Bobby

The whole story of the Omaha evacuees sort of revolves around Bobby Leonard--whether the evacuees like it or not.

When a leader emerges out of pure chaos, those being led sometimes develop a more serious dependency on that leader. And chaos is what these evacuees walked into in Omaha. They had spent 12 days in the flood. The National Guard had shown up waving guns around and dragged them out of town. FEMA put them on a flight and didn't tell them where they were going. They didn't know they were going to Omaha until the captain told them just before they landed. They walked off the plane into a sea of white faces in a prairie city. On top of that, many of them had brought the problems of poor New Orleans with them--criminal records, mental illness, chronic unemployment, substance abuse. Not all of them. But enough of a critical mass to keep things, uh...interesting after they got settled.

Bobby stepped up. He put himself in front of the cameras. He beat his head against the bureaucracies' brick walls. He drove the evacuees to doctor appointments and counseled them when they freaked out. He knew what it was like to have a helping hand lead you over seemingly insurmountable odds. He was full of gratitude for that. And, believing that he could surmount these new odds, too, he held his own hand out this time.

See, Bobby learned to read in prison. He grew up illiterate in the Louisiana boonies, learned to communicate with--as he says--fists instead of words, and got himself a 100-year sentence for bank burglary by the time he was 19. When he got there, he says, he punched the warden. He also says he punched a man who kept showing up to try and teach him to read. The reading lessons eventually took, though, and when Bobby was transferred to a prison that had teamed up with a local university, he got a degree.

When Bobby got out in the late seventies, he started a youth program called Rebirth. Yes, that Rebirth--the brass band named themselves after his program. He kept mostly straight for the next 30 years; when the storm hit, he was helping to counsel drug addicts.

Here was his time to give back. He says he pulled bodies off of bridges and pestered the National Guard to pick them up. He stayed at the treatment house where he'd been helping out--they had a generator, so he cooked for those left behind. And in Omaha, he worked so hard for the evacuees that the state "crisis counseling" agency hired him as an outreach worker.

By the time I got out there in August 2006, though, Bobby wasn't working anymore. And he was barely holding it together.

more to come...