Wendy Kirk, 34 years old and almost 40 weeks pregnant, anxiously paces the main room of the double-wide trailer where she's currently living in Ocala, Florida. Wendy, her husband and their two- and three-year-old daughters are crammed into her sister-in-law's home for an undetermined amount of time, as they wait for their New Orleans residence to be repaired.
The way out
"Trust me, it's crowded in here," she laughs. A South Carolina native, Wendy had only been living in New Orleans for a few months before Hurricane Katrina blew in. Her husband had just finished a tour in the Coast Guard. Before Katrina hit, he drove down from his station in Connecticut to pick up his girls and bring them to safety at his sister's home in Florida.
For Wendy, packing was easy. "We just took everything that was still in boxes," she says, plus some pictures, clothes and essential toys for daughters Paris and Destiny.
Pregnancy worries
While Wendy worries about returning to New Orleans and the state of her home, her immediate concerns are her health and her unborn child ‑- her first son ‑- because she is considered a high-risk patient. "This is it for me, I'm not giving birth anymore," she says, explaining that because she suffers from gestational diabetes, asthma and a degenerative joint disease, she's had difficulty finding a doctor in Florida.
"I'm exhausted," she sighs. "I still have two kids to take care of, and it's not easy explaining why some of their toys aren't here anymore." Because they're so close in age, sisterly squabbles over favorite toys are fairly common. Since what they could bring from New Orleans was so limited, the bickering has gotten worse. "They don't like that much."
The long road home
"I'm still not totally sure I want to go back," Wendy says. "It's scary to think that this could happen to us again." Wendy and her family were living with her father-in-law in Gretna, just southeast of New Orleans. She knows the roof, ceilings and back porch of their home were ripped off, but she doesn't know what else to expect.
Her husband, currently unemployed, plans to return to Gretna to help his father rebuild their home while Wendy and the girls sit tight in Florida, waiting for the baby. "He'll come and get us when it's safe," she says, some reluctance creeping into her voice. "If he feels safe there, then I guess we'll all be fine. But if another hurricane comes through, we're moving! I want to go someplace where nothing happens."
