NEW IBERIA, LA. ? Relief workers have a message for the American people, whose generosity after Hurricane Katrina has been unprecedented:

Thanks, you’re the best. But the 25,000 pounds of pepper jack cheese were a bit much. Don’t send any more secondhand clothes. And enough already with the bottled water.

“We’ve got to stop the flow of water,” said Charlene Sargent, who runs the Seventh-day Adventist warehouse here that is the official receiving point for donated goods from across the country.

Pallets of Propel, Dasani, Crystal Geyser, Deer Park and Dominion already were stacked high in the warehouse when a state official called to say there were eight truckloads of water that couldn’t find a home. Could Sargent take them?

“We’ve gotten water, water and more water,” she said.

As for used clothes, “If you took everything we got this weekend and put it in New Orleans, it would raise the elevation so it wouldn’t flood again,” Sargent said. “We don’t want any more used clothes. No one does.”

Just because Americans are giving enthusiastically doesn’t mean they’re giving appropriately, or that their largesse is always eagerly received.

Those are lessons Santa Monica, Calif., entrepreneur Tom Browne has come to understand.

Browne was visiting in New Orleans, where he was born and raised, until the day before Katrina hit. After the levees broke – three of his relatives’ five houses were inundated – he decided to put some material together for his family.

Then he figured he’d take some stuff for strangers too. He e-mailed a friend, who e-mailed a friend, who posted a request for donations on the Internet.

What started as a small, private mission became a public event, an avalanche not just of packaged food and water but clothing, camping equipment, personal hygiene products and air mattresses – as well as thigh-high gold lame boots, a talking President Bush doll, a Santa suit, Halloween costumes and lots of high-heel shoes.

“People were cleaning out their garages” said Browne, 49. “At a certain point, I started thinking: ‘Enough is enough.'”

By Labor Day, five 53-foot-long tractor-trailers were full. Equipped with two drivers each, they rolled out to provide succor to the homeless, the ill, the miserable of Louisiana.

Before leaving Santa Monica, Browne made arrangements with authorities in Slidell, a city northeast of New Orleans, to take the donations. But when the convoy arrived, officials in the storm-damaged community said they knew nothing about it.

Browne refused to leave until he could find a place for the goods. A friend who was on the trip, Pete Imirie, went off to seek a recipient. “I drove to three schools in the area that were doing disaster relief,” Imirie said. “I went up to the Red Cross and said: ‘I have a tractor-trailer that needs to be unloaded.’ They said: ‘Not our department.’ “

Aid officials say things work much better when donations move through organized channels. At least, they say, someone should be alerted that the material is coming. At the New Iberia warehouse, that isn’t happening yet. Trucks show up randomly, at all hours.

Aid distributors say they don’t have the time or the staff to sort used clothing, and that it’s often worn or even unclean. There’s also, they add, a moral component: Just because someone is homeless doesn’t mean they should be wearing hand-me-downs.

Warehouse manager Sargent distinguishes between “stuff” and “goods.”

“A big plastic bag with things thrown in it is stuff,” she said. “We get clogged up with stuff we don’t need instead of goods we do.”