A Reflection by Fr. Brian:
(a personal story of Hurricane Harvey, continued from May 11th)
We tried to get as much sleep as we could that first night, listening to Hurricane Harvey outside pelting the roof of the terminal with buckets and buckets of rain, bundled up in any blankets we could get our hands on, mostly some from the plane. As the evening got later, some of the skeleton terminal staff brought by some carts of snacks for us. Thank goodness! Chips, small sandwiches, drinks. And, that was our dinner. Some of our older people needed to take some of their drugs, but couldn’t because they were stashed in their luggage and we could not access the luggage.
So, we spent the night, and it was a Sunday night, in the freezing terminal at Bush International in Houston, not knowing if and when we would be leaving for the Rio Grande Valley, not knowing how long Hurricane Harvey was going to last.
The next morning, some airline officials came to me and asked if we would like to get on a plane to Chicago. I said, “Chicago! all we need is a flight of some 400 miles back to the Valley!” “Okay”, they said, then you will have to stay here in the terminal until a flight opens up.”
That whole second day we wandered through the mostly vacant terminals, wondering what was happening. Hurricane Harvey continued to pound Houston with incredible flooding. We prayed as a group together, in fact, I had with me a statue of Father Damien, so we set up a little altar and had a prayer service to Father Damien. We even included a little old kupuna from Guadalajara Mexico who couldn’t get back to her family in Mexico, stuck just like us. We spoke to her in Spanish and invited her to join our group in prayer. I even heard her confession. She too, like us, not knowing what was going to happen to us.
As we ended that second day in the terminal, we had been fed by some terminal employees with sandwiches and stuff since all the restaurants were closed. They had to feed us!
One of our group, a young lady traveling with her parent, happened to discover that they had some cots available in another terminal for the terminal employees who could not leave to use. So, she asked if our group could use some of them. They said sure. So we had to go to a distant terminal where there were some cots, not set up yet, in one of the gate areas.
We had to set up the cots ourselves and just before some people began to retire on them for the night, the second night in the terminal, they brought by some aluminum foil blankets for us to keep warm through the night. We prayed the rosary and tried to get some rest!
(Stay tuned tomorrow for the continuing saga of the Damien pilgrims!