Katrina's Vietnamese Victims
Falls Church Area Agency Aids Gulf Coast Immigrants

By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 9, 2006

BURAS, La. -- Fisherman Ky Le climbed out of his truck, hoisting his 3-year-old son, and pointed to a mass of splintered wreckage on a muddy lot.

"That my house," said Le, 42, in his fragmentary English. Then he laughed.

It was easier than crying.

All that remained of the family's mobile home was this slab of linoleum, set on a wheeled hunk of rusting metal and covered with overturned appliances, dishes, clothing and other items. A backpack that belonged to the couple's oldest son lay near his math workbook.

In the moist, salty wind, shards of a nearby metal shed swayed and creaked as Le's wife, Loan, 39, picked through the rubble, looking for documents that would prove the family had flood insurance to cover the ruin caused by Hurricane Katrina.

This was Plaquemines Parish, a ghostly finger of marshy land poking into the Gulf of Mexico and bisected by the Mississippi River, where life and property were swept away when Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras on Aug. 29.

The couple and their three children lost their home and car. Miraculously, Ky's shrimp boat sustained only relatively minor damage. After several months of taking shelter with other homeless Vietnamese fishermen and their families at a Buddhist temple 50 miles up the road, the family has settled in a rented mobile home near the temple while they untangle their affairs.

The plight of the Le family, and thousands of other Vietnamese immigrants living along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, has become the focus of a Falls Church area nonprofit group, Boat People SOS.

In December, the 25-year-old organization, which works with Vietnamese immigrants through a network of offices nationwide, received a $4.5 million federal grant to seek out and work with the neediest Hurricane Katrina victims, helping them to rebuild their lives financially and emotionally over the next 22 months.

Along with three other nonprofit groups based in the Washington area -- Catholic Charities USA of Alexandria, Volunteers of America of Alexandria and the National Disability Rights Network of Northeast Washington -- Boat People SOS is part of a consortium of 10 organizations nationwide awarded a total of $66 million to assist 300,000 struggling Katrina victims.

Many are poor, elderly or disabled, said Warren Harrity, executive director of Katrina Aid Today, the consortium's parent organization based in Northwest Washington. Some are single parents, while others, like those in the Vietnamese communities that Boat People is working with, speak limited English.

"There are a lot of folks who are just not able to access the world of resources out there," Harrity said.

The contract was awarded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the United Methodist Committee on Relief, the disaster-relief and development arm of the United Methodist Church, using funds donated by foreign governments. The Methodist relief committee, in turn, contracted with the 10 nonprofits to carry out the work, and it will manage the grant and monitor the groups' progress. The committee program within which these agencies work is Katrina Aid Today.

Last week, Volunteers of America launched a $6 million case-management program that will use 60 professionals and 240 trained volunteers to work with about 20,000 people -- many of them already struggling with disability, age, raising children on a limited income or addiction.

"A lot of people, at least the ones we talk to . . . were pretty fragile anyway," said Margaret Ratcliff, vice president of programs for Volunteers of America.

The National Disability Rights Network will focus on 8,000 disabled Katrina victims, including those with physical handicaps, mental illnesses and addiction problems, primarily in Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, said spokeswoman Kaaryn Sanon.

Catholic Charities USA will receive $12 million, which will help fund 125 paid and 250 volunteer case managers who are being brought in to work with Katrina victims in Catholic Charities offices in 13 states, said the Rev. Larry Snyder, the organization's chief executive.

A combination of therapist, nagging mother, networker and advocate, a case manager works one-on-one with clients and with other case managers, drawing up "recovery plans" and then assisting clients with finding housing, jobs and services they need.

"Our aim is to help the folks to achieve a level of self-sufficiency," Harrity said.

Boat People SOS's task is one of the more challenging: to work with insular, often isolated, Vietnamese communities. An estimated 50,000 Vietnamese live along the Gulf Coast, including "boat people" who settled in the area after fleeing Southeast Asia in the 1970s and '80s.

The federal grant, worth about $4.5 million to Boat People, is by far the largest ever received by the organization, which brought in $2.1 million in federal grants in 2004. The group is in the process of hiring 19 case managers to work with Katrina victims through new branch offices in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, said Executive Director Nguyen Dinh Thang.

Many of Boat People's target clients are fishermen, small-business people or blue-collar workers who speak little or no English and, until now, have had relatively little contact with local or federal governments.

Boat People SOS was founded in California in 1981. It has evolved from an organization that rescued thousands of people in small vessels on the ocean who were fleeing Vietnam in the wake of the communist takeover, to one that offers a variety of services to Vietnamese immigrants nationwide.

Funded mostly by government contracts and grants, it now has 17 offices around the country, including three in the Washington area: in Prince George's County, in the District and, its headquarters, in a Leesburg Pike (Route 7) office building just north of Baileys Crossroads.

It draws its work almost exclusively from government agencies, such as those of Fairfax County and the U.S. government, including the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and the departments of Labor, Education and the Treasury.

Boat People offers cancer screenings and translation services, educates nail-salon employees on hazardous materials, sponsors after-school tutoring and teen abstinence education, and helps Vietnamese immigrants become U.S. citizens, among other services.

In Louisiana, the epicenter of its current efforts, is a small Buddhist temple in Orleans Parish, just over the border from Plaquemines. The area is home to thousands of Vietnamese immigrants who earn their livings plying the waters of the Gulf.

Katrina destroyed many of their homes and boats, and about 50 of them are now living at Bo De Temple while they await FEMA trailers or repairs to their homes. They live in the temple's fellowship hall and education center, sleeping on mattresses jammed into small classrooms and cooking in the center's kitchen. They have fashioned curtains out of aluminum foil and brown paper.

Some, uncomfortable with the crowded conditions, have retreated to tents on the muddy grounds. One 81-year-old man lives in his car, which he has outfitted with a sleeping bag and a television balanced on the rear seat.

The presence of the evacuees has put on hold the temple's plan to use the center, which was recently completed at a cost of $200,000, to offer English classes to adults and Vietnamese classes to children. The added expense has also strained the small temple's finances.

"It's very difficult for us in this situation," said the Rev. Thich-Thong Duc, the Buddhist monk who runs Bo De. Duc moved to the United States from Vietnam seven years ago. "But we are happy to help people."

Among Boat People's tasks is to help the Vietnamese negotiate their way through the formidable Katrina-assistance bureaucracy. Some evacuees were not aware they were eligible for assistance from FEMA and thus never applied, said case manager Alessandra Thomas. The organization believes that others' claims were inaccurately denied and plans to launch appeals on behalf of those clients.

Duc said the community is grateful for the assistance. "You come here, you help our community," he told Thomas over tea one recent morning. "We appreciate that. We are happy about that."

But Boat People has had to surmount some cultural differences.

For many Vietnamese, the stubborn American tradition of refusing to take no for an answer is an alien concept, said Ha Hoa Dang, a spokesman for Boat People.

"They'll accept that when the U.S. government has said no, that means no," Dang said.

Other more complex issues also have surfaced. For many Vietnamese fishermen, ownership of their boats is complicated. Some have tangled agreements -- sometimes written, sometimes not -- with others that make for messy insurance claims. Many had no flood insurance on their homes, or lost their insurance documents in the storm.

To reach the extensive Vietnamese communities in the New Orleans area, Boat People is distributing fliers and spreading the word through Buddhist temples and Vietnamese Catholic Churches. It also is relying on word of mouth.

Working off a laptop on a folding table in the temple's cluttered fellowship hall, case managers Thomas and Phu Nguyen work with a steady stream of Katrina victims. They help some fill out paperwork to get free cell phones offered to Katrina evacuees through a Federal Communications Commission program. To others, they hand out fliers in Vietnamese that explain FEMA benefits and Boat People's program.

Many, said Thomas, don't realize that they might be eligible for loans and grants from the government to help them rebuild their boats and homes. But she is confident that more will turn to Boat People for help as they hear about its services. "Word travels pretty fast here," she said.

As soon as Boat People showed up last month, Loan and Ky Le turned to the group for help.

Boat People case workers say that the Le family has flood insurance for their mobile home and, fortunately, Loan was able to unearth from the rubble a letter certifying her claim. Even so, their claim was rejected, and Thomas is working with them to figure out why, launch an appeal and help them through the paperwork.

"She help me a lot," Loan said.

Despite the devastating losses, she said, the couple isn't discouraged.

As an example, Loan pointed to her husband, who squatted by the trailer, cigarette in hand. "He falls down, he stand up and he walk again. He keep working," she said. "He keep working."