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It looks okay, thought Regina Benjamin, as she maneuvered her light blue Toyota pickup through the mud-slick streets of Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Maybe we missed the worst of it.It was August 30, the day after Hurricane Katrina, and all along the bayou, shrimp boats lay tossed onto dry land, masts and rigging tangled in tree branches. Crumpled piles of lumber marked where homes had stood, and a wash of slime inches deep seeped from the open doors of shops and restaurants. Benjamin pulled up to her medical clinic. The tidy gray building looked unscathed. But when she opened the door, the stench was almost enough to make her sit down. Seawater, old fish and dead crabs mingled with raw sewage. Chairs and tables were tossed about as if they'd been in a washing machine.
Dr. Regina Benjamin, 49, had laid out $800 to open her family-practice clinic in this impoverished community in 1990, and many thousands more to keep it going. If people couldn't pay -- and many couldn't -- she treated them for free. Clearly, she wasn't in it for the money. But now her head swirled as she stared into the ruins of her life's dream. Then she steeled herself: I can be sad and depressed later.
Bayou La Batre is a hapless little village tucked along a waterway that reaches like a long blue-black finger from the Gulf of Mexico several miles into the pine-dotted Alabama interior. Seafood is the town's main livelihood, but foreign imports and rising fuel costs have driven the industry into decline. One-third of the population is from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and more than one in five families live below poverty level.
When the hurricane sent a 13-foot tidal surge sweeping through, it submerged shipyards, flooded seven feet up the walls of First Oriental Market, and lapped up State Highway 188 a full two miles north of the gulf. By midmorning, as waters rose rapidly around them, terror-stricken residents climbed onto rooftops and into trees. Out on the gulf, beachfront homes built on eight-foot pilings vanished into the 100 mph winds. Days later, fishermen trawling 20 miles offshore found doors, paneling and furniture.
Though there were no fatalities, 2,000 of the town's 2,300 residents were left homeless. Few had insurance on their homes or their boats.
As Benjamin surveyed the damage, Nell Bosarge Stoddard, 75, whom locals call "Granny," pulled up in her Ford. "Oh, my goodness," said Benjamin's longtime nurse, her voice catching. "Here we go again."
Stoddard had been with Benjamin when Hurricane Georges ripped through the clinic in 1998. Together, the two women had carefully placed patient files out in the sun to dry. Then Benjamin rebuilt farther inland, jacking the structure up onto four-foot stilts. She still owed $170,000 on the new building. But now it had been destroyed too.
It was hot and humid -- 90 degrees -- but the two women put on rubber gloves and set to stripping the reeking clinic. If they didn't get it dried out quickly, mold and bacteria would render the building useless -- even hazardous.
As Benjamin dragged out dripping chairs, lamps and carpet, she made a plan. She had grown up in nearby Daphne and learned early on the importance of doing for others. During the Depression, her grandmother, a matriarch of the rural community, left lemonade and sandwiches for the hobos who hitchhiked along the highway. Her mother was always available to feed a crowd or sign a bail bond if someone was in trouble.
So Regina, after finishing with med school, ignored lucrative job offers elsewhere and returned to the region, laboring at the clinic from 7 a.m. until past midnight. On weekends, she traveled across three states to work as an itinerant emergency room physician to pay the bills. There was never any question that she would rebuild. Again, the question was "How?"
"Bill me." Benjamin, in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around her neck, was on the phone with the pharmacist at CVS. The week after Katrina, she had begun treating patients at the community center, where 240 cots were set up for homeless townspeople. Benjamin's "office" was now the stage of the auditorium. She conducted examinations right there, without even a curtain for privacy. The nearest bathroom was downstairs.
People arrived with ugly gashes from clearing debris, infections from the foul water, and allergies from the mold. All Benjamin could do was ask them about their medical history; she had no records to consult. Patients' lifesaving medications for diabetes, asthma and blood pressure had been washed away in the storm. Benjamin treated them all at no charge.
Before Katrina, the clinic had just begun to pay its own bills, even if the doctor still couldn't pay herself a salary. But now, with expenses mounting, she mortgaged her house for $210,000 and maxed out her credit cards -- $60,000 in debt. It would cost $300,000 to start over. Meanwhile, how could she continue treating people here? One day, gazing across the cacophonous scene at the community center, she had a sudden thought: A trailer would be good.
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