My husband and I were involved with the Katrina relief work out of the Kenner hub. We saw massive fraud. The org was constantly getting donated materials dropped at the KH like sheet rock, lumber, etc from Home Depot and other suppliers. We were rooming with another couple, he was in the accounting and she was in the food department. He would tell us about the donations and processing the friend’s insurance claims. I wish I paid more attention at the time but we were deeply PIMI and it was long, hot days of work. We had a very strange situation with the meals on site.
The “brother” in charge of the kitchen was short tempered and would yell loudly at the sisters prepping the food and cussed a lot! It made things very tense and the sister would often come back to the house we were sharing in tears. But as usual we all covered it over and reassured each other it was due to the stressful assignment. Oddly the same foul brother was running a side hustle from the site. He had hats and T-shirts printed up with JW Disaster Relief and would sell them to the volunteers. He was very pushy about it (we even bought them to make him shut up) and claimed it was to support his volunteer efforts. He would hang the hats and stuff right on the KH kitchen trailer with pricing in full view of all the overseers and no one said a word the entire time. We often wonder what was really going on - who was he really?
Anyway we felt we were doing a good thing and glossed over so many strange things. Here we were a big, noisy group that would roll up on a residential street and basically take over, parking multiple trucks and trailers in front of the neighbors homes. When the homeless would ask for food (there were so many displaced after the storm) we would turn them away even though we had tons of food. As a group we were anything but charitable. So many things from that experience that still bother us.
