Through The FEMA Looking Glass

"Last fall I made a phone call to test the FEMA waters. I was quickly pulled into a riptide of inertia.

A few months after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a master's in city planning, I still had not found the Philadelphia planning job I wanted. It was November 2005, and a friend was doing debris cleanup after Hurricane Katrina in Florida. FEMA volunteering seemed like a way to use my degree, get a basic per diem, and help some people out. My friend connected me with Mark, an engineer in Chicago, who told me that I would be on a team of ten to twenty planners, architects, and engineers creating a Hurricane Katrina recovery plan for the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Days later, Mark called me at my temp job and asked if I wanted to go to Mississippi. I had to be there in three days."