U.S. hurricane evacuees anxious about home, future

Hurricane Ike has disappeared from U.S. soil, but the recovery process is just beginning.

For hundreds of thousands of people who evacuated their hometowns before Ike's landfall on Sept. 13, they are caught in a dilemma of being unable to go home.

That is particular true for evacuees from Galveston and Houston, the two cities hit very hard by Ike. Galveston was still a place deemed not fit for living while over a million people in Houston are still left without power.

As Governor of Texas Rick Perry said, the recovery is going to be a long process.

"I can't go home and I don't know what the tomorrow will be," said Lisa Kuehne, an evacuee from Galveston.

She is one of the over 1,800 evacuees staying at the Austin Convention Center, the city's largest shelter for hurricane evacuees.

Authorities provide food, beds, Internet and telephones for them. But some evacuees thought that is not enough and the government should do more.

"I have no money left and I have no place to go if I leave here," said Rita kirksey, who is also from Galveston.

Like Kirksey, many of the evacuees stay in the shelters are low-income people. She doesn't own a house so she can't get house compensation from insurance firms.

Kirksey also lost her job because of the hurricane and has little hope to find a new one. "All that I have is the clothes I am wearing," She said.

Ma Zhiyou, a Chinese college graduate who had just found a job in Galveston a few days before the hurricane, joined the exodus with other evacuees in a drastic change of fortune.

"The job and the company in Galveston were all gone and I had to find a new one," he said.

When visiting the disaster zones in Texas Tuesday, U.S. President George W. Bush promised to give every evacuee a 30-day interim housing. But apparently many evacuees in the shelters don't see much silver lining in it.

Both kuehne and Kirksey said without a job, the free housing doesn't mean much to them. "You can't just sit in a house and have no food or money," they said.

Source:Xinhua