For Children of the Gulf, Smiles Hard to Come By

The first word Kien Huynh thought of to describe Katrina was catastrophic. The next was boring.

No TV. No Internet. And imagine this lament coming from a 16-year-old: No school.

“Usually if I’m bored, I just walk to my friend’s house and hang out,” said Huynh, a junior at Biloxi High School. “Now we have a curfew, and anyway, we can’t call to make plans because we don’t have phones.”

Up to 150,000 children age 6 to 16 living in the affected Gulf Coast region now must cope with life after Hurricane Katrina. Their reactions are measured not with dollar signs, but with nightmares and loss of school days.

Disaster relief authorities are too busy focusing on restoring order and infrastructure to worry about the interrupted routines of childhood. And parents who understand that their sons’ and daughters’ lives have been turned upside down are themselves overwhelmed.

Many of the schools in Biloxi were leveled, and all are closed indefinitely. Police rigorously enforce an 8 p.m. curfew -- not that the kids could stay out much later anyway, because there are no street lights. With power returning on a limited basis, the electronic assumptions of young American life are gone: television, computers, video games. The other constant for youths -- the mall -- also was wiped out.

To pass the time, many young people in Biloxi have taken to foraging in sand dune-size trash heaps. Along with the possibility of contaminated waste or poisonous snakes, the mountains of detritus that line every street are filled with broken glass, old mattresses, tree limbs, screen doors, battered appliances and ...

“Mini cars,” said James Price, 9, displaying two toy cars he had found in a trash pile at the housing project where he lives, Oakwood Village.

The fourth-grader raced the cars through a plastic toy garage he had found. The mounds also are excellent places to find balls and other sports equipment, Price said.

A neighbor, Julissa Clay, said her 10-year-old son, Tyrone, was so angry when someone stole his little sister’s bike after Katrina that he scoured every garbage heap until he found a “new” one.

“He’s one of the trash diggers,” Clay said. “He’s been bringing back all kinds of things we don’t need and can’t use right now.”

Clay and other Oakwood Village residents know they must limit their possessions to what they can carry in a few suitcases. The housing project has been condemned by health officials because of the black mold that developed after Katrina’s waters reached all the way to the attics of the two-story brick dwellings. The residents will be evicted Wednesday, with no word yet about where they will be sent.

Just before Katrina hit this seaside city of 50,000, some parents sent their children to stay with relatives in other cities. Lisa Jett, 37, said Saturday that her 8-year-old daughter, Krista Hoberman, already was enrolled in a new school in Madison, Miss., where she was staying with her grandmother.

“Her elementary school here was flattened,” Jett said. “They are saying some schools may reopen in October, but I can’t quite believe that. It’s good that she’s up there, in a new school, so she can regain some sense of normalcy.”

Thuy Nguyen, 32, put her four children in a shelter in a nearby town so she could sort out the family’s future. Like more than a quarter of Biloxi’s adult population, Nguyen worked at one of the city’s 12 casinos -- 11 of which were put out of business by Katrina.

“My kids have been worried,” she said.

Clyde McGuire, Gulf Coast regional service director for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, said: “These children have gone through maybe the largest catastrophe ever to hit America. They have lived it. They survived it. These children in Biloxi, they have lost everything. And on top of that, they now have nothing to do.”

McGuire said five of the Boys and Girls Clubs’ seven Gulf Coast sites were ruined by Katrina -- and the other two were severely damaged. He said child welfare officials estimate that 150,000 children between the ages of 6 and 18 will feel Katrina’s effects.

“Their lives have collapsed around them,” he said. “Everything that was considered normal has been taken away.”

Four days after the hurricane hit, the Salvation Army joined with several church groups to open a Kids’ Kamp. The sponsors sent vans around Biloxi neighborhoods, and on the first day brought 30 children to the camp, set up in an abandoned baseball stadium. By Saturday, more than 100 young people were engaging in riotous water balloon fights.

“The kids needed something to do,” said Don Wildish of the Salvation Army. “It was no more complicated than that.”

Along with playtime, the camp offers organized and informal counseling. Volunteer Lulu de Mayorga, 23, asked nine children to draw their happiest thoughts on squares of a white sheet. One boy depicted himself floating upward. Another camper pictured a little girl, lost and lonely, who opens her front door to find her family gone.

“They are subdued, these drawings. There is nothing happy about them,” de Mayorga said. “These kids are definitely stressed.”

Emmanuel McClelland, 18, says he is too old for a kiddie camp. So he and his junior-year classmate from Biloxi High, Maurice Dickey, spend most of their days on someone’s front porch in Oakwood Village, where both live. Sometimes they help the Red Cross and Salvation Army volunteers who come through the neighborhood to distribute clothing, ice, cold drinks and hot meals.

Dickey, 17, said that as soon as Katrina’s floodwaters receded, he and McClelland grabbed brooms and swept the broken glass off the basketball court in the housing project.

With the daytime temperature above 90, he said, they could play for only a few hours in the late afternoon.

Dickey said that in some ways, he felt silly complaining that the hurricane had made his life worse, when things were so much worse for so many others -- and many had not survived.

It amazed him to realize he was looking forward to going back to school. And, he said, it surprised him to realize that doing nothing had quickly become a habit.

“At the beginning,” he said, “it was real boring. But you get used to it.”