Bayou La Batre, Part II

DEBBIE ELLIOTT, host:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Debbie Elliott. We continue our story about Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Don't let the town's population of 2,300 mislead you. With its shrimp fleet, seafood processors and ship builders, this was one of the busiest maritime hubs in the region. But the poverty rate here is twice the national average. Many people barely get by and that's especially true for seasonal seafood workers. Katrina made their lives that much harder.

(Soundbite of wharf activity)

ELLIOTT: We're on small flat bottom skiff with two fishermen pulling crabs traps out of Mobile Bay. Ordinarily each would be on his own boat but since the storm, Nopa Don Vongio(ph) has had to pick up crew work. The Laotian immigrant moved to Bayou La Batre last year, bought a small boat and put out about 300 crab pots. Then Katrina struck. His crab traps were washed away and he still hasn't found his boat. It's just gone. Now he works for a friend, hoping to save up and start over.

Mr. NOPA DON VONGIO (Fisherman) (Through translator): I try to work but I don't have the money yet. I plan to stay here.

ELLIOTT: How much do you make working for somebody else?

Mr. VONGIO: He gives me like a hundred a day but some days we don't go. Like yesterday we didn't go and I don't get money.

ELLIOTT: Phu Chantavist(ph) is helping us translate. She lives in Bayou La Batre and is now working for Boat People SOS. She explains that this crabber was turned down for a small business loan because of a lack of records to prove his operation's worth. That's been a problem for several of her clients.

Ms. PHU CHANTAVIST (Boat People SOS): Most Asians, if you get turned down, they're the type that they don't want to fight. If you say no, that's no. They will work with their ten fingers and try to support a family.

ELLIOTT: Is there work for people? I mean when you have people come to you and say what do I do and you try to get them a job, what do you tell them?

Ms. CHANTAVIST: There is construction and there is office work but most Asians, they don't have education to do that. And as for construction work, most places require a license for electricians. I don't think they can do it. Just pick crabs, you know, shrimp industry, oyster, that's about it.

ELLIOTT: Are those jobs back in Bayou La Batre?

Ms. CHANTAVIST: They're back but they're not working normally like they are supposed to. Now it's like two days a week and you only make $20.00 or $30.00 a day. After the Hurricane everything just went down. There is no work. Seafood is not like before. Everybody is suffering.

ELLIOTT: Take Mali Hoat, a 41-year-old former crab picker. We visited her last November. She was living in a FEMA camper trailer with her six young kids. Relief worker Val Dang(ph) was there to help her navigate the maze of hurricane relief paperwork.

Mr. VAL DANG: (Relief worker): You sign there again. Okay. Maybe get some food stamps for the children. The children have no food, nothing.

ELLIOTT: Mali Hoat has a complicated hurricane story. As a teenager, Mali fled her war torn homeland of Cambodia. After living in a refugee camp in Thailand, she finally made it to the United States. For years she picked crabs in Bayou La Batre, long hours of hard work getting paid by the pounds of crabmeat she could produce each day. It was barely enough to support her growing family. A Cambodian friend in Washington State told her she could make good money there as a card dealer in a casino. So she put her small children in the care of an adult daughter in Alabama and crossed the country in search of higher wages. Then she saw the pictures of Hurricane Katrina on CNN. She rushed home to find her kids, leaving everything behind, including her job. She was denied unemployment benefits.

Ms. MALI HOAT (Resident of Bayou La Batre): Denied because I quit no reason. I said I had to run away from here because my daughter and all my kids are missing. All water.

Mr. DANG: She say before Katrina, she said the life was very easy but after Katrina she says something like she go back to ground zero in her homeland.

ELLIOTT: Mali Hoat has relied on a local church for food and clothes, but other than a FEMA trailer she is not doing too well signing up for more help.

Ms. HOAT: But I tried, you know. Apply everything, they don't give me anything because I don't know how to speak.

Mr. DANG: She says she wants to give up. Don't give up. We still try to help you, don't give up.

ELLIOTT: Ever since the French built a gun battery along the bayou here in the 18th century, Bayou La Batre has been at the mercy of nature and storms seem to mark turning points for the town, known after the Civil War as a costal resort with fine hotels and even an opera house.

Ms. JUANITA McROY (Bayou La Batre Resident): Hurricane of 1906 did a lot of damage and then 1916, and they just never recovered from that.

ELLIOTT: Juanita McRoy and her husband Arthur are members of the local historical foundation. Their home is on high ground, a lovely hillside on the opposite end of town from the water. Both of them grew up here. Juanita was the Postmaster for a time.

Ms. McROY: I started working in the post office when I was growing up too. There was a big French population here, and the descendents of the original French. Every morning they would come in the post office and just, you know, chatter, chatter, chatter their French back and forth.

Mr. McROY: They didn't speak very good English either, but they did speak English.

Ms. McROY: But they could read and write.

Mr. McROY: Tell them about them Portuguese coming in and talking about them damn foreigners.

Ms. McROY: I won't tell you the name but a prominent man moved in here from Portugal. He just got really wealthy here in the seaport industry. But when Orientals started moving in after the end of the Vietnamese War and (unintelligible) fussing and blankety blank foreigners that's taking over this town. I couldn't help but be amused.

And the reason of course they moved to the coast, because that's what they were familiar with over there. And they're good people, most of them are. You know, they've got bad and good like everybody else and they're hard workers. So it's just different. The whole downtown section is totally different now. Just about all the businesses, of course they're gone now too, but were Oriental. It had kind of gotten real depressed before the Hurricane because of the economy. Now it's are we going to be able to get our boats out of the swamp and are we going to be able to get our houses back? You know, that's the big issue now.

It kind of equalized everybody. Since that hurricane I don't see there is ever any hopes for it again. It will never be the same. It will never ever be what we knew it to be.

ELLIOTT: The most stark reminder of what Hurricane Katrina did to Bayou La Batre is at the end of a muddy dirt road swarming with biting yellow flies. Here in the piney woods, four rusting ships loom above you. They're among the two dozen still stuck on dry land. The boats belong to Vietnamese fishermen who don't have insurance or the means to hire cranes to lift the vessels back into the bayou. The boats have become part of the green landscape, pine limbs intertwined with shrimp nets.

(Soundbite of the ocean)

Ms. DEBBIE JONES: Long term recovery. I tell somebody is that it's long-term recovery. I know it happened overnight and unfortunately it's just one of those things that takes time.

ELLIOTT: Debbie Jones has the job of overseeing that recovery for the town of Bayou La Batre. It's now the first weekend in May and we've met her along the waterfront industrial district to get a sense of progress here.

Ms. JONES: We initially, with all our seafood processing plants down...

ELLIOTT: All of them were down?

Ms. JONES: Oh yeah. Everybody here was closed. We have never had the magnitude of water that we had. So all of this was shut down.

ELLIOTT: So the whole industry in this town was basically gone.

Ms. JONES: Shipbuilding and everything. We are standing outside of what used to be one of our larger seafood processing plants. They received so much damage through the storm to the equipment, to the coolers, that it was not feasible for these folks to come back.

ELLIOTT: Now it's for sale, along with several other plants that were once the city's largest employers. As far as the businesses that have reopened, few are at full capacity because of a ripple effect from Hurricane Katrina which put fishermen out of business all along the Gulf Coast.

More than 80 percent of the oysters processed in Bayou La Batre come from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Even before the hurricane, city leaders were looking for ways to lessen the town's dependence on the seafood industry. The city council chambers were lined with sketches of a developer's plan to turn the town into a French-style village along the Bayou. Debbie Jones says the plans have been put on hold for now but could be just what Bayou La Batre needs.

Ms. JONES: Years ago, when my grandmother was little, this was a place everybody wanted to come to for the seafood and for the hotels along the waterfront, and I kind of envision boardwalks, maybe some nice shops and restaurants. You know, seafood's here and it's gonna be here, you know, but my great-grandparents were in that business and I certainly can see it complementing each other.

(Soundbite of thunder)

Ms. JONES: Thunder.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. JONES: You could work it to be a tourists kind of thing, too. A big thing when I was growing up, in third grade, you got to come down here and go on a shrimp boat and learn how they, that was a field trip that we had, you know, so I guess a field trip for adults, if you will, you know. You know, we're not gonna wakeup in the morning and be surrounded by condos and townhouses, but eventually I think it will happen.

(Soundbite of thunderstorm)

ELLIOTT: Even this quick storm overwhelms the town's damaged drainage system, and before long the streets are streaming with water. It's hard to image a big resort here when the terracotta drainpipes can barely handle a spring thunderstorm.

Since Hurricane Katrina, many families have left Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Recovery coordinator Debbie Jones estimates at least 300 people are gone for good, pushing the town's population under 2,000. Those who've stayed are trying to decide if they can face another hurricane season.

When we first met Sharli(ph) and Jody Schultz(ph), just after the storm, they were working late into the night to rebuild their small wood frame house across from a shipyard. This had been Jody's grandmother's house, and Hurricane Katrina reduced it down to the studs. They were determined to stay.

Mr. JODY SCHULTZ (Resident): You know, we're gonna hang in here to the last, I mean the last ones to go.

ELLIOTT: Now, Jody and Sharli Schultz are just about finished with their house. Jody is working fulltime at a boatyard in the next town over. He says he'd like to see more progress in Bayou La Batre by now. His wife Sharli says she's had it.

Ms. SHARLI SCHULTZ (Resident): I'm ready to go.

ELLIOTT: Are you really?

Ms. SCHULTZ: Yeah. I wanna go.

ELLIOTT: Why?

Ms. SCHULTZ: I don't want to go through another hurricane. You just lose too much. I just don't like bad weather, period. I was scared to death yesterday when that come through here.

ELLIOTT: The thunderstorm.

Ms. SCHULTZ: It was bad, and I had enough.

ELLIOTT: Do you ever think it's time to move?

Mr. SCHULTZ: Oh, yeah. And you know, if someone came in and made us a offer that we couldn't pass up, then you know, we'd go ahead and go. There's been a lot of talk about it. It'll probably be this big condo resort town like everybody's talking. Small town life will be over with.

(Soundbite of music)

ELLIOTT: Back at the Blessing of the Fleet Festival, a rain-soaked morning has turned to sunshine. A street parade winds through town, leading the archbishop to a wooden dock just below the Bayou La Batre drawbridge.

About 30 boats are tied up so close you could step from one to the other. There are far fewer boats than in years past, but the mood is still festive. People have affixed colorful decorations to their boats, like the poster board replicas of the Bible atop the mast of the Cajun Baby.

Mr. ANTHONY NELSON JR.(ph) (Fisherman): We've got our Bibles on both sides of the boat.

ELLIOTT: Your Bibles up there?

Mr. NELSON JR.: Yes, ma'am.

ELLIOTT: Up on the top there?

Mr. NELSON JR.: Up on top.

ELLIOTT: And what do they say?

Mr. NELSON, JR.: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.

ELLIOTT: Anthony Nelson Jr. is on the 30-foot shrimp boat with his brother and father and their family. Anthony Nelson, Sr. is waiting for the archbishop to arrive to bless their boats.

Mr. ANTHONY NELSON, SR. (Fisherman): I mean, I believe in blessing a boat, you know, and 'cause all we got is God anyway, so we bless boats, you know.

ELLIOTT: Are you worried at all that Bayou La Batre may lose its seafood industry?

Mr. NELSON, SR.: We not gonna leave if we lose it, because we ain't gonna let it be lost. 'Cause I've never had a steady job in my life. I've always been a commercial fisherman. I've never punched a time clock. I couldn't even tell you how to punch a time clock. You know. I'm not leaving the Bayou. And this is my first friend, Bubba. He owns a boat, too, you know. Huh, Bubba.

Mr. BUBBA BRYANT (Fisherman): We'll keep it alive.

Mr. NELSON, SR.: Yeah, we gonna keep it alive. Just me and you. We gonna be right here. If we ain't but two boats in the blessing, it's gonna be ours.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BRYANT: That's right.

ELLIOTT: As Bubba Bryant and Anthony Nelson ready to push away from the pier, Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb boards the pilot boat Alabama and climbs to the bow in his flowing white robe. He uses holy water from the Bayou to bless the fleet.

Archbishop OSCAR LIPSCOMB: If y'all notice any of them lodged up on the ground where we can't see them, point those out. We'll bless those, too.

ELLIOTT: The boats that have followed behind now circle around, and people on the boats and on shore stretch their arms toward the archbishop for a personal blessing, reaching for the hope that a new shrimp season brings. A new hurricane season opens Thursday.

(Soundbite of horn blasts)

ELLIOTT: To meet some of the people of Bayou La Batre, go to our website npr.org.

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