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American Morning
Christmas in Missisippi After Katrina; Letters to Santa
Aired December 23, 2005 - 08:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: You know, it does look pretty calm there at LaGuardia. This is a live picture. Of course, it's only 8:30 in the morning here in New York. And one has to imagine that a little bit later this morning -- in fact, when you go, Rick, it may be really bad.
RICK SANCHEZ, CNN ANCHOR: Well, you know what it is, too, though? It's a lot easier to -- I was just looking at that family. It's a lot easier to travel by yourself than it is lugging...
(CROSSTALK)
O'BRIEN: It doesn't look too -- and you're leaving lots of time. That's what really all the advice today has been. Leave lots of time, pack your patience.
SANCHEZ: And get your tickets online.
(NEWSBREAK)
(WEATHER REPORT)
O'BRIEN: Speaking of Christmas, it's going to obviously be a very difficult Christmas for folks on the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Katrina left so many people with absolutely nothing. And even hope is in pretty short supply at times, so it's going to take the kindness of strangers to bring the spirit of Christmas.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
O'BRIEN (voice-over): Deep in a Mississippi pine forest...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The kitty's dad in there.
O'BRIEN: Little Lisa Autry (ph) and her neighbors still call the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina their home for the holidays.
LINDA SWANSON, LISA'S MOTHER: It's immeasurable. We are not planning anything at all for Christmas, or any of the holidays.
O'BRIEN: The shrimpers have no boats and the muddy Pearl River is choked with sewage, the Christmas bear limp with dirt. Five people sleep in this chilly one bedroom FEMA trailer, Lisa bunked on a kitchen shelf.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is where I sleep and that's where my brother sleeps. O'BRIEN: The Christmas stockings are empty, and talk of the holidays in Pearlington, Mississippi, brings a rush of tears.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is about all we can live on is what's -- I can't do it!
O'BRIEN: But a few volunteers are determined to bring hope to this little town, people who fear Pearlington will be overshadowed by the plight of New Orleans, folks who believe relief work shouldn't just be left to big government.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Glad to be a part of it.
O'BRIEN: Like these firefighters from Canyon, California.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE; Welcome to Pearlington.
O'BRIEN: Or B.J. Lee, the medical student from Stanford.
B.J. LEE, STANFORD MEDICAL STUDENT: It's such a big effort and there's so much bureaucracy involved. Sometimes it's easier to just drive than like waiting for a call.
O'BRIEN: Steve Horn came from Carbondale, Colorado.
STEVE HORN, CARBONDALE, CO. VOLUNTEER: I don't like to work for organizations because generally your feet are kind of stuck in the mud.
O'BRIEN: Angela Cole, a New York nurse, has launched her personal relief mission.
ANGELA COLE, PUBLIC HEALTH NURSE: I was down here when they needed food and water and ice. You can't make that kind of connection with somebody in a situation that is so dire and then just say, I did my part and walk away.
O'BRIEN: Dashing through the snow, she brought home pictures to her colleagues at Life Brands, a medical advertising agency and they shipped back supplies.
COLE: My concern was there wouldn't be a Christmas, that it would be just another day, just another time of year and it would be too quiet and too dark and too dismal.
O'BRIEN: She found Susan and Reggie Liebrand (ph) from Unam (ph), Georgia, who sent aid by the truckload and a 600-pound Christmas tree.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It makes me feel good because it lets me know that people care.
O'BRIEN: So they strung up the lights...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (singing): Won't you lead my sleigh tonight?
O'BRIEN: ... unloaded the presents...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A heater! To keep warm in the FEMA trailer!
O'BRIEN: ... and filled their shell of a church.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I know it's Christmas, but I don't have the spirit. I just have to -- I'm working on it.
O'BRIEN: Mama Sams (ph), the 88-year-old town elder offered a prayer.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They have fed us, they have clothed us, they have give us shelter and we want to thank the good lord for them.
O'BRIEN: Thankful new friends have not forget Pearlington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
O'BRIEN: You just met Angela Cole in that spot. There she is right now. She's a New York nurse who rounded up a lot of her colleagues and co-workers and friends to help out in Pearlington. She joins us this morning.
Hey, Angela, nice to see you again.
COLE: Good morning, Soledad. Welcome to Pearlington!
O'BRIEN: Hey, thanks a lot. You got some folks behind me -- behind you, rather. Tell me who you have with you this morning.
COLE: OK. We have a number of folks with us this morning. We have the family that you saw in our piece earlier. We have other folks here. We have Mr. Ike (ph) over here. Mr. Ike has graciously let us put up the Christmas tree on his corner. And then we have some volunteers. We Kathy (ph) from Kentucky, who's been working really hard down here in Bayside and up in the Kill (ph). We have our firefighters over there from California.
And we have a very special guest with us this morning. We have -- Brittany (ph), come on over. We have Brittany Earl (ph) and Hershey. Hershey was actually donated by a wonderful woman in Macon, Georgia, Katy Maddox (ph), because Brittany lost her lifelong horse, Ginger, in Hurricane Katrina. So we have a lot...
O'BRIEN: What a tremendous gift. Oh, my goodness! Now, listen, Angela, I got to tell you, the pictures, they look so bad. Is it as bad as it looks there? How is it?
COLE: It's actually worse than it looks. The pictures really don't do it justice. When you come down here and you see the level of devastation and debris, you smell the raw sewage in the air, you see children playing in and around that sewage, you see people still sleeping in tents. It's actually worse than it looks in the pictures. Because it's so vast and it's everywhere down here. O'BRIEN: Are there other towns like this that feel that they've essentially been ignored because of so much of the coverage, frankly, of the big city, New Orleans?
COLE: Well, there are a number of towns. There are communities all along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana that do feel forgotten. I mean, this is an area -- a very rural area, and there are tons of tiny little communities. Pearlington is certainly not the only one where there are pockets of people who absolutely feel forgotten because all of the coverage has focused on New Orleans, or so much of it, and so much of the relief effort has focused on that city as well.
O'BRIEN: All right, so tell us, what do they need and how do people help?
COLE: OK. I think basically we can sum up the need in three areas. At this point, almost four months after the disaster, we still have people living in the shadow of the ruins of their old homes. It is difficult. You can't even think about rebuilding because of the massive debris. We need people down here with bulldozers, back hoes, we need cranes.
Let's get this debris out of here so people can think about rebuilding and so it can help them mentally. They are reminded of this trauma 24/7 with all of this debris. Number two, these folks have been to hell, and I wish I could say to hell and back, but they're still in it.
They need folks just like these volunteers to come down here, have a cup of coffee. Linda over here makes the best of coffee in the county. I know, I've had cups. Yvette (ph) over here is a wonderful cook. She's the reason I can barely button my jeans now. Come down, have a meal, have a cup of coffee, be a shoulder and an ear. We need therapists, we good folks for come down and meet these people.
And then last but not least, we have a cold, hard winter setting in here. There's frost on the ground this morning. It's going to get colder. We need to make sure that these folks have food and supplies for the winter. There are very few businesses open down here, including very few grocery stores. We got to make sure these folks have what they need.
O'BRIEN: All right, Angela Cole, you put the call out now. We're going to check back in with you again, let's say, in a month or so, see who answered, what they did, and how things are in Pearlington, Mississippi. So we're going to check in with you about a month, OK.
COLE: OK, thank you so much.
O'BRIEN: Thank you, Angela. Appreciate it.
Wow.
SANCHEZ: What passion. O'BRIEN: You know what, I am dying to see who shows up with a backhoe and starts clearing up. Because she's right, you know what, if you don't move the debris, people can't move that stuff with your hands. You need a machine.
ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: It's amazing it's still there like that.
O'BRIEN: Yes, wow.
SANCHEZ: Talk about somebody who's really internalized a cause, though. She seemed like the spokesperson.
O'BRIEN: She is Tough as nails, huh?
SERWER: Took it upon herself.
God bless her.
SANCHEZ: Andy is "Minding Your Business" now. Ahead on AMERICAN MORNING now, he's going to tell you know what's going to be coming up?
Rick?
SERWER: Ooh-la-la. Piracy is on the rise in Paris. Plus, what will your family be watching on cable next year? We'll tell you about that, coming up next on AMERICAN MORNING.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SANCHEZ: Sometimes it's embarrassing to watch television with your kids. Trust me, as a parent, I mean, I -- parents have been asking for a long time for family-friendly TV, something where they can watch it together as a family, and they know, pretty confident that most of the channels are going to be something they're comfortable sitting around with their kids watching.
Andy Serwer, "Minding Your Business," joins us now to tell us at least one company seems to be offering it up?
SERWER: Rick, it's actually interesting how quickly this has evolved. Because it was about a month ago when this became an issue and the cable company suggested they would be looking into this.
Last week, we told you that Time Warner, the parent company of CNN, introducing a family package, a family-friendly package. And now today we hear that Comcast, a rival cable company, is also offering a family package; $31 a month you get these channels here. You can see Disney, the Toon Disney, PBS Kids, Discovery Kids, Science Channel, and then you move on here to Nickelodeon, Nick II, Nick Gas, TBN, HGTV -- that's pretty tame, House and Gardening -- Food Network.
Then here we go, CNN Headline News -- hey, hang on. Headline? All right, that's all right. And this is actually a little bit different from Time Warner. Of course the cable, you know, companies can be different like that. And the package, the $31, you get these channels, plus the basic network channels, so you get, you know, CBS, ABC, NBC, et cetera.
SANCHEZ: Yes, so this doesn't count like the HBO, the premium channels.
SERWER: It wouldn't be the premiums, and of course you could see here what's missing here are networks like MTV and VH-1, which have all kinds of racy material.
I want to talk about another issue across the pond in France. This is a pretty amazing situation over there. The government of France was looking to protect copyrighted material online, meaning trying to have anti-piracy laws, and they introduced a very strict law. They wanted to have it passed, where you would have to spend three years in jail and pay $360,000 in fines if you were caught stealing music or movies online. Now...
SANCHEZ: These are people who down load that stuff?
SERWER: Right, exactly.
Now lawmakers in France rebelled against this, and not only decided not to pass this law, they basically passed a law which legalized all file sharing. So now there's no copyright protection online at all, so now the musicians and the moviemakers are up in arms. There has to be a compromise here. They're sorting it out in Paris as only the French can. I think there's a lot of debate going back and forth on this one.
So to be continued. But like I said, a lot of people in the arts not happy over there right now.
SANCHEZ: Still, isn't it still really being worked out everywhere?
SERWER: I think that's right.
SANCHEZ: Because we haven't really gotten an answer here as well yet, right?
SERWER: Right, well, there are laws here that are more severe than you can do it, but it's still evolving, you're right.
SANCHEZ: Yes. Andy, thanks so much.
SERWER: You're welcome.
SANCHEZ: Thousands of kids send out their Christmas wishlist to Santa this time of the year. But what happens to all of those letters? Do any of them actually get answered by anyone?
CNN's Richard Quest travels to the North Pole -- well, Finland, pretty close -- to get some answers.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RICHARD QUEST, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Send a letter to Santa, and this is probably where it ends up, the (INAUDIBLE), the start of the Arctic Circle, where there are more wild reindeers than people. At this time of the year, 30,000 letters arrive every day at the post office. Sorting these letters from all over the world is a herculean task for the post office workers -- sorry, the elves.
For those letters that questions about Santa's life, there's a reply with a special postmark.
For those that just passed for gifts, well, they get filed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These children write about their life, their friends, their pets. They send lots and lots of drawings. They send photographs. It's a wonderful way of communicating, and it's a wonderful way of getting the feeling of what's happening there and how they feel. And it really is nice.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's Mr. Adam.
QUEST: Opening Santa's mail is a journey around the globe. Other countries send them here, even if they're just addressed to the North Pole. The Fins believe all this proves Santa is theirs.
Other countries don't agree. In a dispute worthy of the United Nations, Greenland, Iceland, Sweden and others all claim Santa really lives with them. Thin ice, says Finland.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They can claim him, but we got him here on the Arctic Circle, every single day of the year. So if you want to visit Santa, you can come to (INAUDIBLE) and find him here 365 days per year.
QUEST: With such a volume of mail, Santa, it seems, is no myth. And it doesn't really matter which country claims him as theirs, with so many letters from around the world, Santa is the happy spirit of globalization.
Richard Quest, CNN, at the Arctic Circle.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SANCHEZ: The Arctic Circle!
The Finnish town receives more than a half-million letters to Santa every year, and that's where he lives. We know because they said so.
O'BRIEN: Still to come this morning, lots of new movies to see this holiday weekend. We're going to tell you which ones are naughty, which ones are nice, but first, a holiday greeting from one of our troops overseas.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SANCHEZ: Be sure to check our Web site, that's CNN.com, for the very latest on this morning's top stories. And the big story a lot of folks want to know about, especially those military families, is when is my loved one going to be coming home? The latest from this man, Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, is that some 7,000 U.S. troops -- that's how much the reduction is going to be, 7,000. Some of them have been based in other parts.
As a matter of fact, that's Donald Rumsfeld. He's Iraq and he's speaking. We want to dip into this -- we want to monitor it and come back to it later? We'll come back to it in a little bit. If there's any news on there, we'll certainly turn it around for you right away.
Meanwhile, a tough story in the world of sports. Tony Dungy, the coach of the Indianapolis Colts, who happened to have a winning season this year, like perhaps no others in a long, long time, except maybe the Miami Dolphins -- his team was undefeated until last week, everything going great. Yesterday, he gets the news that his son had died. Police are investigating it as a suicide. It was in Tampa. He was found in his dorm room when his girlfriend returned. And a lot of folks certainly interested in that story, as well.
If you're about to head out to the door for work or school, you can stay in touch with CNN and AMERICAN MORNING by logging into CNN.com and our pipeline video service. You can live, commercial-free news updates. It's all there, CNN.com/pipeline. There you go.
O'BRIEN: David Letterman had a little fun with the transit strike last night. Let's take a look and a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAVID LETTERMAN, HOST, "LATE NIGHT": I'm coming to work this morning and here's what I see. And I thought I was watching a scene from "The March of the Penguins," but it turned out to be a group of nuns walking to St. Patrick. What is that?
Ah, the transit strike. Thank God it's over. Are you happy the transit strike is over? This morning, I carpooled to work with the cast of "The View." Oh! I had to keep telling Barbara Walters to put out her cigarette.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'BRIEN: That was funny. But, hey, "The March of the Penguins" joke, our joke.
SANCHEZ: That was ours!
O'BRIEN: We had that joke yesterday morning during the transit strike. Thanks for using our stuff, Dave. We love you back.
SANCHEZ: Thanks for watching.
O'BRIEN: Coming up in just a moment, a look at the day's top stories, including a Christmas wish list from New Orleans from our very good friend Julia Reed. We're going to check back in with her. She lives there, she knows what the city really needs. She'll update us. That's just ahead on AMERICAN MORNING. We're back in just a moment. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
O'BRIEN: Welcome back, everybody. Coming up next on AMERICAN MORNING, if you're going to feel a little bit guilty about all of the eating -- let's face it, pigging out -- you did over Christmas, well, we just got the remedy. We got five diets that really work. Four books, one's a Web site. They're surefire ways -- "Intuitive Eating," "French Women Don't Get Fat," "Portion Teller," "Three-Hour Diet." Analyze them. These are surefire ways to lose some of that holiday weight. That's all next week on AMERICAN MORNING and we begin at 6:00 a.m. Eastern.
Coming up this morning, we want to talk travel. You're getting out of here after a week of helping us out.
SANCHEZ: I am, indeed.
O'BRIEN: We truly appreciate -- now you're going to slug it out with people as you head to LaGuardia.
SANCHEZ: It's been fun and it will be fun trying to get through LaGuardia. Maybe I'll pick up something to eat on the way out.
O'BRIEN: That's ahead this morning on AMERICAN MORNING.
Look at the lines. It's going to be ugly.
Stay with us. We're back in just a moment.
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