Surviving on faith

KENNETT, Mo -- Cleveland Sawyer holds the shiny brown acoustic guitar loosely between his hands but clings to it tightly in his heart.

The devotion is not about the instrument. It doesn't belong to him.

It's what comes from the guitar -- the chords, plucked nonchalantly. And the smooth blues voice that echoes around the crowded room. That's pretty much all he has left for now. The music, at least, is still his.

He's lost his wife. Maybe she's at a Texas shelter. Maybe she's ... who knows. He left his home in New Orleans without so much as his wallet.

He wants to go back, just to see if he has anything left.

"If there's any New Orleans to go back to," he says with a shrug.

With those emotional barbells dangling from his mind and his heart, he sings.

I'm so glad. Lord been good to me. Thank you Jesus. Ohhh, I'm so glad ...

Sawyer's brother-in-law, Herman Oates, climbed on the same bus leaving the New Orleans Convention Center last Sunday. The two men are together now, sleeping in bunk beds designed for children at Kennett's Camp McClanahan, but their wives are still missing.

The bus they were on, along with two other buses, arrived with 170 people last Sunday night at the rural Baptist camp.

They'd been turned away from two other shelters before arriving in the middle of a Kennett cotton field to a welcome party of American Red Cross volunteers and local church members.

One of the volunteers loaned Sawyer the guitar. Sawyer's fingers itch for the familiar feel of saxophone keys as well, but he hasn't been able to find one yet. The guitar is enough for now.

About 50 people have left the camp this week, gone on to more permanent housing or met up with family elsewhere. There are still about 100 Katrina refugees at Camp McClanahan, sleeping in concrete block cabins with people they've only known for a few days but would never call strangers. Not now.

Many of them waded through neck-deep floodwaters, carrying children past floating bodies. Some of them spent days sleeping on concrete overpasses. Some spent days in the convention center, waiting for help that was painfully slow to come.

Like so many at Camp McClanahan, Sibbie Hayes still finds a reason to smile each day. She doesn't call her two days on the Super Dome overpass or the destruction of her house a tragedy. She calls it an adventure.

"God does these things. He lifts you up and shakes you up," she says.

Like many of the victims, the 61-year-old social worker is frustrated at the initial lack of aid, upset at the memory of an emergency worker telling her 50 buses were coming to help. Those buses never came, never were coming, she says.

Unlike many of the evacuees who had families with them, though, Hayes was alone. She had no food or water with her. Two different families "adopted" her. They made sure she ate and took care of her other needs. She's staying in a cabin at the camp with one of those adopted families.

"They're mine now," she says. "Every day, there's something to lift me up. It might look bad, but it's not. There's a reason for everything."

And that's enough for her right now.

cmiller@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 128