New Katrina Moms Face Challenges

Homeless And Without Jobs, New Mothers Face Extra Stresses

(AP) 
Church members also proved to be good detectives.

They helped one mother with a baby in intensive care track down her 10-year-old son, who had been taken to a shelter in Thibodaux, 50 miles away. And they reunited a 17-year-old pregnant teen with her grandfather in St. Louis.

"We're trying to show them we haven't abandoned them," says the Rev. Ernest Saik. "They're a human voice and not just a number. We're hearing their stories. We want to make sure we're tending to their needs."

Shannon Easley did that — and so much more.

A secretary in the neonatal intensive care unit of Women's Hospital, she befriended Rosezina Jefferson, a new mother who had arrived from New Orleans with an amazing tale of survival.

When Katrina struck, Jefferson was just days away from her delivery date. But when her 5-year-old son, Ashton, started having an asthma attack, she was determined to get medical help, even though floodwaters were swallowing her neighborhood.

Though she was 40-weeks pregnant, the 400-pound woman inched her way down the fire escape of the two-story building, plunged into the filthy water wearing just a sleeveless dress and swam in search of help.

"I said, 'The Lord be with me. Whatever happens, happens.' ... I wasn't thinking about being pregnant and what could happen in the water," she says. "My main focus was Ashton."

Even when she could feel contractions, Jefferson managed to swim through the water reeking of gas and swirling with branches and strange bugs.

"You get your strength from somewhere," she says. When the Coast Guard plucked her out, she begged them to go back and get her son. But she already was in labor and was rushed out by helicopter, eventually making her way to Baton Rouge.

The next morning, she gave birth to a son, Keith. Within days, she found out her 5-year-old, Ashton, and her fiance, also named Keith, had made it to Houston.

By then, Jefferson had become friends with Easley who called her husband, Willis, and explained the family's predicament.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" she asked him. He was.

The two piled in a truck and made the 10-hour roundtrip, picking up Jefferson's son and fiance and surprising the new mother back at a church shelter.

"I thought if we just do this, it could be so cool," Easley says. "God still takes care of his people. ... He takes something really bad and makes it into something really good."

Jefferson is now staying at the Judson Baptist Church — the Easleys are members there — and has a room with a crib, a swing and everything her baby could possibly need.

She's not sure where she'll eventually settle.

"I don't want to make sudden decisions with a 5-year-old," she says. "I don't want to keep moving him. ... He asks, 'When are we going home?' I tell him I can't give you an answer when I don't know."

It will take time and patience for Jefferson and other new mothers to get back on their feet.

Still, some good has emerged from the hurricane, says Eaton.

"The bonding between mothers and babies is more intense and stronger from the first moment," she says. "Everyone has the feeling we're going to survive all this. ... Right now, everybody can appreciate life better."