Video to Link Community with Hurricane Victims

Local residents will soon be able to connect with about 40 victims of Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita. Westmont Head Baseball Coach Rob Crawford will arrive in Santa
Barbara, Saturday, Oct. 1, after returning to the Gulf Coast for a week. He spent
several days videotaping and interviewing the evacuees who he and 21 other local
volunteers got to know in September.
“There’s so many gaps,” Crawford said. “I hope that Santa Barbara will respond to
this. I’ll show the video and hopefully get some sponsorships. We now need to
match about 100 families in Santa Barbara to share some of the responsibility for
awhile, at least some of the moral support.”
Contributions and support have already been pouring in. Crawford received a
phone call from a local woman who had raffled off a jacket from Emmylou Harris
that she’d gotten before last Tuesday’s concert at the Arlington Theater. She raised
$1,000 and told Crawford she wanted to sponsor a family, especially with
Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching.
Crawford also received a call from a woman in Ontario who runs a program for
single moms with children under the age of 13. She has four available houses and
wants them to go to families who were evacuated because of the hurricanes.
“She calls me and says that FEMA and Red Cross aren’t responding,” Crawford
said. “Then she says: ‘While you’re there can you find me some families.’ It wasn’t
hard. I could have found her 25 families.” He says he found some moms who
needed a break and interviewed them. He plans to give a video tape to the shelter in
Ontario and then figure out how to get them out here.
Crawford also took some evacuees shopping for food and clothes in Houston,
Texas. One of the families had a 13-year old boy who is over 6 feet tall and weighs
over 300 pounds. None of the clothes at the shelter would fit him. Crawford says
the teen was thrilled when he saw they had bought him a couple pairs of pants and
some big shirts.
Crawford has also been invited to speak and show the video Sunday at the Army
Reserve Center in Santa Barbara to troops who are being deployed to the Gulf Coast.