Displaced, but Not Disheartened

As she walks through the bungalow she now calls home, Dawn Evans casts grateful eyes over the polished dining room table and the simple but stylish drapes hanging at the windows. Her eldest son, Sean, 10, barrels through, bike helmet still strapped to his head. In the backyard, 7-year-old daughter Ashlyn's pink-and-white two-wheeler sits upside down, one training wheel on, one off. Her youngest, 4-year-old Kannin, wanders by wide-eyed, offering up his juice box so his mother can insert the straw.

When Father Robert Kearns of St. Brigid Catholic Church in South Los Angeles walked her through the house two months ago, he warned her she might not want it. The house needed everything -- paint, carpeting, windows, blinds for the windows.

But Evans, 31, needed everything too -- a place a single mother and three children could call theirs, a place where they could pause an odyssey that began after midnight the day before Hurricane Katrina tore up the Gulf Coast.

Evans packed a few days' worth of clothes, a few important documents and her children. They piled into a friend's SUV at 1 a.m. that Sunday in the Gentilly suburb of New Orleans, and headed for Texas.

St. Brigid Catholic Church, with its mostly black and Hispanic congregation, was thick with ties to the Bayou State. The pastor was out of town when the hurricane hit, but he called the rectory right away -- put something in the bulletin asking for suggestions on what the church could do.

By the middle of September, the parish decided to renovate the little bungalow it owned behind the church parking lot on Western Avenue and offer it to a hurricane survivor -- preferably a family with ties to the parish.

St. Brigid parishioners donated goods, money and hours of labor to turn the bungalow into a cozy home. Seven weeks, it took. New appliances and repainted cabinets for the kitchen. Mint green paint and pink rugs in the rear bedroom, for Ashlyn. A bunk bed in the side bedroom, for the boys. A gleaming washer and dryer stand in the small laundry room at the back of the house. And out the back door, there was a tree full of fat lemons.

Parishioners from Our Lady Queen of Angels in Newport Beach took on the bathroom, cleaning and then re-grouting pale yellow and black wall tile that had been unrecognizable under the grime. "When I saw what they had done, I cried. I cried the whole day walking through the house," Evans says.