The three of them sit together in a sunny yellow house in Burke now, all smiles and polite conversation, enjoying each other's company. While they talk, they hold hands, give reassuring glances and gentle reminders that God has been looking out for them.
For Irene Smith, she never thought the storm would be all that bad.
"I lived through Betsy," she said, her voice not carrying any trace of the city she called home for most of her life. "But after talking with my son and some friends, everyone thought I should leave."
That was three weeks ago, before Katrina hit, before loved ones were scattered throughout the southern part of the country, before her beloved New Orleans began to drown.
For the past two weeks, Smith has been living with her son and daughter-in-law, Don and Joy Smith, in their Burke home, trying to regain her life and rebuild a paper trail of an identity.
She is joined by Johnny Harrell, Joy Smith's father, who stayed out the storm in a duplex he shared with two sisters and a brother-in-law. They were rescued after the storm ended and the flood waters rose up nearly 20 feet into their second story home. After 10 years of asking her father to come live with her, Harrell has finally agreed to stay in Virginia.
Smith isn't so sure. "I'd like to see the condition of my home," she said. "I haven't decided if I'm going back yet."
IRENE SMITH'S ORDEAL was similar to that of countless others. Sunday, Aug. 28 began with church services. On the advice of a friend, Irene Smith took a change of clothes with her to church, "just in case," she said. "The sun was shining brightly, just like it is today, when services ended. My friend called her son and he said they were about to head up to Greensburg where his mother was, so we all went up there."
The traffic on the bridge to Greensburg wasn't as bad as the bridge crossing Lake Pontchartrain, she said, and they made it to their destination in about two and a half hours. Around 6:30 p.m., as they arrived at Mildred Gardner's house, it began to rain.
"It rained all that night and all the next day," said Irene Smith, one of 10 guests in the Gardner house. They lost power Sunday night and listened in the dark to trees falling all around them. By Monday morning, the water and phones had been lost as well and the rain continued to come down.
"They had plenty of food and bottled water, and I stayed with them until the following Saturday," Irene Smith said. "I went to her niece's house in Baton Rouge and called my son. He got me on a plane the next morning to Atlanta, and from there I came to Baltimore."
Irene Smith's only luggage was a purse, filled with her medication and some identification, and the clothes she had been wearing the week before. "I would wash out what I was wearing every night and hang them in the bathroom to dry," she said.
Arriving in her son's home, Irene Smith was welcomed with balloons and open arms from her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Still, she is quick to call her former hostess "a lifesaver," ever grateful for the stranger who let her in.
"God was in the plan for us," she said. "I've always believed in prayer. We started every morning at Miss Gardner's house with prayer, asking God to be with us and protect us and stay with us. I'm believing in him that everything will be all right."
Irene Smith has been able to contact some friends, and is happy to say that "everyone I know is OK," but will not know the fate of her home until phone service is restored.
"It would be hard to leave, that house has been my home for more than 50 years," she said. She cannot begin to guess what remains of her neighborhood and admits she didn't know how bad the damage was until nearly a week after the storm hit.
"We didn't have a TV to watch and we didn't have any power to watch it with," Irene Smith said. "When I saw the houses covered in water, I just cried. I cried every night. I feel so terribly blessed just by being alive."
FOR THE WEEK following Katrina, Joy Smith did not hear from her father, who at the age of 92, had been missing in the chaos until she was able to track him down and his sisters through the American Red Cross.
"They had decided to stay in their house until the water started coming up, up, up, up until it was in the upstairs house, probably about 18 feet up," Joy Smith said. "They stood out on the porch and waved a white towel over their heads. When no one stopped to help them, they went to the other side of the house until a helicopter saw them. It took several hours," she said.
Harrell and his sisters were taken up, one at a time, in a basket and flown to Interstate 10, where they waited for five or six hours until another plane came to take a group of refugees to the New Orleans airport. They were flown to Fort Chaffee, Ark.
"I was frantic," Joy Smith said. "We put pictures up on the Internet. I was talking with a cousin from Chicago and we were planning to fly around to different Red Cross centers to try to find them when we got the call to let us know they were safe."
Joy Smith's search wasn't quite over yet. By the time she and her cousin reached Little Rock, Ark., their family had been taken to one of eight churches in the area, but no one knew where they were. "Fort Chaffee was made to hold about 4,000 people, and when we got there there had been 15,000 living there for a week," Joy Smith said. "Everywhere you looked, every barren spot had people crammed in it."
When she and her cousin were able to track down her father and aunts, they had been taken to a "beautiful retirement home," Joy Smith said. "It was like an answer to a prayer." Because neither she nor her cousin could take all four relatives into their homes, the next morning, after a prayer, the family had a meeting where it was decided that Smith would take her father and an aunt with Alzheimer's Disease, and her cousin would take the other couple.
"They had spent most of their late adult lives together, and when we were all at the airport, I had to explain that we were only taking the two of them home. It broke my heart," said Joy Smith. She believes that the only reason they had survived was because of the bond among them, keeping them together and encouraging each other.
SINCE RETURNING home and reuniting her mother-in-law with her father, Joy Smith has found the community around her household to be "so kind," helping with the necessary medical and relief paperwork that has become a time-consuming way of life.
"You have to recreate your life when you walk away with nothing," said Joy Smith. "When you have no bank information, no insurance policy numbers, it's incredibly difficult. We have to piece their lives back together with numbers and without them, you're almost a non-person."
The family does agree that the relief effort was mishandled, due largely in part to the predominately African American and poor status of many of New Orleans' residents.
"People died for lack of food and water," Joy Smith said. "There is no excuse for that. We weren't prepared to take care of our own citizens from a hurricane, but we're supposed to believe our leaders are prepared for a terrorist attack with no warning? Our country is sending our citizens to someplace else and are losing their lives and we can't even protect ourselves at home."
Help is, however, pouring in from generous neighbors and friends.
Beverly Wilson, a close friend of Joy Smith's for more than 20 years, said she and two other friends, whom Joy Smith calls "my guardian angels," have combined their efforts to help the family out with the long process of reconstructing their lives.
"My first thought when we heard about the storm was to call Joy and see how her family was doing," Wilson said.
"Once she came back, I called the two other girls and began to strategize," Wilson said. "We wanted to help as much as possible, so we started making phone calls to the Red Cross and other agencies so Joy wouldn't have to make as many calls to get things in order."
She also turned to Antioch Baptist Church, where the family attends services, to put the family on a prayer list and let the congregation know of the visitors in the Smith home.
"As a Christian, my baseline is to do what God asks me to do and be a good Samaritan," she said.
Next for Wilson and the other friends is to help Joy Smith find housing for Harrell and Irene Smith, "depending on what they decide to do," she said. "We know they'd do the same thing for us, if ever we needed it."
For Rev. Marshal Ausberry, senior pastor at Antioch Baptist Church in Fairfax Station, it is "a blessing" to know that his congregation is filled with generous people willing to open their homes and hearts to those displaced by the storm.
"A number of members from our congregation have expressed a willingness to open their homes to other victims of Katrina," he said. The congregation has also raised $40,000 in the past three weeks that will be donated to the relief effort. Their goal, he said, is for the 900 families to raise a total of $100,000 within the next few weeks.
"We are working with other Virginia Baptist churches to house between 400 and 500 people outside of Lynchburg until they can find homes elsewhere in the state," Ausberry said. Some members of the churches will be trained to perform disaster relief tasks alongside Red Cross personnel.
"Our congregation sees the need and are filled with compassion. These people lost everything and we want to help," Ausberry said.