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Helping Hands
Stan Wright, a tobacco-chewing oysterman serving his second term as mayor of Bayou La Batre, got the call on his cell phone. On the morning of the hurricane, with 100 mph winds still blowing, Wright had launched his 18-foot fishing skiff into the roiling waters that lapped up Highway 188. Using the police radio in his Ford pickup, he dispatched his son-in-law, a cousin and a good friend to rescue survivors by boat, while he stood at the water line, shuttling each load to the safety of a nearby church. For hours, the tiny crew plucked people from the water: an amputee with one leg, clinging to a mattress; a man and woman floating in a children's wading pool; another terrified couple in a tree.Since then, Wright had barely slept or seen his wife. He had 30 people staying at his home. At the community center, he supervised the feeding of 17,000 evacuees from across the county, as well as a drive-through supply center. But for Regina Benjamin, he always made time. Benjamin, he felt, had about the biggest heart of anyone in town. "She's always been there for people," he says. In fact, she was the mayor's personal physician.
"Stan. This is Regina. Think you could get us a trailer?" The mayor, wearing his customary blue work shirt and ball cap, didn't even hesitate. "Yah, babe," he said. "Whatever you want."
In ensuing days, county officials took on the job of locating a mobile medical trailer. Meanwhile, a bunch of students from Iowa's Vennard College showed up in T-shirts and boots to chain-saw the pecan and oak trees behind Benjamin's clinic, making room for temporary quarters.
Four weeks after the mayor's call, two halves of a double-wide trailer rumbled down Bayou La Batre Irvington Highway from Mississippi. After the long trip, the trailer was infested with bugs and caked with dirt. But another contingent of volunteers -- this one from Mercy Ships -- was ready to fumigate and scrub.
A nun from St. Vincent's Hospital in Birmingham drove down in a rental truck loaded with burgundy armchairs and framed prints for the waiting room. A relief organization from the West Coast supplied worn wooden examining tables and cartons of antibiotics, insulin and other drugs. Benjamin paid for $1,200 worth of gravel to put on the muddy field, then hired a plumber and electrician for another $3,000.
On October 17, seven weeks after the disaster, the clinic reopened.
With scarred walls, cracked li-noleum, and a hallway so narrow that two people could barely pass, the trailer hardly seemed a symbol of modern medical care. But to Benjamin, it was beautiful.
By now, FEMA had begun to deposit tiny white trailer homes next to the rubble of destroyed houses and in neat rows in a local park. Life in Bayou La Batre began to resume. Except for one thing. "People were starting to understand the severity of their situation," Benjamin said. "They wouldn't have jobs for a long time, and [they had] no houses."
Now, she expanded her mission to provide more than just medical care. In the late afternoons, she climbed into her pickup. Cell phone to her ear and eating cashews from a plastic jar, she rumbled down the dirt roads making house calls.
"How you doin', Miz Lee?" she called one day in November to Mary Alice Lee, 77, a short, white-haired woman with diabetes, who poked her head out the doorway of her FEMA trailer. Behind it lay the ruins of her three-bedroom house. A colossal black pig rooted in the dust.
"I miss my home," said the frail woman, stepping onto the porch with the aid of a three-pronged cane. "This is a little too small."
Benjamin was her friend, Lee said. "I rely on her. She takes everyone in."
The doctor continued down the road, stopping at a small white frame house across from the bayou. There, another family greeted her warmly. "She came by to check on us after the storm," said Jody Schultz, a lanky boat builder whose home was inundated with seven feet of water. "She does that from time to time. Just like a neighbor."
An inspector had slated the Schultz family home for demolition. The young couple desperately wanted to keep it, but didn't know how to navigate the government bureaucracy. Benjamin did. Back at the office, she telephoned one of the clinic's board members, Joseph Mitchell, who is an Alabama state legislator. Within a day, the Schultzes got a permit to rebuild. "It was my grandmother's house," said Jody Schultz. "She helped save it."
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