"People didn't believe it would happen. It happened so fast. Every morning, I wake up and I'm in tears," says Wilson, who is working hard to get her family situated in Fremont.

Members of the local community want the Wilsons to feel welcome. Last week, Madelyn and Les Rudy, members of the Fremont Keeway Swingers Square Dance Club, learned about the Wilsons from Sister Elaine Sanchez of Sister John Marie's Panty. Every year, during the holidays, the Keeway Swingers donate a basket of canned goods and grocery store gift certificates to a needy family. This year, they chose the Wilsons.

The Rudys were especially touched by the Wilsons when they delivered the items to them. Ermica's son, Nicholas, instantly approached the Rudys with a copy of a story he had written for school about his experiences in New Orleans.

"Nicholas' paper for school described what he went through and makes you feel so bad about the situation," Madelyn Rudy says. "At the same time, we're proud to be associated with Fremont, the city that helped them get housing."

With the storm's strength intensifying, the Wilson family and 14 of their relatives were invited to take shelter by a local priest in a Catholic school building. But the three-story structure filled with water to the second story - enclosing them in a building that soon would lose power and clean running water, and fill with the stench of raw sewage.

The school became a makeshift shelter for more than 200 people during the next three days. People flowed in on makeshift rafts, and Ermica Wilson remembers desperate young mothers outside the school throwing their babies through the windows in hopes of saving their lives.

Benjamin Wilson knew he had to make a drastic move to help his family and the others, so he left the shelter to return to their home in the hopes the freezer had not been damaged and he could at least grab some frozen meat.

Armed with a chunk of roof as a raft, a 2-by-4 piece of plywood as a paddle and eight heavy-duty garbage bags to carry the food, Benjamin said goodbye to his wife.

"I said a prayer and I cried like a baby. I was worried I wouldn't see my husband again. There were power lines in the water, and I was scared to death he would get electrocuted," Ermica Wilson says.

The next day, the helicopters stopped on the roof of the shelter and picked up the people inside. The Wilsons were the last to leave. Dropped off on a stretch of interstate, they waited for a bus to take them to the Houston Astrodome. The family slept in a circle by the side of the highway.

The bus came the next day, and the Wilsons boarded - hungry, exhausted and traumatized. After such a horrific situation, they found hope on the way to the Astrodome.

After two days at the Astrodome, the Wilsons drove from Houston to Fremont, where they faced another financial and mental battle. Two weeks after arriving here, they had to use their $2,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency money to drive back to New Orleans and document the damage done to their property.

"It's not home anymore," Benjamin Wilson says. "If people asked us to go back five years from now, we wouldn't. Louisiana did their own people wrong."

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