The newspaper photo showed a young woman sitting forlornly, framed by a huge hole in a wall that Hurricane Katrina created in wiping out the New Orleans bank building where she had worked.

She had fled the storm with only the clothes on her back, escaped being drowned by the flooding and somehow had managed to get back to the spot where she once worked. Her residence had been wiped out, all her personal papers and identification were gone and she was out of a job for an interminable period. Yet she was one of the truly lucky people in the ravaged region.

She was a 25-year-old single college graduate with subsequent on-the-job training and was blessed with the chance to find a new place to start her life anew and rebuild a career. Consider the thousands of people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama who lost even more and lack the occupational skills to provide for themselves or their families. What can be done to assist the minimum-wage victims of the storm so they can return to at least a semblance of the lives they once had?

Time and again as the storm’s devastation is assessed in human terms, property loss and infrastructure disasters, the word that keeps rising above almost everything else is JOBS! Where are they going to come from? Who is going to provide them? What kind of relief should be generated for those who continue to be out of home, hearth and work?

There was a television interview with a well-trained professional woman who had just gained a job at a McDonald’s fast food outlet in a non-emergency area. She admitted it was not the ideal situation, “but at least it’s some kind of job where I can have some control over my two children’s futures.” Think of the thousands who have nowhere to turn for employment, high-level or not, and who are willing to take any kind of job until they can get back on their feet.

Look around the room you are in. Suppose it suddenly was whisked away in a tornado or flood and you and yours had to flee for your lives with only what you could carry on foot. You would be fortunate if all the members of your family were safe. Consider the horror if someone was lost. Then after you have somehow managed to survive, what’s next? Water, food, sanitation; suppose you have none of these. But even worse, imagine that your place of employment was obliterated and your job had become as absent as your dwelling and belongings.

Perhaps you might have the skills and wherewithal to go somewhere else and start over. Suppose you did not. We who are out of the storm zone can only guess at the terror and trauma that so many people down south have experienced. We cannot begin to guess what our outlook would be if we were stripped of all the “comforts of life” and had no prospects whatsoever for jobs to help begin rebuilding our lives.

As we offer help to those on the Gulf Coast we must remember that one of the most vital tasks for us and our agencies is to help create jobs that will give people a chance to restore themselves and regain the dignity they had before Katrina ripped their lives away.