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Shalaura Daniels shuffles into the stands of the Astrodome, her infant nephew straddling her hip. Another nephew toddles ahead of her. Daniels, a member of a New Orleans Baptist church called My Redeemer, collapses into an end seat and surveys the arena's cot-covered floor with thousands from New Orleans whom Hurricane Katrina made homeless. And she cries.

Those now dwelling on the Astrodome floor began arriving Wednesday in bus caravans from the flood-devastated city. Partly filled Hefty garbage bags near some cots hold the only possessions the murky waters didn't swallow.

A gray-haired man lying on his cot, bare feet protruding from a blanket, struggles to sip water. A small portable urinal hangs on the walker next to him.

A teenager's unbuttoned shirt reveals homemade tattoos covering his chest and arms. He roams the arena's perimeter with other boys whose bodies bear similar markings.

A young woman limps in flip-flops, one foot bound in white tape.

Children and babies are everywhere.

Pink wristbands mark each as Astrodome residents. They rode out the hurricane at home, in the Superdome, in New Orleans's convention center, or elsewhere because they were too poor or too frail to evacuate, had no car to leave in, or had no place to go outside the city. Now they hobble off buses and into the Astrodome in unrelenting waves. Hundreds queue for a meal.

Some 220,000 storm survivors are housed in shelters across Texas; 130,000 evacuees are in shelters and hotels in Houston alone.

And like Daniels, almost all are black.

Daniels's family waited out the storm in the New Orleans convention center with no food, no water, no electricity, and no working toilets. Media broadcast news of rapes, looting, murders, bedlam, and dead bodies everywhere. "If we hadn't left when we did … " Tears end her sentence.

Her mother joins her in the stands. "There's no time for tears," her mother says, taking the baby from her. Daniels wipes her face.

"They told us in New Orleans that we were going to be put in hotels," Daniels says, wondering, then, why all the cots? "Where are we going to sleep?"

She is told: here in the Astrodome.

Daniels pauses to process the news. "This is no way to live. I can't live like this for two months."

So she prays.

Housing the homeless
At first, city, state, and federal responses to Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding were ad hoc at best. The Red Cross, which did not have a permanent presence in the New Orleans because it was considered too risky, swung into action, setting up some 300 shelters in 16 states. Meanwhile, as tens of thousands flooded into cities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states, especially neighboring Texas, churches nationwide mobilized.

And the government needs their help.

"We could not take on this project without our partners in the faith-based community," says Rusty Cornelius, administrative coordinator for the Harris County (Texas) Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. "This thing is huge. We're only beginning to understand the magnitude of this."

Three days after the August 29 storm, Houston's 42,000-member Second Baptist Church pastor Ed Young called city religious leaders to organize Operation Compassion to feed the Astrodome evacuees. Young recruited leaders from mainline, evangelical, Pentecostal, and Roman Catholic churches and non-Christian faiths to fund and provide volunteers for Operation Compassion.

The bill: $125,000 per day, or almost $4 million per month. Some 4,500 people attended the first Astrodome volunteers' training session September 3 at Second Baptist, where those wearing crosses and Christian T-shirts joined black-veiled Muslim women to learn how to distribute food and comfort the suffering.

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September (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49