Tuesday March 19th, 2024 7:20AM

Tragic bond: Sept. 11 survivors helping Katrina families

By The Associated Press
<p>When her husband died in the attack on the World Trade Center, Jill McGovern felt the crushing weight of grief and loss. But she soon came to realize that most of the country and the world shared in her pain.</p><p>Letters and messages from places she had never heard of flooded into the home she shared with her stockbroker husband, Scott. Some included donations, prayers or just words of encouragement.</p><p>"We got such an outpouring, not only from the family and wonderful friends who knew us, but people from all over who we didn't know," McGovern said. "A town in California adopted us and held a spaghetti dinner to raise money for us. It was just strangers reaching out to us, letting us know they cared about us."</p><p>Now, she has found a way to give back some of the love that was shown to her and her two young daughters after that awful September morning. She's doing it through a program in which more fortunate families "adopt" families whose homes were damaged or lost by Hurricane Katrina. The donors give the victims clothing, toys, and household supplies to help them start over.</p><p>And in a bond that only the victims of major disasters can truly understand, many Sept. 11 families from New Jersey have been among the most enthusiastic participants, wanting to repay the kindness and love that so many strangers showed them four years ago.</p><p>"Because of what happened with 9/11, I know how comforting it us to know you are supported by a community," said Sheryl Oliver of Jackson, whose husband, Edward, a broker with Carr Futures, died in the trade center. "I just felt the country was really there for all of us. Although that can never erase what we went through, you know people care about you, and that really helps."</p><p>Called "Family-To-Family," the program was started three years ago by Pam Koner, a suburban New York mother who was moved by a newspaper photograph of a poor young girl sitting on a tattered mattress. Her idea was simple: matching families who wanted to help with less fortunate families.</p><p>When hurricanes Katrina and Rita walloped the Gulf region this summer, Koner expanded the program to include families affected by the devastating storms. Donor families send a duffel bag, pen, self-addressed, stamped envelope and a form to their "adopted" family asking them what they need to re-establish a household somewhere else.</p><p>Typically, the families need things like kitchen and bathroom supplies, bedding, clothing and personal grooming items.</p><p>Donna Jones, a single mother in Gulfport, Miss., lost her home when falling trees pummeled it. She and her 7-month-old son lived temporarily in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer before finding an apartment of their own in Clarkston, Ga.</p><p>The program matched her up with Oliver in New Jersey, who is sending pots, pans, towels and other household items.</p><p>"You don't realize how much you need these little things you live with every day until you miss them," Jones said.</p><p>She is grateful for the help, and hopes to go back to school and find a job at a bank.</p><p>"I just think it's wonderful that people can be so compassionate," she said.</p><p>Koner estimated her program has helped more than 500 needy families so far; additional requests for help _ and offers of assistance _ arrive each day on the computer in the basement of her home.</p><p>"A friend of mine once told me, `It seems like you're trying to save the world, one family at a time,' " Koner said. "I thought, `Maybe I am.'"</p><p>The roster of helpers goes far beyond Sept. 11 families, from the 11-year-old Brooklyn boy who got his mother's permission to adopt a child from the Gulf region, to the Pennsylvania woman who sent a new computer to the New Orleans woman whose small business relied on a computer that was ruined in the storm. But the program seems to have especially touched those left grieving by the 2001 terror attacks.</p><p>"I know what it feels like to have loss," McGovern said. "But I can't imagine what it's like to be displaced, to have nowhere to call home."</p><p>In addition to her adoption of a Moss Point, Miss., couple and their four children, aged 14 to 10, McGovern has donated about $10,000 worth of toys with money left over from a charity golf tournament in her husband's memory, as well as other disaster relief collections she and her husband's friends amassed.</p><p>Jones, whose mother died a month before Hurricane Katrina and whose brother died a year earlier, also feels a bond with the Sept. 11 survivors.</p><p>"I know what it's like to lose someone," Jones said. "I feel for them."</p><p>___</p><p>On the Net:</p><p>HASH(0x1cdf9bc)</p>
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