The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #84239   Message #1557691
Posted By: Azizi
06-Sep-05 - 01:31 PM
Thread Name: Outraged over Bush! (Hurricane Katrina)
Subject: RE: Outraged over Bush! (Hurricane Katrina)
Lost and Found:

"..a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he said his name was Deamonte Love.

After their rescue Thursday, paramedics in the Baton Rouge rescue operations headquarters tried to coax their names out of them...

So far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children missing, and that number is expected to rise, said Mike Kenner of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which will help reunite families.

At the rescue headquarters, the children ate cafeteria food and fell into a deep sleep. Deamonte gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.
He said the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building.

The children were clean and healthy, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she said, that "time had been taken with those kids." The baby was "fat and happy."

False hope
Thursday night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a shelter in Thibodeaux was searching for seven children. People in the building started clapping at the news. But when they got the mother on the phone, it became clear that she was looking for a different group of seven children.

The children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department of Social Services, rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors from the Big Buddy Program were on hand. For the next two days, the staff did detective work....

Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised he'd take care of his brother.
Late Saturday night, they found Deamonte's mother, who was in a shelter in San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children. Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children's pictures on a Web site set up over the weekend by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight was waiting to take the children to Texas.

In a phone interview, Williams said she is the kind of mother who doesn't let her children out of her sight. What happened on Thursday, she said, was that her family, trapped in an apartment building, began to feel desperate.

The water wasn't going down and they had been living without light, food or air conditioning for four days. The baby needed milk and the milk was gone. So she decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a helicopter arrived to pick them up, they were told to send the children first and that the helicopter would be back in 25 minutes. She and her neighbors had to make a quick decision.
It was a wrenching moment. Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to send the children ahead.

"I told them to go ahead and give them up because me, I would give my life for my kids. They should feel the same way," said Love, 48.
His daughter and her friends followed his advice.
"We did what we had to do for our kids because we love them," Williams said

The complete story HERE

-snip-

Notice how the newspaper first assumped that the children's parents had abandoned them or had died.

Unfortunately, there will be alot of orphans as result of this Hurricane and miserably failure of aftermath planning & support.
Undoubtably alot of children have died for lack of food, formula, water, not to mention drowning.

Whose fault is this?

Well, Bush could say that the buck stops at his desk, but I'm sure he won't.