Hi Chris!

Jason Hurst

New Mobility Magazine Article - December 2005

When Home is Not Home
cover story 2
December 2005
When Home is Not Home
By Jean Dobbs

Photos by Sabree Hill

Jason Hurst had been in the wrong place at the wrong time before--that's how he got shot in the neck 11 years ago. But in late August, everything seemed right. He and his family had struggled past bouts of unemployment to regain their financial independence. They had succeeded in sending two more kids to college. They had their health, a happy home and exciting new projects on the horizon. Unfortunately, their American Dream was about to capsize.

At first, Jason, 30, and his mother, Willmarine, 55, were planning to ride out the storm. Jason, a C5-6 quad, didn't want to leave--he had just started grad school in urban and regional planning and was looking forward to studying ways to improve his city. The irony is not lost on him. "I guess if I ever get that degree, I'll have a job, huh?"

Willmarine, a writer, had just started a new job and--before the hurricane strengthened--thought evacuating would be too disruptive, not only to her but to everyone in the home: another son, two grandchildren and a great-grandson. And of course there was Candy, their beautiful black Akita who shimmers with a silver undercoat.

Willmarine still wasn't too concerned about the storm until she had a nightmare that convinced her they needed to get out of Dodge. "I had a bad dream that I couldn't shake about us being covered in water," she says. "I couldn't get Jason up in the attic in time." So she called on a church friend to take the kids and called her brother to take Jason and her with him to Dallas, where they had more family. Jason's brother Jahmal stayed in the area but not in the house.

"They got me out, put me in the back of my uncle's car," Jason says. "I was in a manual chair--I had to leave my power chair, all my medical equipment." And Jason's uncle didn't want the dog in his Cadillac. "I had to leave Candy--that's the thing I regret the most."

"You have to understand that in our minds, we were going to come right back," Willmarine adds. "We gave the dog some food and gave her some toys to play with, filled up the tub with water. We thought we'd be back in three days."

Traffic was hell--a drive that normally takes seven hours took 17. When they finally arrived in Dallas at 4 a.m., Jason began to absorb the reality of his sister's fourth-floor walk-up apartment.

"Since I couldn't stay with my sister, we went to a cheap little motel, about $40 a night, but we only had enough money for three nights," he says. "My other sister loaned me some money for a fourth night. After that we tried to get the Red Cross to help out, but they said they couldn't help us [with motel vouchers]."

The Red Cross said the only way they could help was if Jason and Willmarine slept in the convention center on the flimsy cots. Being a big guy with a high injury, Jason couldn't get down onto the cots, and even if he could, he would have developed pressure sores in no time.

Willmarine and Jason protect themselves from mold as they stare at their drowned kitchen.

They left the shelter not knowing where to turn next. While driving, they spotted a Salvation Army rehab/recovery facility. It was a long shot--this was not a hurricane shelter but a place where addicts were trying to get their lives together. They called to see if they could stay there.

That's when they encountered Misty, the first of "many beautiful people" who helped them on their journey. Misty arranged for them to stay in a modest suite set up for visiting officers of the Salvation Army. "A lifesaver!" says Willmarine.

With a roof over their heads, they turned their attention to food, clothing and other basic necessities and made their way back to the convention center to see what was available. "We got the runaround in a lot of cases," Jason says. "Things seem to be getting better now, slowly but surely, but the Red Cross--you ask them if you can use the restroom and they give you a list of phone numbers. Everybody gives you phone numbers, and you call the numbers, some of them don't work--or they give you another phone number! It's wild, man."

Disgusted and disheartened, they pressed on. There was nothing else to do.

"Everybody who was in their face was able to get immediate help," Willmarine says. "The Red Cross guy kept saying, 'Did you sleep here tonight? If you didn't sleep here, we can't help you.' I'm like, you've got to help us. There're medicines and supplies and things that Jason needed, but they kept saying if you didn't sleep in the convention center, then you couldn't get any help. We asked, 'Well, can we get food?' 'Well, yeah, you can come and get breakfast at 8 a.m., come back and get lunch at noon, and you have to come back and get dinner at 6 p.m.' So you have to run back and forward--which is not like next door to anything--to get meals. And we didn't have a ride, so we were at the mercy of whether or not my daughter could bring us. It put Jason in a position that he had to keep forcing himself to get in a car and transfer from his manual chair to a car, which was really hurting him--it was causing him more problems because his skin was breaking down."

Hope Springs Electronic
With failing health, heavy hearts, no money and no help from the official charities, Willmarine did something she was loath to do: She sent a personal e-mail asking for financial help, then sent a variation of it to everyone she could think of, and prayed.

To Whom It May concern:

If you can help us, please contact us. Any help we can get would be appreciated. We are desperate, so I'm grasping at any and all past contacts. Normally, I would never find myself in this sort of begging position. But this has been anything but normal. People's lives were totally shattered. Families were torn apart. Please help us.
Thank you and God Bless,
Willmarine B. Hurst

One of the bright spots: Some artwork was
unharmed.

As the message spread through the Internet, it made its way into the hearts of some fine people. Casual Male Big & Tall sent Jason some extra-large clothes. A Dallas lawyer named Cynthia Thornton offered transportation for apartment hunting, first month's rent and furniture. Curt Simonds of Allumed and Sara Moore of National Seating and Mobility came through with a loaner power chair. Marcie Roth and other disability advocates went to work on securing equipment and supplies overlooked in public evacuation plans. New Mobility publisher Jeff Leonard established the New Mobility Katrina Rebuilding Fund.

But it was Jason's posts on pet sites and forums that lit up the message boards. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people were searching for Candy, scouring web pages, following news of pets being shipped all over the country, calling shelters. "This guy is just so heartbroken about his dog," wrote one searcher. "This family just needs a break," typed another.

Jason himself was spending every free minute checking the leads people sent him, or posting on yet another site. "She's my baby," he says.

Starting from Scratch
As help trickled in, Jason and Willmarine searched for more permanent housing, but found accessible apartments were rare--they couldn't believe how wonderful their modest home had been. "My house was on a slab and had a wide open floor plan--everything was at my disposal," Jason says. "My bathroom was in my bedroom. I had tile so I could roll around easily. A roll-in shower. I could roll under my sink and brush my teeth. It's been hard to find anything here--when most people say they have wheelchair-accessible housing, they mean that it's on the first level. Even some of those have steps and you have to get out of your wheelchair once you get in."

Finally, they rented an apartment that would suffice and began the task of equipping it for Jason. They needed a hospital bed, lifts, a shower chair--everything.

Jason started looking for attendants. His niece had been his primary PCA, but she was now in Cincinnati; his mom had been helping him since the storm. "It's so hard to find a reliable PCA," he says. "Besides my niece, I had a lady I worked with for five years. That was the longest I had a PCA--I've had five PCAs in as many months sometimes. To find someone who's going to come into your house every day--it's a whole other level of being pulled out of your comfort zone."

And, reluctantly, Jason started thinking about a future in Dallas, one with his career goals on the back burner. "I wanted to start a nonprofit organization--I was going to try a three-in-one: help the city fight blight, which is a problem in New Orleans, and at the same time take those blighted properties and merge affordable housing with accessible housing.

"Now school is kind of the furthest thing from my mind," he says. "I have to get settled in, get acclimated to where I'm at, get my feet under me and see if I can find some kind of work, some way to generate an income. I've got to get things together so my little brother and sister who were away at college when all this happened will have somewhere to come home to."

Where Is Home?
But of course, their real home is in the middle-class African-American neighborhood of Pontchartrain Park, in New Orleans. So when they learned that they could return to their zip code on Oct. 5, Jason and Willmarine approached some of their "beautiful people" to borrow an accessible van. They'd heard that Candy had been spotted not far from their house, running wild. Sickened that she could end up one of the dogs being shot, they wasted no time.

Jason's skin had not healed, and he had dysreflexia from an unknown cause, but when they got the van, they drove all night, arriving the morning of Oct. 6. After personally visiting the local animal shelters--no Candy--they rolled down a bleak row of broken, moldy homes to their own.

The orange spray-paint said their house had last been checked Oct. 3; the watermarks said it had stood in 6 feet of sludge. With much trepidation, they held masks to their faces and opened the door.

The stink was overpowering, but it wasn't as awful as the sight. Waterlogged photos still clung to the walls, perhaps suspended by the thick growth of blue-green mold. Books rotted in their spines, and personal belongings were clumped together in sticky, unnatural groupings. There was some good news: A few pieces of original art were unharmed, and one stash of family photos had floated in a plastic bag--as had a laundry basket of clothes.

For hours, they culled what they could from the debris, taking breaks to breathe clean air and drink bottled water, but they couldn't even get into one room because of heavy furniture blocking the door. The forlorn pile of salvaged items included a handful of trophies and ribbons, a graduation tassel, a prom dress, several collectible Barbie dolls, some scraps of writing, a rusted camera, the damaged photos and the somehow untouched artwork that Jason had commissioned. Ruined was the computer full of their poems and papers, signed books by Molefi Asante and Ivan Van Sertima, their degrees and diplomas, and so many of the other creations and mementos that tell the story of a family's life.

And how would they ever rebuild? "We own our house," Jason says, "but with me being out of work--I had just started working at a nonprofit organization part-time--we didn't have the money for the insurance. We were just about to get the insurance policy up again right before this happened. I was going to send that in the next week. Then this happened, and it knocked all the wind out of my sails."

Willmarine feels equally deflated. "When I came up here [to Dallas], I wished I could have someone hypnotize me for just an hour so I could just forget. I try not to think about that whole situation and the totality of it. People say, 'Just start all over.' But from where, from what?"

"It is overwhelming--and I'm just so homesick," Jason says. "But I think I could deal with it all if I could just pet my dog."

UPDATE:
Through Jason's diligence and help from volunteers and strangers from around the country, he was finally reunited with his dog. He's now living in the metroplex in an apartment with his mother. He still holds on to the hope of one day rebuilding his home in New Orleans. Until then, he keeps moving forward with his dreams. After all, he's a survivor.