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Through the Eye of the Storm

A Book Dedicated to Rebuilding What Katrina Washed Away

by Cholene Espinoza

Reviews

New Age Retailer

Reviewed in National Review Network

Resource Guide 2006

Having lived in New Orleans for 40 years, I was anxious to read this book about such a tragedy. I was in New Orleans four months after Katrina devastated the city, and I still feel anguish over the sights I saw there — 75 percent of the city looked like a war zone.

Cholene Espinoza captures the bravery and fortitude of the Gulf Coast people as she weaves her story of going there to help. She and her life partner, Ellen Ratner, connected with a group of people in DeLisle, Miss., who are members of the Mount Zion United Methodist Church.

Throughout her story, Espinoza, a United Airlines pilot, interjects comparisons with scenes of wreckage, devastation, and loss she witnessed while on missions as an Air Force Academy graduate flying a U-2 spy plane in Saudi Arabia. She also tells of having lost her faith in Christianity and regaining it by working with the people of Mount Zion.

Espinoza accurately portrays the lack of response given to the Katrina survivors by the government and insurance companies.

All proceeds from the sale of this book go to fund the Pass Christian/DeLisle Community Center in Pass Christian, Miss. By stocking this book in our stores, we can all do just a little bit to help this dire situation.

Gay Hurricane Katrina hero speaks

PlanetOut Network
by, Larry Buhl
July 24, 2006

Cholene Espinoza admits that she is always on a mission. More than a dozen years ago, she was the second woman to fly the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft in the U.S. Air Force. In 2003, she took a job as a military correspondent for Talk Radio News Service and was embedded with the U.S. Marine Corps First Tank Battalion in Iraq.

Now her mission is rebuilding a church and community center devastated a year ago by Hurricane Katrina. Since September, Espinoza and her partner, Ellen Ratner, have made numerous trips to Harrison County, Miss., and helped raise more than $600,000 for a community education center there.

In her book, "Through the Eye of the Storm" (Chelsea Green Publishing Co.; $14) which chronicles her personal journey, Espinoza says that helping a storm-ravaged community helped restore her faith in the goodness of people after being disillusioned by the carnage she saw in the war and reconstruction of Iraq.

"I've always looked for opportunities to help others and I also believed that we (Americans) were always the good guys," she said. "But after what I saw in Iraq, I started to lose faith in man and God and my country. I kept seeing all this suffering, and thinking, 'for what?' And I couldn't help."

It was a disillusion with roots in her earlier experience in the U.S. Air Force, where she served for 13 years. As she struggled to come to terms with her sexuality in an environment hostile to gay men and lesbians, Espinoza left in 1995 and began looking for other ways to serve, and landed a job as a pilot at United Airlines. She briefly considered rejoining the Air Force after 9/11, but decided that her desire for personal integrity was in conflict with her desire to help her country.

In September, she saw the opportunity for a new mission to help. Using her vacation time from United, Espinoza, with Ratner and a close friend, packed up a U-Haul with supplies and ended up in DeLisle, Miss. There they met Rev. Rosemary Williams, pastor of the Zion Methodist Church, who has been the center of local relief efforts for the community.

The first goal was meeting immediate survival needs, delivering items such as bleach, bug spray and diapers. After the initial crisis, Espinoza and Ratner have returned dozens of times to help with the rebuilding efforts. Espinosa was instrumental in the effort to buy a new piece of land for a new community education center, obtain a grant for $250,000 and raise, so far, another $350,000. All proceeds from her book will go toward the center and to the people of Harrison County, Miss.

Seeing the vastness of the volunteer effort, in which people from around the country still flock to the Gulf Coast in their campers to help out, has shown Espinoza that "Americans are better than our government." That statement on its own isn't saying a lot, given her scathing critique of the federal rebuilding effort, in which only $30 billion of the nearly $121 billion promised for Katrina relief has even been released.

"My brother said that 'politics is managing perceptions and governing is managing reality,' " Espinoza said.

"In the gulf I saw a lot of managing perceptions, not reality. The monolith of bureaucracy is so process-oriented, rather than outcome-oriented, that hardly any money has trickled down to the people. I helped families fill out loans in October and they finally received their money in May. How is that possible? If it took Ditech or Bank of America that long to fill out a loan, they wouldn't be in business."

The idea of a progressive lesbian couple from New York City working for a conservative church in the reddest of red states did give Espinoza pause at first. But Espinoza said her sexuality has never been an issue in the Bible Belt.

"If you listen to the news, you would think that the country is deeply divided, but I think the country is a lot more unified than the media want us to believe. I had stereotyped faith-based communities in the past, just as they had their own ideas (of gay people). But all that disappears when you're all standing in the mud."

A witness to resiliency

The Sun Herald
by Scott Naugle
April 9, 2006

Few people ever imagine they will read a book so close and so recent to their own lives. Embryonic memories have yet to mature. New experiences still intrude.

The line "As bad as Delisle was, Pass Christian was much worse," written by Cholene Espinoza, hits too close to home in her book, "Through the Eye of the Storm," about her visits to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina. "The air was so humid you could practically drink it," she recalls.

I remember.

The author continues, "There were a few women picking through the piles of discarded clothing in the peak heat of the day. Their tired faces bore the look of sleepless nights and worry. I doubt they ever dreamed life would require them to shop in a 110-degree parking lot to clothe their children with old shirts and pants."

I have not been able to forget this.

Espinoza later elaborates, "The whole enterprise of government has warped into one giant public relations machine. Meanwhile, the reality is that our government is spending and spinning."

How I wish this were in the past.

Without the travails of Katrina, Espinoza has a unique life story to tell: an Air Force cadet, the second woman selected to pilot the U-2 spy plane, a United Airlines captain and a war reporter in Iraq.

Espinoza was scheduled to be on United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, that was seized by terrorists and crashed in rural Southwest Pennsylvania near my hometown. She does not flinch from recounting her inner struggles with anger, religion and sexuality.

Espinoza writes of comparisons between Iraq and Katrina. Compelled to come to our region to help, she was unprepared for what she found: "Even my encounters with war and terror left me unprepared for the totality of destruction that I witnessed two weeks after Katrina struck the people of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi."

Finding her way to Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Delisle with her first truckload of supplies, the author began her journey from years of "anxiety, uncertainty, anger and frustration."

The resiliency and perseverance of Rev. Rosemary Williams and her Katrina-ravaged parishioners rekindled her hope.

Espinoza writes, "Mt. Zion was the community's Mt. Sinai. It was a place where great men and women interceded in the aftermath of a storm that would have destroyed the spirit, hope and love of their community, had they not acted with love, compassion and mercy."

Espinoza stuck with Delisle and continued to return with supplies, helped parishioners with SBA paperwork, and carried our problems to the halls of Congress. Far from finished, she has established a nonprofit organization to help Williams build a community center in Delisle, "a refuge where children can play and dream, for young adults to receive high school diplomas, and provide working mothers with a safe and wonderful place for their children."

"Through the Eye of the Storm" is a moving, firsthand report of life on the Katrina battlefield and an intelligent, accomplished woman's journey to a higher purpose. Invited to tell the congregation of Mt. Zion what she was doing for them, "I ended up telling them what they had done for me."

Concerning Iraq and Delisle, I asked Espinoza which situation was worse and where she would rather be. "Delisle, Mississippi" was her quick reply. "In Delisle, the destruction is worse, the devastation to the human condition is worse, and there has been little progress. But there is hope in Delisle. Absent in Iraq, there is hope in Delisle."

Finally, I inquired of Espinoza as to what Katrina and her journeys to the Gulf Coast had shown her.

"When all else is lost, in the direst of circumstances, and society is completely broken down, I found a sense of self," she quietly responded, "a sense of hope." This I want to remember every day.

Scott Naugle is a freelance writer living in Pass Christian. He is also owner of Pass Christian Books.