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How a Set of Tools Was All One Family Needed for a New Start
People laugh when Victor Dennison tells them that he was a victim of Hurricane Katrina.
“They always say, ‘Man, it’s been two years, and you’re not back on your feet yet?’” Victor explains, furrowing his brow in frustration. “What they don’t realize is that you don’t gain back in two years what you earned in thirteen.”
The root of Victor’s problem was planted even before Hurricane Katrina hit, when Victor and his son Cody made plans to build a small car repair shop on their property in Jackson, Mississippi. In order to do that, they decided they should switch to a more business-friendly insurance carrier.
“What we didn’t realize at the time was that our new carrier wouldn’t cover flood damage,” Victor says. “After Hurricane Katrina, we couldn’t believe it. We lost our home, our shop, and everything we had—the worst part was that our old policy would have covered it all.”
For more than a year-and-a-half, they camped on their ruined property, but when virtually no relief came by then, they decided it was time to try a shelter. Using their carpentry skills to find work when they could, for a while they were shuffled from shelter to shelter, just getting by. Then disaster stuck.
“One day, somebody broke into our car and stole our $4,000 toolbox,” Victor says. “My son was eight months from becoming a certified diesel mechanic before Katrina hit, and he had hoped to finish some day. But without his tools, all hope was lost—there was no way for him to finish the program.”
Finally the Dennisons ended up at the Samaritan Center—tired, cynical, and asking for help with clothing. Susan DiStefano, their Samaritan Center case worker, saw the Center’s potential to help them with even more than that.
“I didn’t want to just band-aid their situation,” Susan says, “I wanted to solve it. I knew that if they just had their tools, they could get paid double for their labor and could get back on their feet more quickly. I knew we couldn’t afford to replace the whole tool kit, so I asked them how soon they could start a better-paying job if we just bought them the essentials.”
“I told her we could start tomorrow,” Victor remembers, “and she made arrangements for us to pick out what we needed from Home Depot. After all I’d been through, I could hardly believe that there were places like this that would go out of their way to help you get back on your feet. When we came to the Samaritan Center, they gave us more than just clothing and tools—they gave us hope.”
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