not over," said local Red Cross Chairman Greg Bruce. "They're going to need a lot of hand-holding to acclimate back to regular life."
Bruce also said that he hopes the momentum for helping displaced New Orleans residents will carry over to help address Lubbock's impoverished.
As for the Phillipses, they're ready to get on with their lives.
"This is a little paradise for us now," Cheryl said.
I don't downplay the tragic loss at all, but I do think that for those ready and willing to make lemonade, getting off the plantation and seeing what the rest of the world has to offer may be the best thing that ever happened to them.
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