Waylon Cook - Double Evacuee

I have been volunteering at South Carolina Cares, helping hurricane evacuees. I helped with a few legal problems, but mostly I was working with project-reunite, where we find seperated families and buy them bus or plane tickets. Thursday morning at the evacuee center, Nola was telling me about an evacuee from New Orleans named Waylon Cook. Here is a story about Waylon from The State newspaper:

Tue, Sep. 20, 2005 - KATRINA’S WAKE - Evacuee leaves Columbia for unknown future. New Orleans man, still waiting to find his family, returns to Louisiana.
By JAMES T. HAMMOND - Staff Writer

Waylon Cook boarded a bus headed for Louisiana on Monday afternoon, uncertain of what he would find of his home, his family and his life.

“Everything is gone. I’m going back to nothing,” said the 44-year-old carpenter and electrician for the French Quarter Suites in flood-stricken New Orleans.

There is little doubt he has been reduced to poverty, materially. He knows his home was destroyed. Information about the fate of his family remains ambiguous. His 37-year-old wife, Louise, and 2-year-old daughter, Aisha, left him the night before the post-hurricane flood to go to Louise’s mother’s house.

Relief volunteers at Columbia’s Operation Reunite found a message posted on the Internet showing his wife looking for him. But it did not include her location.

Every day since he was evacuated to Columbia last week, Cook has sat quietly in the Operation Reunite office at the old Naval Reserve center on Pickens Street, waiting his turn to inquire whether the volunteers from the S.C. Bar have found his wife. Bar employees Jill Rothstein and Nola Armstrong took a personal interest in Cook, worried that the tall, thin man was not eating and growing even thinner. They finally made contact with his employer, a New Orleans hotel operator, who said Cook had wages waiting if he made it back.

“Don’t you worry. I’m going to keep looking for your wife,” Rothstein told Cook on Monday morning, rising to her tiptoes to give the tall man a reassuring hug.

Operation Reunite purchased his bus ticket to return to Louisiana. The bus company told him he would not be allowed to get off in New Orleans and would have to ride on to Baton Rouge, leaving him still 80 miles away from his home. He hopes he’ll be able to return to work at the French Quarter Suites. Rattling his pocket, he says with a wry smile, “I’ve got the keys to the hotel.”

But in many ways Cook is plunging into the unknown, and he knows it.

“I’m scared. I’m scared,” he said, as he waited for his bus to depart for Louisiana.

Well before my shift ended, in walked Waylon Cook. He told me what happened after the news story was written:

The bus dropped Waylon off in Baton Rouge and he took "the back way" into downtown New Orleans. He used the keys that he had to the hotel that he worked for and was staying inside the hotel when the Army burst in and got him. Waylon is a smooth talking veteran, so the Army decided to let him go. He bought his own plane ticket and flew back to Columbia. During the course of all this, he located his wife in Picayune, Mississippi. As of Thursday, he was trying to figure out what to do next. He told us that he had also been on the television news in Louisiana while he was down there.