Oh Kamryn, I'm sorry if it seemed seem like I was talking about you. Now, after re-reading my post, I can see why.

Rest assured "the fool" I'm talking about is the jerk who wrote that - not you. :)

**insert embarrased smilie here**

I am back. :(

We tried to leave early yesterday morning, we were in traffic for 9-10 hours and had gone 45 miles. We tried to go east towards Louisiana ahead of the storm, but we were forced to go northeast towards the Livingston area (which is ironically now under a mandotory eveacuation) and with no way to get back to the road that takes you to Dallas or Shreveport. So we only had one chance to go towards the west which is back towards Houston. I am bitterweet to here it is moving to the east back towards the Louisiana and Texas border, I live in the extreme NE part of town so we may get some heavy wind. I just pray that all our Houston area greekchatters are okay! Most of the my neighbors are still here outside chilling. Atleast I have my wine;)

Soror, good to know that you and the family are OK. It hit me bolt upright that one of my chapter's neos moved to Houston last year and I'm also praying for her.

UPDATE: RITA HAS BEEN WEAKENED TO A CATEGORY 3
 

Rita has weakened to a Category 3 hurricane.

Let's pray that Rita will be further weakened by landfall.

In any event, our prayers and God's praises are in order.

Carry on...

...praying that all Houston-area Greekchatters will be safe. I know you guys have probably already thought of this, but perhpaps (if not already done) you can exchange numbers so peeps can check on each other??

it's gon be alright.

BV Buzz news on Kelly Price
 

I hope everyone who will be affected by Rita will be OK. I'm still praying for those affected by Katrina.
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Vocalist Kelly Price barely escaped the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. The song stylist was in New Orleans taping an appearance for 'Gospel Dream,' the 'American Idol'-like reality series she judges for the Gospel Music Channel.

"My husband and I could not get out of the city because there were no flights, every rental car had been taken, no buses, no trains -- having money meant nothing. You couldn't buy or sell anything. Even if you had a car, if you didn't have gas you were out of it. Gas wasn't available for at least 100 miles outside of New Orleans," explained Price.

The Atlanta-based artist thanks New Orleans minister Bishop Darryl Brister for making her escape from the city possible. Only a few months ago, Price had sung during a revival at Brister's Beacon Light International Baptist Cathedral, which is now under water.

"It was Sunday morning, and we had already received instructions, there were survival instructions that the hotel had slipped under every occupied room on what to do when the winds got so high they busted your windows open. They anticipated that! We were running water in bathtubs and trying to get our personals and essentials together," she remembered.

Price continued: "The Lord really showed us what it meant to have favor on that weekend! The Lord touched the heart of the man of God, and he called us on Sunday morning and he told us, 'Get your things together and meet me in the lobby of your hotel in 15 minutes.' He put the keys of one of his personal vehicles in our hands and he told my husband, 'Take your wife and get out of the city.' "

Price said their journey from New Orleans to Atlanta wasn't an easy one. "Literally, by the time we got on the road, we were dodging tornados. We had to pull over in Mobile, Ala. and sit for a while because there were three tornados on three different sides of us. The National Weather Service interrupted all radio and said that if you were in a car, to ditch your car and go find a hole and get in it if you couldn't find a building and get in a closet and away from windows. A drive that normally would have taken seven hours took sixteen hours because of evacuation traffic, but God was really merciful to us," said Price.

The singer hopes that fellow hurricane survivors will take this opportunity to strengthen their relationship with God. "They need to know they were spared for a reason. God could have allowed them to perish but He didn't," she said. "My message to the people is that God has not forgotten you! Know and understand that in everything we are to give thanks. There is a greatness that I think is going to come on the back end of this!"

Yes, I think it did rain there last night. Before I left work yesterday it rained off and on most of the day.


Okay. Brister helped Kelly, but what about his CHURCH MEMBERS? His POOR members? Many of them were stuck at the convention center, at their homes...

Don't get me started about the ineffectiveness of the Black choich (I meant to spell it that way) in the NO during this disaster. :rolleyes:

Wonderful, I'm glad you all are okay.

It took my sister and her family over 6 hours to get from SL to here. :o

Honeykiss, don't be embarrassed you're okay. I kind of figured so after I read the whole post when you said, "He did right to withold his name." However, sometimes people don't read the entire post and just scan over them. So while making sure that we were on the same page, I wanted to clarify it for anyone who may have misinterpreted it.;)

Soror Wonderful I left Houston Wednesday around 3 and made it to BR around 11:30 that night. I hate that I may have to fight that traffic Monday or Tuesday if Fort Bend says school is back in Tuesday. I'm happy to hear that you are doing ok.

I'm in the same area and left Thursday morning @ 3 am..didn't make it home (Dallas) until 9 am Friday morning..30 hours of driving..gas so scarce until we got to College Station..but I'm safe..thanks for everyone who has prayed and been concern!!

Girl, I live in College Station! If I had known you were on the road, you could've crashed with me. Glad to know you're safe!

when i first started my trip at a litle bit before 10:00 p.m. on wed., it took me 4 freakin' hours to drive about 10 miles. one of my l.s. and her parents got me through downtown (which was a ghost town) onto another freeway and i met them at their house in spring which is a suburb NE of houston. i had enough time to use the bathroom and eat a sandwich then we headed out for dallas. i got to my parents' house at about 7:40 thursday night! i am absolutely DREADING the drive back!!

Well now thats is over we are all okay. Rita had nothing on Katrina. All of you who left the Houston area, they are letting people in on a schedule so please refer to it. No school until Wen. :D

www.chron.com

Chief of Police resigned: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...ew_orleans_hk2

Clarence Page on what Katrina and Rita may have exposed
 

Interesting perspective from a moderate thinker. I love Page and William Raspberry, BTW.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...l=chi-news-col
Poverty IQ: Po' vs. broke
How do you cure loss of hope and a poverty of optimism?
Clarence Page
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September 28, 2005

WASHINGTON -- I'm delighted to hear people jawboning about poverty again, even if it took a couple of hurricanes to get us to do it. But sometimes I wonder how many people know what poverty is.

Basically, poverty is a profound lack of money.

Or, as my father used to put it, "po'," which apparently meant that you were too poor to afford the "O" or the "R."

"Are we po'?" I asked the old man.

"Naw," said the principal breadwinner of our household. "We're not po'. We're just broke."

What was the difference?

"Po' folks don't know when they're gonna eat again," he said. "I have a job. When I get paid, I won't be broke no mo'."

For this we were so thankful that, when the Sunday school plate was passed for a "missionary offering," my parents always reminded me to drop in something "to help the po'."

I must have been in college before I discovered that, according to sociologists, our family was "the po'"! And yet, we were rich in spirit.

I might not have had hole-free socks to wear to school every day, but I went to school so that, as Mom said, "someday you can buy yo' own socks."

I had loving, hard-working and dependable parents at home, which meant I was blessed. We had an optimism about our future that kept us from feeling poor.

Optimism or a lack of it separates the "po'," the long-term poor, from those who are "just broke."

President Lyndon B. Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty in America" in the 1960s. Two decades later President Ronald Reagan ridiculed Johnson's challenge with, "Poverty won."

Fortunately, Reagan was wrong. We've won many victories, thanks to some anti-poverty reforms from both political parties, but poverty doesn't quit.

The poor declined sharply as a percentage of the population from 22.4 percent in 1959 to a low of 11.1 percent in 1973, according to the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. After a few years of minor fluctuations, the poverty rate rose steadily in the 1980s to 15.1 percent in 1993. Poverty then declined to 11.3 percent by 2000. Since then it has risen to 12.7 percent in 2004, according to the most recent figures available.

Overall, we've made a lot of progress against poverty since the 1960s, thanks to a combination of government and private-sector reforms. The reforms include new job and education opportunities for blacks and other minorities, increased help for the elderly and the Earned Income Tax Credit, a break supported by the right and the left that effectively gave an income raise to low-wage earners.

Yet, after Hurricane Katrina made America's usually invisible poor visible again, I've heard people repeat Reagan's glib pronouncement, as if Americans fighting poverty had not scored any victories at all. We need to give ourselves more credit than that.

The poverty challenges that we face now are not quite the same as those we have faced in the past. What program, public or private, can prevent those who are merely "broke" from sliding into the predicament of becoming long-term poor folks?

Folks on the left want government to spend more time and money on our urban poor. Folks on the right want the poor to produce fewer out-of-wedlock babies. As Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, has suggested, these do not have to be opposing values. In a new anti-poverty war, such values could be the makings of a grand left-right coalition of the willing.

We have needs.

- We need to set realistic goals for further progress in liberating the poor from dependency and find realistic ways to achieve those goals.

- We need to avoid stereotyping all of the poor as looters, snipers, drug addicts and out-of-wedlock welfare cheats.

- We need to give special attention to the way our young males of all races are failing academically and economically at a faster rate than young females.

- We need to encourage teachers, preachers, social workers, neighborhood associations and others who have worked directly and effectively with teenagers and their families.

We who have succeeded in life need to be divinely dissatisfied with tax breaks and other government policies that widen our rich-poor divide to a canyon that resembles a Third World country. And we African-Americans, I might add, need to transfer some of our alarm about the racial divide, which has narrowed in recent years, over to the class divide, which has widened between the haves and have-nots within our own communities.

Then maybe the poor won't have to be so po' no mo'.

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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com


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