Friday, October 21, 2005
The retired teacher helped victims in Louisiana and plans another trip there.
By VIRGINIA ROSS
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
COLUMBIANA -- For three weeks, Joyce Szedny Yurfick distributed food to Hurricane Katrina victims in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, and they gave her necklaces of beads to show their appreciation.
"That's all many of the people had," she said. "I have so many beads now, and they all mean so much to me. But that's what the people do. They gave us, the volunteers, all beads."
The Beaver, Pa., woman, a retired school teacher, watched the aftermath of Katrina unfold from a distance knowing she had to do something. She became an American Red Cross volunteer.
A week after Katrina hit the American coast, Szedny Yurfick was serving food from a Red Cross truck to hundreds of Hurricane survivors each day just five miles outside New Orleans.
On Thursday, Szedny Yurfick addressed pupils during an assembly at Columbiana Middle School.
"There were really three disasters with Katrina," she told the children in grades five through eight. "The first was the hurricane itself. Then the flooding of the levees. And third, the absence and lack of help and rescue of the thousands of people ... those looking for a safe place to go."
Getting others involved
While Szedny Yurfick was in Louisiana, her friend Shirley Ferrand, a sixth-grade language arts teacher at Columbiana Middle School, was encouraging pupils to bring their spare change to the school so that a donation could be made to help the hurricane victims. In one week, the school collected $707.12. The money is being sent to the Paul Solis Elementary School in Gretna, which is part of Jefferson Parish. That school was destroyed.
"When [Szedny Yurfick] told me what she was doing, we thought it would be good to work together and get the children here involved with helping the children there," Ferrand said.
Szedny Yurfick said she plans to return to the New Orleans area by the end of the year. She continues encouraging area residents to support the relief effort.
"To think of drinking water as being such a premium," she said, "it's something so easy to take for granted. But it became so precious to the people because nobody had it. First water, and then food. That was the priority. And there is still so much devastation and so much work to be done. There are so many needs there. "People ask, 'Will they recover?' Sure they will. But we all need to consider what we can do to help in that process."