Surviving Katrina

Never before has my Pocket PC been so critical and useful to me than during the recovery from the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

My synagogue (http://www.northshorejewish.org) and my home are in Mandeville, Louisiana, a suburb immediately outside New Orleans. When we learned that the then Category 3 hurricane had turned towards the New Orleans area on Saturday, August 27, my family, along with the overwhelming majority of New Orleans-area residents, decided to evacuate. My family and my brother's family went to stay with my in-laws in south-west Louisiana. There were nine of us living in one home with one phone line. When I returned to visit Mandeville five days later, I discovered that both my home and our synagogue sustained damage when the Hurricane hit on August 29.

Wi-Fi equipped Pocket PC comes in handy

I have been using a Toshiba e740 Pocket PC since January 2003. At the time I purchased this device, I debated whether or not to purchase a unit with Wi-Fi capabilities since there were not that many applications for the technology at the time. I continually found greater uses for Wi-Fi since then, but didn't realize how critical it could be until the evacuation. I keep information about the leadership of our congregation and my other most important contacts on the device in Pocket Outlook. In addition, I also keep contact information for our entire membership in an Excel database, which I keep synchronized with my Pocket PC. Since I keep congregants' e-mail addresses in this file I had the ability to stay in contact with any of them who had access to e-mail. I also had the cell phone numbers of many of our members, and was able to contact many people with whom I rarely spoke other than by landline.

But the most convenient aspect of my Pocket PC was the Wi-Fi feature of my e740. The best way I had to communicate with my displaced congregants was through our e-mail list server. Ninety nine percent of our congregants had evacuated, but because our community is not right in the middle of where the most severe devastation occurred, it didn't get much press and we could not obtain information about our area very easily.

Even though our area didn't receive the massive damage of the Ninth Parish, we were still in state of shock. None of the news or Internet sites were reporting on what was happening in our neighborhood, and we had no idea what the future held for our community. From the broadcasts it appeared that the city of New Orleans and nearby suburbs may have been completely destroyed. We did not know if there would be anything left to rebuild. Members of our community had relocated to Baton Rouge, Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, Florida, and throughout the country. How could any congregation survive as a community when we did not know the status of our synagogue, our homes, or our friends?

Amidst all the chaos and my own shock, my Pocket PC not only helped me remain connected with my congregants, it helped me retain a sense of purpose. I stayed in contact with our congregants by sending at least one e-mail a day. Sometimes I would gain a piece of information, which I would then pass along. Other times it was words of encouragement. And instead of giving my weekly sermon at the synagogue, I e-mailed it to everyone.

"Word of mouth" beats network news—a big "thanks" to Kinko's!

Our congregation wanted to know what was happening in their communities and on their streets. However, as mentioned, the major news sources were focused on the major devastation, and pretty much ignored the outlying parts of the city. Even the Internet news sources weren't doing much better. So instead we used a "word of mouth" system augmented by e-mail. When one person with a connection to a local government agency or law enforcement department obtained information, they would pass it to me via e-mail or a phone call. I would get on my Pocket PC and send it out to our congregational list. When we finally got back to our Mandeville, many congregants told me that this was often their lifeline to the congregation and to the community—the only connection they had to what was going on in our area.