Sunday October 20
It’s 3:15 AM and now I’m sitting in the lobby of a different hotel trying to stay up until 5AM to prepare myself for the midnight shifts that I signed up to handle at the new “mega-shelter” which apparently is a big deal because it’s bigger and more comfortable than the vast majority of shelters that Red Cross has done in the past. I visited and did a walkthrough earlier this evening as many of their crew were finishing up their last shift. It’s in this giant empty warehouse, like as big as the Amazon fulfillment center I visited but totally empty except for our little village of tents and trailers and air conditioners. I guess we’ve got 24/7 nursing care here too which is usually not the case.
So in many ways this trip has been freaking great and is making me even more loyal to the Red Cross long term… however… it has been… I have to be careful about my wording here… it’s disorganized.
Disorganized.
So I’m just hearing stories, so much of it could be schoolyard rumors, but when you hear it from multiple people who are all professionals–so apparently in the middle of the night, someone noticed that the numbers on the trailers were out of order, so decided to change them so they were in order. Well, people were sleeping in those trailers, got up to go pee and several people went back into the wrong trailers. One man supposedly walked in on a naked woman and they were both like really upset about it.
Supposedly there was no dispatch on the food delivery, they weren’t checking out the vehicles, didn’t know where they were going. A couple shelters didn’t get their dinners, meanwhile the delivery drivers have so much extra food that they drive around town just searching for people on the street to give it to.
Oh, and at basecamp there’s a table marked Lost and Found, but there’s a second sign also marking it as Leave and Take (leave stuff you don’t need for anyone to take). So if you lose something, it’ll get dropped on this table for anyone to take. The lady I borrowed the blanket from, well her trailer disappeared and I forgot to get her name, so I had to put her blanket on the Lost Leave Take Found table.
So Friday me and another volunteer drove down to the office to get dispatched out to a supply warehouse, when it’s like, why don’t they just dispatch people over the phone? Or better yet, have some kind of system in place to dispatch people–I mean we do have an app with all our info about our job and where we’re supposed to be but it seems half the people don’t use it and just do everything by the seat of their pants.
So we drove over an hour to this warehouse, only to discover they didn’t actually need any help so they gave us busy work of collating informational papers meant for shelter workers–except shelter workers all need to have smartphones–why not just send out all that info as a PDF?
So Saturday I guess it finally clicked in my head that I was never going to get assigned to a real job unless I went out and made it happen–because I kept hearing that there actually is a whole lot of work to do. But there was just some kind of massive communication breakdown on this deployment. Some of the old veterans say this is the most disorganized deployment since Katrina back in–was it 2005?–
So I just went around looking for work. One person at the staff shelter said he needed me but didn’t have the authority to actually put me to work. He told me to wait to hear back but I was done waiting so I took a shuttle down to the Red Cross Tampa office and just started asking around “who here needs help with something? I’m a stray. I need work.”
I told them someone wanted me back at the staff shelter (Adventure Island Basecamp was just a fun name for a staff shelter) but instead they assigned me to the new “Mega-shelter”. They almost put me in a class on how to do damage assessment, which I thought would be a good thing to learn so I can do it on these deployments but also it would come in handy back home when I go out to the smaller individual house fires.
Instead they told me to wait around.
So I walked to a Home Depot because I have this idea where I want to make a marble run in my house from the upstairs down into the living room along the wall and I wanted to see what they might have there that I could use. I found some plastic edging that I think would be great and economical. I just need to figure out the best way to attach it to the walls.
Anyway, I had lunch and rode the city bus back to Adventure Island Basecamp and a couple hours later got picked up to come out here to the Mega Shelter right between Tampa and Orlando.
So Red Cross has a policy that we do not shelter in the same place as the residents but here there’s not enough of us to justify a whole other camp so they put us up in hotel rooms.
But we get to the hotel and me and the two folks I came with–well they just can’t find our reservation. So after–an hour maybe?–they can’t find, it we can’t get ahold of the agency that booked it, or maybe they can’t get us an answer. The front desk guy was calling them, the two guys I came with were calling.
AS far as I know, we never got our rooms. I think they may have booked it at a different hotel and accidentally sent us to this one. So instead we just started asking all the other Red Cross people if they had extra beds we could sleep on.
So it’s like, you just got to be flexible. You gotta figure it out as you go. It wasn’t like this four years ago in New Orleans when I did that deployment. There was a little disorganization but nothing like this. There was really only once where things got weird where I took this woman across town to sign up for FEMA and told her how to use public transportation to get back. We made it real clear what she needed to do, but she was still scared of riding buses and when we got there a security guard told us the bus she was gonna use was notorious for just never showing up, so I decided to stay and wait with her as she signed up for FEMA then get her back to the shelter via Uber, so I basically went against my supervisors orders as she’d told me to come right back and I think I’d forgotten to take down her number so couldn’t tell her what I was doing, but later when I explained why I was two hours late coming back, she said that I’d definitely done the right thing by staying with her.
But that was just once that I remember the last trip where things really didn’t go as planned–unless you count when I got caught in a hurricane while I was trying to get to my assignment.
Anyway, Red Cross deployments have actually been really freaking fun for me overall. I may try to do one every year around hurricane season.
So anyway, I found an extra bed and now I’m down in the lobby because I didn’t want to disturb my roommate and it’s probably healthier for me down here anyway.
Also I kind of want waffles. I said I’d go to bed at 5 but free make your own waffles start at 6 down here and I kind of want a waffle.
But a bunch of the other volunteers they had a little party down here in the lobby before going to bed because most of them are going home in the morning–which I guess is right now. They wound up doing a good job giving me a feel for how it’s going to go. Sounds like they all had an amazing time and became fast friends after just two weeks together.
It’s like this weird big hippie commune but without all the drugs and music but with a shared mission that actually means something.
I guess there’s been news reporters and politicians and stuff coming to see this whole new type of shelter. It reminded me of part of either Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul I can’t remember which, where they secretly housed a work crew in a big warehouse and created this little village inside it.
I think there’s a final season of Better Call Saul that I need to go back to.
Anyway, I guess people are realizing that hurricanes are going to get worse and worse every year and income disparity keeps getting worse, so the need for shelters every year will get bigger and bigger, so we need to figure out ways to make the shelters bigger and bigger.
I just re-read my wednesday entry and noted just how many things I was wrong about. If anyone ever does read these things, I hope they don’t take it too seriously.
This is meant as my internal dialogue that people can have a window into.
Maybe that’s just me making excuses “Don’t get mad at stupid shit i say cuz I don’t edit and it’s just a fast mind dump.”
Starting to get real tired.
Also worried about my mom. She’s still in the hospital and docs still think she’s gonna recover just fine but I’m still worried.
It’s weird how I want to just keep writing about anything, even though I’ve come to a logical end of the entry. Like go back to that dream where I kicked a dog or talk about Anxious Generation book and about how technology and rules and modern society have so deeply separated us from who we truly are as humans.
I guess that’s one thing I truly love about Red Cross. We may be disorganized but at the end of the day, we are all being human. That’s the whole point of our organization is to bring back a sense of actually being human again.
Reconnecting with ourselves.
We are all of one consciousness experiencing ourself subjectively.