MODESTO BEE
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By BLAIR CRADDOCK
BEE STAFF WRITER

Last Updated: September 17, 2005, 04:22:46 AM PDT

A few at a time, families displaced by Hurricane Katrina have begun making their way to Modesto — and when they get here, they need help.
"We're getting at least two families a day," said Jim Money, director of the Stanislaus County Red Cross. "They're coming directly from Louisiana and Mississippi, on their own."

The Red Cross building on Sixth Street has become an intake center for people who lost homes and jobs — and, in some cases, friends and family members.

Dodi Habis, 30, said Friday that she, her boyfriend, Eric Hogel, 34, and their 3-year-old daughter Cecelia were the first to arrive at the Stanislaus County Red Cross after the storm, seeking help on Sept. 6.

Hogel had once lived in the Northern San Joaquin Valley, so as the storm approached the Gulf Coast, they packed what they could and headed west.

They're trying to rebuild their lives from the ground up, having driven out hours before Hurricane Katrina smashed south Louisiana. They got out with just the items they could fit in a rental truck.

"I finished my résumé yesterday. I've been working on it for a week," Habis told Kouern Phe, a counselor from the Employment Development Department who was at the Red Cross to talk to evacuees about their job placement needs.

Habis and Hogel also were waiting to talk to a landlord who had contacted the Red Cross, offering a possible place to stay.

"We've had our ups and downs, but this is the lowest we've been," Habis said to the employment counselor, with a rueful laugh.

She said she was able to laugh now, because she'd rested. But she nearly cried on an earlier day, when a different agency's intake worker kept calling the family "homeless."

"It made me feel 2 inches tall," Habis said.

She'd had a home, not three weeks ago, back in Boutte, in St. Charles Parish. It was a rental house, and she was a stay-at-home mom while Hogel worked for a scaffold construction company on projects that included oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, she's pretty sure there is not much of a house to go back to.

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