Praying for family from afar
Monique Beadle ’04 (right) wasn’t asked to evacuate New Orleans. She wasn’t among the many Gulf Coast residents who locked their front doors with an urgent prayer that their homes would still be standing when they returned. As Hurricane Katrina closed in on the city where she was born and raised, Beadle waited and watched nervously from 1,000 miles away—powerless to help her family and friends who fled inland to escape the storm.
A law student, Beadle lives in Washington, D.C., where she also serves as refugee program director for the World Organization for Human Rights USA. “It was really tough initially,” she remembers. “At first, I felt like I was in mourning for a lost family member, watching my city sink. I would go from having hope that New Orleans would rise again like a phoenix from the ashes, to being mad at the bureaucrats who were slowing down aid.”
Her parents, residents of Jefferson Parish, were among the fortunate few whose homes emerged unscathed because they lived in areas where the Army Corps of Engineers focused most of their energy.
Troubled especially by the devastation of the underprivileged population of New Orleans, Beadle says, “It was an indictment for me. The convention center where I’d had my senior prom was teeming with refugees. The neighborhoods I’d been unwilling to walk through were now flooded—and I was partially responsible for the suffering.”
As a refugee advocate, Beadle is not unfamiliar with pain and displacement. But when the hurricane hit, she gained a greater personal awareness of the vulnerability of refugees. “To see that my own parents were IDPs [Internally Displaced Persons], that made me speechless,” she says. “I could no longer see my clients as others.”
Although Hurricane Katrina sharpened Beadle’s perspective, it did nothing to shake her faith. “According to the Gospel, the poor are blessed,” she says, “When there is suffering, it doesn’t mean that [God’s] hand has been lifted.” If anything, this disaster has only strengthened Beadle’s sense of responsibility to the poor and displaced—a glimmer of hope emerging from the wreckage.
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