Day Four Final 1 of 2

So day four..day four...what to say about day four. This not as easy to write a dispatch three days later, but here goes it.

So I woke up at about 9:30am and found out that the plan was to go to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but there was no real mention of why. But at that point I had finally accepted the fact that I was at the will of the group and half of the group weren't journalists at all, so they weren't really interested in the storytelling aspect of the trip. Either way I figured what the hell, I've never been to Louisiana, so giddy-up.

We were apparently shooting to leave at about 11:00am, that didn't happen. The nice ladies at the church had decided to make a real good lunch, since it would be our groups last meal at the shelter, so we couldn't get on the road until after our specially prepared lunch. They said it would be like a half an hour or so, but like seemingly everything else in the south it took much longer than expected. We ended up leaving Jackson at about 2:30pm or so. But the food was great...fried chicken, chicken casserole, corn bread, green beans, caramel cake...it was good stuff.

Anyways, Baton Rouge is about two and a half or three hours away from Jackson, so we ended up pulling into the Baton Rouge Marriott at about 5:00pm or so. We only pulled in there to get directions to a persons house for a previously set-up interview, but it ended up being a lot more than that. The Marriott, like apparently every hotel in Baton Rouge, was being used to house some evacuees. But they were different evacuees than the ones we had been talking to all week. These were the middle/upper class evacuees and the juxtaposition of them to the lower/working class people we had seen at the shelters and at the Coliseum was astonishing.

These people were not concerned about what they were going to eat or where they were going to live or how they were going to get adequate health care for their kids. In most cases, these people weren't concerned about losing their house. They were most shattered because they lost family photos or heirlooms or special personal knick-knacks. I don't mean to talk down to this group or about this group, because I am that group, everything I own is insured and I have never worried about how I was going to eat or where I was going to live. But the juxtaposition of the thoughts of these different classes and groups made the upper class thoughts seem so frivolous and petty. It was very interesting to see and to compare.

Also while we were at the Marriott I went for a walk, following some guys who had media credentials, acting like I knew what I was doing. They lead me back to a large conference room, which was acting as the logistical center for ABC News for the whole Gulf Coast. That was pretty cool. That room was dealing with all the supplies (water, food, tapes, batteries, gas, etc.) for all the ABC News employees in the Gulf Coast. They were also equipped to do some light production work and they had a couple of sat trucks available.

Sunday was really a long day. In the second half of this post, the group will head to a couple of shelters in Baton Rouge, meet a family interested in coming back to Indiana, and start working our way back to Muncie, but for now I must get back to school work.