By Joe Winter
Catholic Herald correspondent

St. Patrick parishioner helps Katrina victims

HUDSON -- Karine Wilson was driving to an art show in the Nevada desert when she heard hour by hour how bad the Hurricane Katrina damage was getting.

That has prompted the Hudson art student to sell her paintings for hurricane relief, start a nonprofit organization to help further, and plan to travel to the area after her upcoming graduation to do clean-up with the Red Cross and other groups.

"I have a strong connection to this," said Wilson, who added that she switched gears to do several paintings on a Katrina theme for her senior exhibit at UW-River Falls. Many show the geography of the area hit.

"I had wonderful painting ideas from my studies abroad last year, but when the evacuation of Louisiana was called, my entire focus changed," said Wilson, a longtime member of St. Patrick Parish in Hudson, who also was especially active in youth activities. "Yeah, I'm really driven. I'm self-motivated to keep something going and keep with it."

Three years ago, Paul Wilson, the father of Wilson's three children, remarried and the children, Jakob, 14, Ford, 11, and Elaine, 10, moved to the New Orleans area to live with him and his new wife.

Because of the state-mandated evacuation, the children only saw the force of the hurricane through photographs, Wilson said.

It's unlikely the Edward Hynes Elementary School that the younger two attended will be rebuilt, since it was flooded by nine feet of water and insured with a $500,000 deductible, Wilson said.

Benjamin Franklin High, a magnet school for the gifted and talented, where Jakob went, is being cleaned and repaired, especially by parents who gather on weekends. Wilson said school officials hope to occupy it by the beginning of the next term in January.

It is not known if all the students will be able to return and join their former classmates, since many of the houses they lived in were badly damaged.

Wilson had been corresponding frequently with a religious sister who led the religious education sessions for her children, but has not heard from her since the hurricane.

Wilson already has helped with the opening of the Biloxi (Miss.) Free Grocery, which has assisted families in the area, and she will be delivering supplies there later. One of the first things done in Biloxi was to construct a dome where people could obtain temporary shelter, and then food was the next community need.

A Buddhist temple in Biloxi is being repaired with the help of Wilson's friends who are artists, and stores were cleaned so they could reopen and help local families.

Some of the same people also helped establish a free clinic in Algiers, which is across the river from the French Quarter in New Orleans.

Wilson has queried about what she can do to help the volunteer doctors and nurses. She isn't exactly sure what she'll be asked to do when she arrives after graduation, but added it probably will depend on day-to-day needs.

"Today it could be delivering diapers, and tomorrow it could be something completely different," she said, adding that there are many more needs in other areas.

Some of them are simply financial. "Some people just could not pack up and leave to go right away," Wilson said, adding that the need for help will exist for years to come.

"I think on the spiritual side, part of being a community and having a (close-knit) neighborhood is being able to have generations of people stay together in the same area," Wilson said, adding that may not be possible because of a need to move on from damaged housing.

This Katrina warning was the fifth hurricane evacuation warning in three years, so her family's effort to leave at first was a bit mundane, Wilson said. Elaine, the youngest, told Wilson over the phone that they were OK and not to worry, and that she had taken all the precious items from her dresser drawer and the family cat with her.

"You never think that you won't have a home to go back to," Wilson recalled thinking not long after she hit the road with her paintings earlier this fall.

Her destination, called "Burningman," is a huge art show and event held each year at a site in the Black Rock Desert, 100 miles north of Reno. Its regulars, who are nicknamed "Burners," are a self-reliant group who travel long distances to attend, Wilson said.

As she and other artists trekked toward the Burningman site in the desert, they kept up as best they could on news about Katrina, although radio and cell phone reception was difficult. Satellite phones and a Red Cross Web site with a page devoted to the hurricane were helpful, she said.

"It became very solemn and serious," Wilson said of the Burningman event. "It was all about what you could do to contribute."

As they learned more, the artists decided to do fund raising to assist the victims of Katrina, Wilson said.

Wilson was kept abreast of the how people were doing in the aftermath of the hurricane by residents and friends, and by information that was made available on-line by the local Parent Teacher Organization, with whom she will work on weekends come January.

"They were evacuated to this place and evacuated to that place," Wilson recalls she was told. "We were all shocked when the levee broke."

Wilson now is certified by the Red Cross, as a disaster relief caseworker, so she can do more when she gets down to the hurricane area. She leaves Jan. 3, will drive back about two weeks later to bring one of her children home for an event -- and pick up supplies -- then make a return trip down south with both.

"I have a lot of other friends who are activists or artists, or who work in the service industry," Wilson said, adding that she's been organizing such people to assist under the umbrella of her nonprofit organization. "The Biloxi effort is mostly a bunch of 'Burners.'"

Some of them are finding that their artistic talents, as a blacksmith or glass artist, for instance, are tailor-made to help with the reconstruction effort. Wilson herself has diverse artistic talents. Her senior exhibition included a piece of performance art, "17th Street Levee," where she painted directly on an entire gallery wall. "By re-creating the expulsion of (levee-breaking) water in the gallery setting, I hoped to entice some emotional response from the viewers."

One of her friends, Rebecca Chojnacki of Hudson, deputy director of Wilson's nonprofit group, as well as a safety coordinator in the hurricane area, plans to leave for the Gulf Coast over Thanksgiving. She recently got a degree from the Occupational Safety and Health Association as an environmental scientist.

Such training is required for relief workers to remove hazardous materials, and they must know how to use special equipment. "Some methods will work for some materials and greatly increase the problem with others. I know how far out the problem may spread and in what manner," Chojnacki said.

Without training, access to many areas is denied, since people may not know the nature of the contamination, which often is widespread. There also aren't enough officials to test conditions for safety, and Chojnacki hopes to help out in that drastically needed area, because people can be exposed to hazardous waste without knowing it, and even an instant can cause great medical harm.

Editors note: People who want to help can visit the Web site Wilson has established, www. Grassroots KatrinaEffort. org.

< Local Archives

© Superior Catholic Herald, 2005