Alfred gets a debit card — Praise the Lord!
Here is the latest report back to the Goshen, IN, church from their group ministering in Louisiana:
We are impacting people’s lives. In the last 24 hours:
We helped Patricia find transportation home. This will allow her to reunite with her family and begin a construction job.
We helped Cornelius find transportation to get back together with his kids who ended up in Texas.
We helped Linda Bovia find her brother who was once living in the New Orleans VA hospital.
We also arranged transportation and the food that you [the Goshen church] donated to get Lisa, her mom, and two kids to get back home to Kenner, LA.
Our biggest joy came from Alfred Carter. Alfred, like so many of the evacuees, is a guy just like us. He works at the post office, sent his kids off to college, and Katrina turned his life upside down.
For the last couple of weeks his home has been a mattress on the floor of the Emanuel Baptist Church’s Red Cross Shelter. Alfred has been spinning his wheels for three weeks. He has been unable to get a rental car because he does not have any debit or credit cards. He has cash, but the rental car company would not take it.
We started working the problem of turning his cash into plastic so that he could get a rental. We were able to get one of the managers of a local bank to pull some strings for us and he now has a VISA gift card that turned his cash into plastic.
This means he can finally get a rental car and get to his house to get the insurance going, to get back to his life.
Because the Lord has chosen to let our paths cross, the Carter family will be forever changed. Tomorrow we are going to try to find Alfred an apartment. If we are successful in this he’ll be back to life on his own. Pray for us, as you can imagine that apartments in this area are hard to come by.