PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. (ABP) — “I slept on the street that first night,” said Angel Peña. “I tried to find the shelter, but I gave up. Then I found this place.”
Since Hurricane Katrina swept over this coastal town Aug. 29, Peña has been living on the upper balcony of a torn and tattered Catholic school beside the beach.
The Hispanic man shares the space with two other residents of Pass Christian — one white, the other African-American. They've set up a makeshift home in the abandoned school, catching and cooking fish and sharing whatever food and supplies they can salvage from the largely deserted neighborhood.
It's not home, they say, but it's safe and dry.
“My apartment building just down the street collapsed in the hurricane,” said Peña. “I tried to stay there, but I had to jump out the window in the middle of the storm onto the floor below me. Some of us who had gotten out held hands and jumped down. We tried to get others out. I don't know how many were still in there or how many didn't make it out.”
Peña spent the first night sleeping on the side of the road. Then he made his way to St. Paul's Catholic School. “I had nowhere to go, so I'm staying here.”
Severely damaged from the hurricane, the brick school stands covered with debris, its lower floors gutted by waves that reached up to 40 feet. School rooms once occupied by hundreds of children were ravaged by the storm, scattering desks, books and papers across the beach and through the streets.
But on the upper floor, where the rooms remain relatively intact, Angel now stores his meager belongings, sleeping on a makeshift bed on the concrete floor near what was once a computer lab.
Carl Brown's home and business once stood adjacent to the school. “The water got up to my nose in my house,” said Brown, who is white. “I got on top of a bunk bed and prayed for it to go down. Then when it did, I came here.”
In this historic community of 10,000 — named for 17th century explorer Christian L'Adner — Brown owned and operated a small print shop next to his home, just a few hundred yards from the Gulf. It had been his home for 12 years. But Katrina completely destroyed both his business and home.
“I lost everything it took 28 years to get,” he said. “I lost my print shop, my house, and I also had eight pieces of rental property and three vehicles — all gone.”
“See that camp trailer down there?” Brown added, pointing to a battered camper that lay half buried in the rubble just below the balcony of the school. “That's mine too.”
With nowhere else to turn, Angel Peña, Carl Brown and Skip Brown have made a rugged home of the upper balcony of the school. They dig through the rubble piled high along the roads and on the beach to find things they can use to make their lives more bearable.
“We found this old gas burner,” said Carl. “It still works. We've been cooking on it.”
The men garnered water from disaster-relief teams and rescued a few supplies from the debris left by Carl's nearby home.
“Look in this cooler,” Carl insists, lifting the lid of a small cooler to show off his catch for the day. “We're going to have a fish fry tonight.”
Skip Brown, the third refugee, grilled some of the fish on a hibachi.
“I made flour tortillas last night,” Peña boasted. “They were good.”
“We're doing good,” he added with a big smile. “It's better than a shelter.”
Both Carl and Angel say they are making plans for their futures — futures that do not include staying on the Gulf Coast. They say they've had enough of hurricanes.
“I've got a few CDs in the bank,” Carl said, looking out across the beach scattered with what is left of the town he's lived in for over a decade. “I'm going to buy me another camp trailer and just travel around. I may come back to the beach. I'm not through with it for good. But I won't be back here to live.”
“I'm from Texas,” Angel said. “I think I'll go back there, to Brownsville. I have relatives there who don't know if I'm still alive.” But for now, he said, he'll stay in his make-shift home at St. Paul's Catholic School.
“This is heaven, right here,” he added. “Compared to where I've been a few days ago, this is heaven.”
— Photos available from ABP.