Patty Chantrill, right, with her daughter Mandy Gonzalez outside a Baton Rouge, La., shelter for hurricane victims. (Photo by Jackson Hill)

Patty Chantrill has done a lot of listening over the past two weeks. She’s heard homeless people worry about where they’ll lay their heads. She’s heard families distraught over losing health insurance. She’s listened as teachers recount harrowing waits, sometimes on rooftops, as floodwaters rose.

Chantrill, an associate professor of communications at Eastern Washington University and a member of the United Faculty of Eastern/AFT, is one of the many AFT volunteers who flew to the wreck of Hurricane Katrina and started putting things back together.

She’s answered phones, cleaned out refrigerators, folded stacks of sheets for the shelter, and transformed a training center into temporary housing where she stayed with other volunteers.

She’s recorded grocery card distribution, handled Red Cross intake, edited a press release, and traded stories with her grown daughter who is working in a nearby shelter.

But the most important thing she’s done is listen.

"It’s one desperate story after another," she says, and people need to talk.

By a stroke of fate, Chantrill was set for sabbatical when Katrina blew through the Gulf states, so when AFT’s Connie Cordovilla put out a plea for volunteers, Chantrill was ready to pitch in. She flew to Baton Rouge and went to work for the United Teachers of New Orleans, directing members to the resources they needed, dealing with questions about Red Cross, FEMA and AFT assistance, then shifting over to the Louisiana Federation of Teachers for similar work.

Teachers who left assignments written on their chalkboards the Friday before the hurricane soon realized that the storm erased a great deal more than weekend homework, she says.

"You couldn’t go back Monday morning," she notes. Obvious, but the realization that leaving home was not a temporary situation was hard to handle.

Among the most immediate problems: "Disaster leave" makes teachers eligible for unemployment but leaves them on tenterhooks about whether they’ll get their old jobs back. Finding new work is impossible; despite burgeoning classrooms in Baton Rouge, where the population has doubled since hurricane evacuees flooded in, schools are not hiring.

Also heavy on the minds of displaced teachers: Healthcare runs out Nov. 30. One woman, scheduled for a caesarean delivery Dec. 15, is considering an earlier birth to ensure the procedure will be covered. "It’s just unbelievable that they’re having to go through this," says Chantrill.

She plans to continue helping when she returns to Washington.

"Part of my job is to raise awareness with the people in the Northwest," she says, "but also to continue to do whatever it is I can," even from across the country.