So far, I wouldn’t say that I’ve exactly been in the trenches in my volunteering for the Red Cross effort to get hurricane evacuees settled. It’s been all but a walk in the park, in fact, based on my expectations, at least with respect to the shape and morale of the people coming in. There’s been much chaos, poor training (as a result of the chaos), and very bad management of resources, again because of the chaos. I don’t think it should be terribly surprising that things aren’t well-organized just yet. Though the Red Cross responds to many disasters, one of this magnitude is probably very much bigger than what our local RC staffers have ever had to manage. The lack of adequate staff to perform training while also getting other necessary work done has resulted in there being many clueless volunteers whose cluelessness causes them to ask supervisors questions, which keeps supervisors constantly busy and harried, which makes it harder for volunteers to get information out of them.

I don’t bring this up in order to criticize. It seems a pretty natural flow of events, and we’re gradually moving toward better organization and more streamlined processes. You have to be kind of careful about suggesting things, as some staffers are too harried to want to deal with approving modified processes, but I’ve found that by simply implementing better processes and demonstrating to other volunteers that the processes improve your ability to help evacuees, you can spread modifications around and eventually they’re smiled upon by supervisors.

This bottom-up change process has made me a much better caseworker. On Monday, having had 30 minutes of disorganized training, I saw my role as a collector of information. If I could get a client’s information down correctly and have all the forms signed appropriately, I felt pretty good about what I’d done. Today, after working through the process with others and sharing our experiences with one another, I was a much more useful caseworker. It’s not about getting information and routing people to the next station as I had originally understood. My role is to help get these people as back on their feet as they can get. I try to help them figure out what they’re going to do about their banking, their insurance, their housing, getting their kids in school, getting medication, etc. These people have arrived in Knoxville with nothing and often without having any idea what to do next with their lives, and I’m charged with helping them take those first steps. It’s very gratifying to see the occasional transformation of a client from a dejected survivor to someone with some direction and some hope. I’m not trying to puff myself up here. I’m merely a facilitator more or less following a script that has emerged and improved a great deal over the last few days. So I don’t think I’m especially talented or good for being able to follow that script. I’m very glad to have the opportunity, though, because it reminds me how lucky I am and gives me a chance to hear interesting (if sometimes sad) stories and sometimes to make a brief human connection with someone who could really use a friendly face.

All of the people I’ve interviewed so far have gotten here through friends or family and so have had a place to go. For them, things haven’t been perhaps as bad as they could have been, though it’s almost certain that they’ve lost their homes. One elderly woman recounted for me the story of returning to her home to assess the damage. She and her husband and son walked 6 miles back to their home to see that it was still standing but unusable, the frame all askew. She had a picture. During these interviews, I have to ask people how they were affected by the hurricane and how they found their ways to Tennessee. As she recounted her story, she began crying a little (not very much at all, and a heck of a lot less than I probably would be doing in the same circumstances), and so strong was her spirit (for lack of a better, less supernatural word) that she apologized for crying. She had what I gather was a Creole accent and seemed to be a strong, sweet woman. She was lucky in having located all of her family.

Another woman I spoke to (not in an official interview) was a Knoxvillian who had brought her sister to our processing center. She’s got 12 siblings who all lived in New Orleans. They’re scattered now, and she was upbeat. They’ve found most of her siblings by now. She had located her sister using one of the online services. By chance, she was being flown up to a Tennessee city a few hours from here. When she drove over to pick her sister up, the volunteers asked her sister if she had any family in Tennessee. I guess she was dazed enough from the events of the last week that she couldn’t remember, so she said no. When they gave the sister the name of the woman I spoke to, the sister realized her lapse and was united with at least that one little branch of her family. The woman I spoke to was very upbeat in spite of the fact that some of her family’s still missing.

And that’s what stands out to me about my volunteer experience so far: that people are enduring. This awful event has displaced all of these people, but most of them come in and are thankful and kind and seem to take the attitude that life will go on. Which it will, but it’s easy to forget that under duress. People are very resilient, it turns out.

Maybe I’ll have more on this later. Working my day job during just-pre-crunch time and trying to get in 4 or 5 hours of volunteering a day while minimizing the effect on my family (of which I’m doing a poor job) is hard, and I won’t be able to keep it up. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s when we’re expecting the onslaught, hundreds of people at a time. It’ll be much less of a trickle than it’s been so far, and I suspect there’ll be more impatient people (understandably, as they’ve been standing on sides of roads and flying in planes and riding on buses for days) and much more work than can really be done in the facility we’re using. I hate that now that I’m up to speed, I’m going to have to cut back my commitment shortly after we really do find ourselves in the trenches. Next week and subsequent weeks, I’ll still try to volunteer for at least a half day a week. Maybe I’ll do a half day during the week and a half day on the weekend. If I have any local readers out there who haven’t volunteered yet, please do think about doing so. There’ll be a long-term need for volunteers, so if you can’t do anything in the short-term, consider checking back in the coming weeks.

In five minutes, I head out to a training session, where I’ll learn how to interview incoming evacuees. I’m told it takes an hour or an hour-and-a-half to interview one family. I don’t know precisely what the interview’s for. I presume it’s to get former address info, family info, etc.

I’m nervous for two reasons. One is that I’m sort of treading on unknown territory here. I’m terrified of confrontation, and I know there’ll be some. I’m nervous around new people. And in particular, I have difficulty dealing with people undergoing some sort of hardship. I find myself awkward around the disabled and the elderly, for example. But this is something I want to do. I’m still trying to wrap my head around why I’m so manic about this effort.

The other reason I’m nervous is that I’m heading out sporting an RET shirt that reads on the back, in big letters, “You don’t need god to be good.” The training is at a church. I worry that some (most) people will find this offensive, but my intention isn’t to offend. I just want to demonstrate that even the godless are good, to be in the trenches working as steadfastly as the religious and to show them that not only don’t I eat babies, but that I’m in fact capable of compassion and have a very strong personal desire to help those in need.

I went to an organizational meeting last night at a church. We were in a cavernous sanctuary whose balcony was as deep as the church I grew up attending. The minister addressed the large crowd from the podium and talked for a few minutes about how the church grew a great deal during the plague because people demonstrated the love of Christ through their actions and brought others into the fold. He paid lipservice to the fact that the Red Cross had rules against prosyletizing, but his emphasis was on growing the church, adding names to the list. It made me a little heartsick, because here I am out of genuine compassion, hurting when I think of these poor evacuees while the head of this major church is thinking of them as targets. He might as well be trying to get them hooked on Amway.

I don’t doubt that many religious people have a sincere desire to help, one very much like mine. But there also seems to be an ugly ulterior motive lurking there. “If I help these people, maybe I’ll get into Heaven.” And I don’t have that. I want to help because I want to help; I’m good because I know what it is to be good and not because I feel as if I’m under the thumb of any god who will torture me forever if I’m not good.

And that’s why I’m wearing the shirt, inflammatory though it may be. If anybody approaches me about it, I’ll try to engage in friendly conversation about it, to explain (in less frank terms) my motivation: that I want to demonstrate that the godly don’t have the corner on morality and ethics.

Another email to RET, from yesterday. Please take it to heart and help if you can, even if you’re not associated with RET. Also, I’ve set up a wiki to house what information I can cobble together about local relief efforts. If you know of other information or if you need other information, please let me know or post on the wiki.

I learned today from an RET member of an informational meeting about local efforts to help provide relief for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Some people have already migrated to the Knoxville area, and 750 are being bused in on Tuesday. About 1,500 total are expected. The meeting, organized by a local group called the Compassion Coalition in conjunction with the Knoxville chapter of the American Red Cross, centered on organizing volunteers.

The coliseum and several churches will be providing space for shelters, but administrators have estimated their staffing needs to include a workforce of 540 volunteers working 6-hour shifts every third day. That’s a lot of people, and that’s a huge commitment. Let’s think of it in terms of RET’s membership. If our group of 60ish people could find three volunteers, they could each expect to spend roughly one business day (or night) a week staffing a shelter. Realistically, it’d probably become a bigger commitment than that.

For as small a portion of the workforce as we could provide, I imagine it’d be an administrative speedbump for the coalition and the Red Cross to have to coordinate with us. Accordingly, I’ve contacted Rev. Buice at the TVUUC to see if his church is getting involved and to see if we (and perhaps the other area UU churches) could lump our resources together to provide a group of volunteers that could be more reasonably managed. I’m also attending a meeting tonight at which I hope I can gain some traction within this coalition.

Yesterday, I asked you for money, knowing full well that many of us are unable to donate substantial money to this cause. Today, I ask you for time, hoping that more of us can spend a few hours a week chipping in. I was trying to work out on the way home from the meeting today how I could fit this into my schedule. RET already suffers because I don’t dedicate sufficient time to executing its business. The list of things I need to fix around the house is getting longer and longer, and I’ll be out of town for a week at the end of the month. And of course I already feel as if I don’t see enough of my daughter. But my daughter’s safe. And I type this from a comfortable chair in my air-conditioned home after having spent the morning at a stimulating discussion among friends. There are 1.5 million people displaced by the hurricane who can now only dream of such things. Surely I can spend 4 - 6 hours a day or two a week for a few weeks to help give some of these people a home and meals to eat. Surely I can try to find a way to make it work.

From 6:00 - 9:00 tomorrow night at Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church (on the corner of Kingston Pike and Cedar Bluff), there’s a training meeting. All volunteer staffers have to go through this training. There will be other sessions in the coming weeks, so if you’re interested in helping but can’t make this session, don’t worry. If you’re interested in possibly helping out, please let me know, and try to give me an idea of what kind of time you think you can devote to helping. I’ll provide more details as I get them to those who express an interest.

It’s frustrating to me that RET wasn’t on the list of groups invited to today’s meeting, that the secular weren’t considered a resource for helping those in need. The Compassion Coalition is composed of people who emphasize a belief in Christ, so understandably we’re not included. We need to look past differences in religious beliefs to help these people in need, though, and I’d like to be able to say proudly that our little group produced a wellspring of volunteers. Please give serious thought to helping out. Thanks for your continued attention on this matter.

247. That’s what I weigh as of a doctor’s appointment yesterday. I’m up 8 pounds from a February physical. My blood work in February showed a high level of liver enzyme and slightly elevated cholesterol, and yesterday’s doctor visit was a belated follow-up (I neglected to schedule it earlier, and my doctor nagged me about it a couple of months ago when I came in with a virus). My blood pressure was up yesterday as well, and that’s odd, as I’ve always been a 120/72 kind of guy. I measured 120/96 yesterday, I think. Between that and the already being overweight and the weight gain, my doctor went ahead and told me to start eating better, exercising, etc. He wants me to monitor my blood pressure over the next month (I have another follow-up set up in October) to see if yesterday was a fluke or if I’m developing some sort of problem. If my blood work comes back with liver weirdness, he’s going to do an ultrasound on my liver to see what’s up. It could be any number of diseases, or it could be fatty deposits in my liver. Yuck.

My second summer in Knoxville, I got a new job and had to get my first physical in many years to get the job. I knew I had gained a little weight then, but I was utterly shocked to see the scale balance out at 220. I had always been fairly heavy-set — at least solid and with beefy shoulders — but even so, I weighed in at 185ish through most of college. Of course, in college, I walked many brisk miles a day back and forth across a large campus, and my meal portions were pretty small. When I moved here, I ate bountiful meals and enjoyed a largely sedentary lifestyle. So it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was. I suppose I wouldn’t have been surprised to have escalated up to 200 pounds, but 220?

A few years ago, frustrated with my weight and feeling sort of bad about my appearance, I decided to lose weight. I cut soft-drinks and limited my fat intake to the standard allowance or less. What prompted this lifestyle change was my discovering one day that a measly little fronzen lunch entree that hardly qualified as a snack had more fat in it than my whole daily allowance. And after eating that, I’d go home and eat a big dinner with probably double the fat. So I cut my fat intake substantially and did nothing else in the way of exercise, and before you know it, I had people commenting about how my face was thinner and about how thin I was looking. I felt really good about myself. I’m not much of a mirror gazer, but if I happened to catch a glimpse in the mirror on the way to the shower, I’d see at most a very slight hint of a bulge around my middle. I lost two or three inches around my waistline during this time, and I guess I kept the weight off for a year or so.

Then I got another new job and started eating big greasy burgers out with my coworkers a couple of days a week. Then along came the baby, and something about the experience made me start packing food in. And so here I am today at 247.

Several times over the past year, I’ve started to cut my fat intake, but I’ve always relapsed pretty quickly into pigging out. But now, with the doctor on my ass, with $120 blown on a blood pressure thingie, there’s real motivation. I went out yesterday and bought some tennis shoes so that I can try running (or at least walking briskly) pretty much every day. I did a little under two miles today (walked most of it). And I bought a couple of cookbooks that have great looking low-fat meals. This is exciting anyway, as I’ve been growing increasingly tired of the meal rotation (call it a rut, maybe) we’ve been on.

I think I’m serious about changing my lifestyle this time. I’ve spent money on it, after all, and I’m so tight-fisted that spending fairly substantial money on something represents a commitment that’s not to be taken terribly lightly. Wish me luck, and if you see me scoping out unhealthy food, do me a favor and remind me that I shouldn’t.

Here’s a letter I wrote to the members of the Rationalists of East Tennessee, an organization I’m associated with. While it targets members of the organization, anybody who reads it here is perfectly welcome to contribute as well. If you wish to inquire for further details, email me at daryl at learnhouston.com.

This week, as we all know, hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf. I grew up on the outskirts of hurricane country and, while I was always nervous when bad weather approached, hurricanes were fairly commonplace and seldom seemed to do much damage as far inland as I lived. We’d gather up some candles, bundle my beachfront grandmother up to come stay further inland, and weather the storms from a pretty safe distance (though a few years ago, a hurricane obliterated the comfortable little town I grew up in). But Katrina’s a different story. Even as far inland as Knoxville, I was affected by the hurricane, losing power for four hours on Tuesday night when (I assume) heavyish winds blew down power lines that feed my neighborhood. You should have heard me griping about hating rain and having no air conditioning and having to reset the stinking clocks and — horror of horrors — missing one of my favorite prime-time TV shows. This hurricane was such a raging pain in the neck for me.

How petty I’ve felt while watching reports of the situation in the Gulf area over the past few days. Houses are in splinters. There are still people hiding in their attics, chest-deep in water. People are dying for lack of medication and from the heat. Others are wandering around grimly looking for lost family members. Perfectly moral, law-abiding citizens are being reduced to theft so that they and their families can survive. That could be my family. I feel an acidic rush of despair when I see lethargic, hungry babies in the reports (usually while my baby plays on a junk-heap of toys, well-fed and happy). That could be my baby going hungry.

Think for a minute about your grocery bill. A can of vegetables costs less than a dollar. A meal’s worth of ground beef or chicken for one person can be had for a dollar or so. A loaf of bread costs a buck or two. Two or three dollars will keep a baby in clean diapers for a day, and an infant can be fed a good meal for a buck and a half. Every ten or so dollars donated might keep another person fed for another day. If every member of RET donated $10, we could feed about 60 people for a day.

As humanists, we’re proud to be concerned with this life and its quality rather than with any hereafter. Accordingly, when we see so much suffering and chaos, when we see so many thousands of other human beings savaged by loss and exhaustion and bereft of human dignity, it is incumbent upon us to help in what ways we can, however modest or generous. I challenge each of you to donate more to the Red Cross than you’re especially comfortable donating. Skip a dinner out so that you can tack another $30 onto your donation. Skimp on your own groceries in the coming week so that you can donate the difference and help feed someone in dire need of help. If you have airline miles, you can even donate those through the American Red Cross Web site to help with the mobilization of resources. Please do what you can (and then some) to help those who are displaced and suffering as a result of the hurricane.

RET is accepting donations earmarked for hurricane relief and will send the full amount of any such donations to the American Red Cross next week. If you’d like to donate through RET, please write “Hurricane Relief” in the memo line of your check and send to the address below or deliver to me in person as soon as possible. We’d like to get funds to the American Red Cross by midweek. As RET is a non-profit organization, your donation will be tax deductible; we’ll be happy to provide receipts upon request.

Rationalists of East Tennessee
Hurricane Relief
P.O. Box 51634
Knoxville, TN 37950

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and import the bugs. Hrrmmmm.

So my company’s looking at switching from using the beastly Bugzilla bug tracking software to using something called FogBugz. It seems a decent enough piece of software, though the install process went as follows:

1. Download and untar install files.
2. Learn from the readme that it requires a PHP extension, a daemon, and (for me) a PHP upgrade. This is all rather more intrusive than most bug software I’ve seen, though to be fair, Bugzilla also has a lot of dependencies.
3. Upgrade PHP.
4. Run a script at the command line to make sure dependencies are all worked out.
5. Start the daemon.
6. Run a wizard on the Web to set up the database, etc.
7. Buy and submit license key.
8. Worry about importing bugs from old bug tracker into new one.

This last item is the one that’s taken up some four hours of my morning today. FogBugz apparently ships as an asp application, but there’s a PHP version that we’re using. For the Windows version, there’s a script to import from Bugzilla, but it’s hosed on Linux. It seems to tap into stuff set in the PHP extension that’s Windows-specific or something. So I worked a little magic using some PEAR classes and was able to connect to Bugzilla’s xml interfact to retrieve bugs.

But I was getting authentication errors. Apparently, if you’re not logged in, you can’t see bugs using Bugzilla’s xml interface. I tried a couple of things and finally just used links at the command line with the -source flag to get all of our bugs as text files. I had to browse to our Bugzilla install using links and login first, though, so that the cookie would be set and subsequent connections would be able to see the xml data rather than the “NotPermitted” error.

So, now I’ve got 700ish bug reports in a directory. Time to hack the import script to make it work using my data rather than the obfuscated methods available through the Zend extension. This was just a little tedious and mainly consisted of finding objects and function calls and replacing them with arrays and keys that hold the corresponding data from my parsed xml. That is, the shipped code gets an xml file and creates objects to hold the data, while my code slurps in the xml and creates a nested array for each bug; I had to make the import script read my arrays rather than looking for objects. There were a couple of little hitches that were easily fixed, and before too long, I had my 700ish bugs imported into FogBugz.

But I noticed when reviewing my new bug list that I had a bunch of bugs that weren’t mine, and others had bugs that should have been mine. Moreover, most of the bugs were assigned to just two of us. Why this happened I have no idea. To fix it, I wrote a script that reconciles user ids between the two systems and changes bug assignment in FogBugz for each bug to what the assignment in Bugzilla originally was. For example, say user X in Bugzilla has numeric id 5, while he has numeric id 22 in FogBugz (just because of the way the users were imported). Luckily, both systems use the email address as the login, so I could query both databases, get the numeric id for each, and then do a query for each bug that says (in English) “Change the assigned-to field for bug 700 to the numeric id 22 because the numeric id for assigned-to in Bugzilla is 5, and user 5 in Bugzilla corresponds to user 22 in FogBugz because they map to the same email address.”

And voila, my bug list is as it should be. I’m sure we’ll find problems here and there, but by and large, I’d say it was as successful an import as could have been hoped for.