Wendy Kirk, 34 years old and almost 40 weeks pregnant, anxiously paces the main room of the double-wide trailer where she's currently living in Ocala, Florida. Wendy, her husband and their two- and three-year-old daughters are crammed into her sister-in-law's home for an undetermined amount of time, as they wait for their New Orleans residence to be repaired.
The way out
"Trust me, it's crowded in here," she laughs. A South Carolina native, Wendy had only been living in New Orleans for a few months before Hurricane Katrina blew in. Her husband had just finished a tour in the Coast Guard. Before Katrina hit, he drove down from his station in Connecticut to pick up his girls and bring them to safety at his sister's home in Florida.
For Wendy, packing was easy. "We just took everything that was still in boxes," she says, plus some pictures, clothes and essential toys for daughters Paris and Destiny.
Pregnancy worries
While Wendy worries about returning to New Orleans and the state of her home, her immediate concerns are her health and her unborn child ‑- her first son ‑- because she is considered a high-risk patient. "This is it for me, I'm not giving birth anymore," she says, explaining that because she suffers from gestational diabetes, asthma and a degenerative joint disease, she's had difficulty finding a doctor in Florida.