[StBernard] Two women who faced fear and floodwaters together are honored for their courage

Westley Annis westley at da-parish.com
Fri Sep 29 22:08:39 EDT 2006


Two women who faced fear and floodwaters together are honored for their
courage
Friday, September 29, 2006
By Bill Walsh
Washington bureau

WASHINGTON -- With Hurricane Katrina swirling toward New Orleans, most of
the disabled and elderly residents at St. Bernard Manor in Meraux had been
scooped up by their families and taken to higher ground.

Kimberly Cook, a 24-year-old paraplegic with cerebral palsy, had been in a
wheelchair all her life, but never felt so helpless.

With her parents deceased, she placed a desperate call to the nurse's aide
who looked in on her every day. Patricia Williams had for a year been
bathing and dressing Cook and tending to a hundred other details. Now "Miss
Pat" was about to become a lifeline as well.

Katrina's devastation spawned many stories of courage and generosity, but
Williams and Cook overcame more than most. The two women -- one who could
barely move, the other who refused to leave -- fled coursing floodwaters,
lost all of their possessions and bounced from one shelter to the next.
Ultimately, their journey drew them closer, transforming them from nurse and
patient into companions who are rebuilding their lives together.

The two received the first "No Limits Award" from the United Cerebral Palsy
in Washington on Wednesday night.

"These were two strong women faced with an incredibly horrible situation,"
said the Rev. Sam Maranto, a Baton Rouge Redemptorist priest who put the
women up at his rectory for nearly four months. "They had faith in
themselves and love and confidence in one another. Each was able to help the
other one make this journey out of the destruction that was their lives and
make a new start."

Before Katrina, Williams filled the 3 to 11 p.m. slot in the daily nursing
rotation at Cook's assisted living apartment. They had grown close over a
year of daily visits, Williams filling a void left by Cook's recently
deceased parents. It hardly mattered, they say, that Cook is white and
Williams is black.

"We're not related, but we might as well be, right, Mama?" Cook said,
looking over to Williams during an interview. "We're like family. The only
thing separating us is the color of our skin and that don't mean jack."

"That's right, baby," Williams assured.

When she got the call from Cook the day before the storm, she didn't
hesitate. The area floods even in a heavy rain. Both knew it was no place to
be with a killer storm bearing down.

Williams and her two daughters raced to Cook's apartment, packed a bag of
clothes and a teddy bear and loaded her into the car. The electric
wheelchair didn't fit, so it stayed behind.

Williams figured they would be safe at her house in the Lower 9th Ward. But
her husband, Harold Foy Sr., wasn't so sure. He and his wife could climb up
on the roof if the waters came, but what about Cook? They went to their
daughter's house in the 7th Ward instead.

Foy was right. Their 9th Ward home, like those of all their neighbors,
flooded past the rafters.

"Thank God you were with me," Williams said to Cook. "I would have stayed
there and then it would have been, oh, Lord . . ."

The water found them anyway, at Williams' daughter's house.


Coming and coming


When it rose around Cook's bed, Williams' son-in-law, Derek, picked her up
and waded through chest-deep water to a nearby house. They thought they
would be safe in a building with a second floor. They were wrong.

The water rose up around their knees.

"It's like it was chasing us," Cook said.

The family yelled to passing helicopters and boats until a Coast Guard
vessel came by. They lifted Cook through a second-story window on a blanket.


As the boat motored away, Williams spotted two infants floating in an
inflated plastic swimming pool, bobbing like a toy in a bathtub. No parents
were in sight.

The captain said he would come back for them, but Williams insisted they
stop. The huddled evacuees added two terrified babies to their circle.

The group was dropped at what passed for high ground in post-Katrina New
Orleans: a highway overpass at Elysian Fields Avenue. With only cookies to
eat, they waited 10 hours as they contemplated their flooded homes and
uncertain futures.

An Army truck finally hauled them off to the Superdome, which was quickly
filling with flood victims from all over New Orleans. Cook was told to go
around back to a makeshift medical clinic. Williams had a decision to make:
stay with Cook or go into the Dome with her own family. It wouldn't be the
last time she put the well-being of her patient over her own.

"I said I wasn't leaving her," Williams said. "They would have put her in a
nursing home. I told (my family) I would see them later."

It would be three months before she would.

The two women waited in the back of the truck for two hours before finally
being taken to Kenner. They were dropped under a bridge.


Another angel arrives


Eventually, Williams persuaded an ambulance driver to take them the hour
north to Baton Rouge. They were dropped at the field house at Louisiana
State University, where thousands of other New Orleanians had taken shelter.
Cook was worried. Now that she was out of danger, would Williams leave to
find her own family?

Cook had spotted another nurse pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair. As
soon as the nurse collected her disaster money from the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, she left the woman behind.

"She dropped the lady like an old pair of shoes," Cook said. "I looked at
Miss Pat and said that could never happen to us, could it? She said, 'Of
course not, baby.' "

"I honestly believe that it's because of her that I'm alive right now," Cook
said, emotion choking her voice.

They had been at the LSU field house for a week when the man who would
become their savior happened by. Maranto said he was struck by Cook right
away.

"It was her cheerfulness that seemed strange to me," he said. "It wasn't
what I would have expected for someone who had just escaped a disaster and
lost everything."

After that, he came by regularly, chatting about church history and quizzing
Cook on the Italian phrases she gleaned from a textbook he had given her.
But the respite wouldn't last.

The women were told they were being moved to another shelter in Lake
Charles. The priest grimaced. He had seen another cerebral palsy patient
"stuffed into a van like a sausage." He pressed his card into Cook's hand
and told her to call if they ran into trouble.


Enough, already


No sooner had they arrived in Lake Charles than they were told they would be
shipped to Texas the next day. They both thought of what Maranto had said.

"We looked at one another and said, 'Oh please, no more traveling. We've had
enough,' " Cook said. "We dug through our clothes, pulled apart everything,
looking for his card."

With a borrowed SUV, the priest and a friend pulled up that afternoon to
take them back to Baton Rouge. He set up an apartment in the back of the St.
Gerard Majella church rectory.

Eventually, Williams tracked down her husband, who had ended up in New
Mexico. He made his way to north Baton Rouge and the three of them settled
into the makeshift apartment.

As the days wore on, it became clear that there would be no returning to New
Orleans. The city where both women had been born had become an inhospitable
place even for people without serious medical conditions. They started
talking about finding a place together.

Maranto, a man with a fat Rolodex and neighborhood sources that would make a
gossip columnist envious, once again came through. He heard that a tidy
two-bedroom, one-bathroom house nearby was about to go on the market. He had
known the owner, Josie Giammerse, since he was a boy. When she died, he
asked her daughters about selling.

Cook and Williams didn't have much. Between them they scraped together
$54,000. With real estate prices in Baton Rouge soaring with the influx of
evacuees, the priest figured the house would be beyond their means. He was
stunned when he heard the asking price: $54,000.


'It is worth it'


Maranto dug into a disaster fund set up by the Redemptorist Order for the
closing costs and it appeared the two women's long journey was about to end.


They had hoped to move in by Christmas, but there was a last-minute glitch
with the legal papers. Maranto found a lawyer to donate his time to
straighten out the problem.

They moved in Dec. 22. When they swung open the front door, they found a
fully furnished home, complete with a Christmas tree and presents courtesy
of Josie Giammerse's family.

Today, Williams said people ask her why she didn't just leave Cook behind.
Surely the evacuation would have gone more smoothly and she wouldn't have
been separated from her own family. But that's just it, she tells them.

"It was just like she was my child. I don't look at her and say, 'Oh, that's
my patient.' It was my problem and I'm glad today I did it," Williams said.
"If I hadn't, I would have lived the rest of my life knowing I was only 10
minutes away from her and I didn't do anything. After all the hardships we
went through, it is worth it knowing that I didn't leave her."

. . . . . . .

Bill Walsh can be reached at bill.walsh at newhouse.com or (202) 383-7817.









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