8 Amazing Lives Impacted By The Qatar Katrina Fund

Qatar donated $100 million to aid students, build homes, and restore communities across the U.S. Gulf Coast region.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating, deadly, and costly disasters in American history. The Category 5 tropical cyclone slammed into the Gulf coast on August 29, 2005, ravaging vast swaths of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. A few hours later, the levees protecting New Orleans broke and 80 percent of the historic city was flooded. At least 1,800 people died and more than a million others left their homes, leading to the largest mass migration in American history.

On the other side of the world, Sheikh Hamad Al-Thani, the Amir of Qatar, watched the tragedy unfold on television. Two weeks later, his government created the Qatar Katrina Fund, pledging $100 million to 18 renewal projects. Ten years after the storm, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are still recovering. Here are the inspiring stories of just eight of the thousands of people impacted by Qatar's extraordinary gift.

Born with the music

Photo by Rush Jagoe

Calvin Johnson comes from a family of New Orleans musicians. His grandmother played gospel piano, his father, grandfather and three uncles were all jazz musicians. At age seven, one of his uncles gave him a saxophone and lessons. He played that saxophone on stage at the famous Tipitina nightclub at the age of 12 alongside Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews.

It was registration week at the University of New Orleans when Katrina hit. Johnson had not yet attended classes, but had moved half his stuff into his new dorm room, leaving the other half in his parent’s house. The storm flooded their home with over 12 feet of water, destroying everything – including his saxophone. His dorm was not flooded but looted. “They broke into everything and took what they could,” he recalls.

Doubly homeless, Johnson became a nomad, traveling across the country from place to place. When he returned home, he found it nearly impossible to find affordable housing.

Then he heard about Habitat for Humanity, a charity that was building homes in New Orleans East in a development called “Musicians Village” to house displaced performers. The six-block Village, now complete and home to 80 some local performers and their families – including Johnson – was largely funded by a $4 million gift from the Qatar Katrina Fund.

In total, the Fund donated $25.2 million to support Habitat For Humanity projects throughout the Gulf region.

A safe, cozy place

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When the storm struck, Rosa Bustamante-Forest had to leave New Orleans. Her home was not badly damaged, but like thousands of others she soon found herself commuting to Baton Rouge for work. “All any of us wanted to do was come home,” she says. Then she heard about a new program looking for staff.

Rosa left her teaching post at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center to become a nurse and program manager with the March of Dimes.

The program, funded through a grant from the Qatar Katrina Fund, provided mobile medical units offering free prenatal and postpartum care to any mother and baby who came to their doors. Funds from Qatar enabled March of Dimes to buy three units and also covered all the operational costs, salaries, gas, supplies, and any medical costs not paid for by the patient’s insurance. If the patient had no insurance—and many didn’t— a clinic and money from the grant paid the costs.

“The program was essential at that point,” Bustamante-Forest said. “I also got to meet the [then] Amir of Qatar!” she added excitedly, remembering when His Highness visited the city in April 2008. When the Amir asked one of the patients about her experience, she explained that she only spoke Spanish and hadn’t known where to go for prenatal care because none of the regular clinics had interpreters, which scared her (and is medically dangerous). “They were so excited. She explained how grateful she was for the help she got during her pregnancy.”

“It was really moving,” Bustamante-Forest recalled. “The unit became a safe, cozy place for women to congregate and tell their stories.”

300 years of culture

Photo by Rush Jagoe

Stacy Horn Koch was running Covenant House, a shelter for kids 16 to 21, when Katrina hit. She immediately turned it into a community hub providing aid, clinics, and any form of assistance. The center is located right beside the Tremé/Lafitte neighborhood in New Orleans.

Tremé/Lafitte is embedded with 300 years of New Orleans culture and heritage, a neighborhood where music like jazz and brass band evolved and took form. The area is a core part of the New Orleans’ soul. But as Koch puts it, “hurricanes are equal opportunity destroyers” and Tremé was no exception.

With more than half of the homes in Tremé destroyed after Katrina hit, people felt like they had no place to come back to. This is when people like Koch and the Tremé/Lafitte Renewal Project stepped in.

With a $2.5 million donation from the Qatar Katrina Fund, the project provided hundreds of low-income homeowners with grants averaging around $24,000 to help rebuild and repair their homes. The project also gave free home ownership training and counseling to the people of the community and helped make Tremé healthy once again.

“In the end, we made a significant difference in several hundred people’s lives,” Koch said. “This is my community, and they [the Qataris] supported us. To make it healthy we needed people to come home. To this day, I think what they did was extraordinary.”

Bringing New Orleans home

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Reverend Willie Gable – a pastor in downtown New Orleans, who also runs a number of charitable causes – was one of many whose lives were forever changed by Hurricane Katrina. His church, his home, and three buildings operated by his organizations were all battered by the storm.

Gable runs the Dr. Murphy W. McCaleb Education Fund, one of 63 agencies that make up UNITY, a New Orleans collaborative that provides housing for chronically homeless people and those who struggle with substance or alcohol abuse. With the fund’s buildings damaged and evacuated, these people had nowhere to go.

A $2 million grant from the Qatar Katrina Fund allowed Gable and the fund to renovate and rebuild, and even construct a brand new 43-unit building. UNITY’s motto is “Bringing New Orleans Home” – through dedicated people like Reverend Gable and the Qatar Katrina Fund, UNITY was able to do just that.

In 2014, First Lady Michelle Obama challenged 570 cities across the US to commit to housing all veterans living on their streets by end of 2015. Just nine years after Katrina, New Orleans was declared the first city to end veteran homelessness. That’s a heady achievement for a city with sky-high poverty and unemployment rates, let alone one that lost hundreds of thousands of homes because of the hurricane.

“I’m starting to get goose bumps again”

Photo by Rush Jagoe

Gary Marchand, CEO and president of Memorial Hospital of Gulfport, Mississippi, was on duty when Katrina struck. He would spend the following two weeks at Memorial, unable to see his wife and family.

Following the storm, Memorial became a community shelter for southern Mississippi, providing food, water, nursing services and pharmaceuticals to everyone and anyone who walked through their doors.

The hospital transformed some of its wings into dormitories, providing bedding for volunteers and staff. Hundreds of hospital employees lost their homes in Katrina. Many worked and lived at Memorial for weeks or even months afterward. Gary referred to these long hard days as a time where “everyone had compassion for everyone else… the humanity rose in people”.

Thinking about the gift from Qatar, Marchand says, “I’m starting to get goose bumps again.”

Many in the community were in need of medical services, and many could not afford them. The Qatar Katrina Fund worked with Memorial to establish the $10.8 million Qatar Hope Fund. The fund enabled Memorial to directly aid thousands of uninsured patients affected by the hurricane, and turn Memorial into a level II trauma center and Mississippi’s first primary stroke center.

“The Qatari’s are interwoven into our success,” says Marchand. “We’ve advanced medicine in the state of Mississippi over the last 10 years, and Qatar is part of that story.”

Enabling careers, healing a community

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Dr. Norman Francis had been president of Xavier University for 47 years when he retired this summer. A native of Louisiana, he is no stranger to hurricanes and had never fled his home for one before Katrina. It would be no different this time.

Dr. Francis stayed in New Orleans and watched as both his home and his university were badly flooded. He immediately started working on getting Xavier back on track, somehow managing to reopen the university on January 17, 2006.

Katrina damaged New Orleans’ universities in other ways – parents no longer wanted to send their kids to school there and enrollment figures plunged for four years. To aid with student enrollment, the Qatar Katrina Fund and Xavier University established the $17.5 million Qatar Katrina Fellowship Fund, offering scholarships to hundreds of students in need and building the Qatar Pavilion – the new home to Xavier’s College of Pharmacy.

Xavier has always been a school recognized for graduating the best African American students in pharmacy and premed.

“You walk into any pharmacy in New Orleans, just ask, ‘What year did you graduate from Xavier?’ Don’t have to ask if they graduated from Xavier, they all did. That money from Qatar helped many of those students get their degrees,” said Dr. Francis.

The college, the only pharmacy school in New Orleans, has an 80-year history of training the region’s pharmacists. Following Katrina, many pharmacists and health workers left the city. The shortage has been identified as one of the area’s most serious healthcare problems. The new Qatar Pavilion has enabled Xavier to address this concern head-on.

“I’m a design guy”

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Having grown up in Slidell, Louisiana, Chad Cramer knew it wouldn’t be long before he would return home to Louisiana to go back to school. It was, he knew, one of the best schools around. He just didn’t know Hurricane Katrina would hit the day he was supposed to start his first day at Tulane.

Just three days after Katrina struck; Cramer was back in New Orleans. His home had been flooded, but he went right to work cleaning up and helping others. “We met everyone from every demographic you can think of and heard their stories…it was really emotional,” he recalls.

By the time Tulane reopened, Cramer had been focused so hard on the community, he had no financial plan for school. He wasn’t alone. Like Xavier, Tulane’s enrollment had plunged because many students were in need of financial assistance.

Tulane, working with the Qatar Katrina Fund, established the $10 million Qatar Tulane Scholars Fund. The fund provided scholarships to students from Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi who suffered losses from the hurricane – including Cramer, whose five years of architecture studies were covered by a scholarship.

“To have someone come in and say, ‘We are going to pay for your education’ was just amazing,” he said. I remember when I got the letter saying that I had received the grant, I had tears in my eyes.”

Cramer was the first person of his immediate family to graduate from college (and he did so with honors). He is now an urban designer with the City of New Orleans.

The kindness of strangers

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“Anywhere else just seems bland” is how Loyola graduate Christina Luwisch describes New Orleans. “You fall in love with the people, the food, the music,” and that did not change for her even after her home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

For Luwisch and her family, returning home was never a question; it was their city. She spent the next year living in her grandparents’ home and before starting her studies at Loyola University. However, with her family’s resources all going into rebuilding their devastated house, Luwisch was unsure if she would be able to afford college.

Luckily, she discovered that the Qatar Katrina Fund had stepped in to create the $1.4 million Qatar Loyola Scholarship Fund.

“That someone in another country that I’d never met would decide to help me, it was just astonishing,” Luwisch says. “They made a profound impact on my life and the life of my family. It was…a complete game changer.”

The scholarship provided Luwisch and other students directly affected by Katrina with the opportunity for a great education.

Inspired by the kindness of these strangers, Luwisch now works as assistant director of the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center, part of the Loyola College of Law.

– Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans