Loaves and Fishes

I need to tell this story before I die --- because I am the only one who can tell it.  There is one other person who knows this story, but he will not tell it, and perhaps he did not even see it the way I saw it.  Perhaps he does not even know what really happened.

Everyone living on the Gulf Coast in 2005 has a Katrina story.  I suspect there are many stories like this one, but I don't know how many of them are eventually told.

The storm came in Sunday night and early Monday morning.  Monday afternoon, I was rescued by a neighbor from my damaged house and brought to the local shelter, a grammar school some distance inland.  I arrived to find the classrooms locked and people sitting on the floors lining the dark hallways.  There was no power, no air, no food except what people had brought with them, and no water.  I managed to navigate my way through spread-out legs to find a vacant spot in a back hallway.  I thought that if I could not find fresh air I would be sick.  The toilets had stopped working sometime Monday, and were overflowing, filling the school with their stench...  

Fortunately, my "spot on the floor" was located against a locked door to some office, and I was able to find breathable air coming from under the door as I tried to sleep that night.  From Tuesday morning on, though, most of the people in the shelter found it best to sleep outdoors on the school lawn.  We had no food or water Tuesday and Wednesday.  Thursday afternoon, a helicopter landed on the lawn; a Budweiser plant some distance away had sent a truckload of Budweiser cans filled with water to the shelter.  What a welcomed gift that was! 

Thursday night, those of us sleeping outdoors were awakened by two Greyhound buses arriving from Texas.  A man who owned a pre-stressed concrete company on the coast had brought in the buses for his workers, about 150 of them, who were in the shelter with their families.  He was bringing the workers to Texas, where he would provide places for them to live and jobs in his plant there.  As each worker boarded the bus, I watched this man hand each of them a check.

After the buses left, the man came to me and said, "I have a small school bus loaded with bread, meat, and cheese for the people who are left here (about another 150 of us).  How should we handle this?"  (I had been managing the office while the police and firemen were handling other problems that week.)  I advised him to wait until morning (it was about 3:30 am then), and we would start feeding everyone.

As soon as it was light, he opened the back door of the school bus, and two of us began making sandwiches for the people in the shelter.  Under the seats in the bus, he had packages of cold meat, cheese, bread, Gatoraid, and chips.  As people lined up for the sandwiches, word quickly spread to the surrounding neighborhood that food was available at the shelter, and the lines grew.

For the next 3 hours, we continued to feed everyone who arrived.  From time to time, I would see the Mexican worker who was assisting our donor looking around under the seats.  Then he would come to the man, whose name I never learned, and say, "There's no more bread," or "We run out of meat."  Each time this happened, our benefactor would calmly say, "Look under the seats."  Now, I had just watched that assistant look under all the seats, but every time, when he looked again, he found what he was looking for -- another loaf of bread, another package of meat or cheese.  The only thing we ran out of that day was potato chips!

Eventually, we were able to hand out seconds, and the line eventually dwindled.  Finally, my co-worker and I were able to sit down and eat our own sandwiches!

I have never forgotten our own miracle of the loaves and the fishes!  I cannot explain how or why we were able to feed everyone who came to us --- the school was surrounded on every side by homes, and my guess is that we fed maybe 300 people that day.  And I cannot explain why our donor never worried that we might run out of food.  

When the Red Cross workers arrived later that morning with MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), they took inventory of everyone in the shelter so that they would know they had enough food for everyone, and they did not want to distribute food to anyone not registered in the shelter.  I understand their logistics, and the reason for their caution, but after our miracle of the loaves and the fishes, I wanted to tell them to throw their caution to the wind --- God would provide!