Photo Essay - After Katrina: A New Home in Atlanta

Across the United States, International Rescue Committee resettlement offices, which have long helped refugees from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America rebuild their lives, are extending aid to families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

"These evacuees have essentially lost all of their possessions," says the IRC's national resettlement director Christine Petrie. "They could be separated from family members. They have lost a sense of community and they are concerned about their children’s future."

IRC staff members —  many of them former refugees who came to the U.S. with the IRC's help —  are working one-on-one with evacuee families to help them start over in cities around the country.

"There is no cookie cutter response to a disaster like Katrina." Petrie says. "In order to bring order to the chaos there has to be an individual family approach."

It will be a long time before many of the families can return home, so the IRC has been helping them find and furnish new homes, stock their pantries with food, get new jobs, enroll their children in school, and get comfortable in their new communities.

Photographer Jim Stawniak was on hand this fall when two families who lost homes to Hurricane Katrina - Lola Freeman's from New Orleans and Vu Lam's from Biloxi, Mississippi - moved into the new apartments the IRC found for them in Atlanta, Georgia.

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