Evacuees: Monica Kell was up before dawn yesterday, but had no plans to celebrate America's Labour Day holiday with her family. Instead, she was out trying to find work in a strange new city, along with a quarter of a million other Katrina evacuees in Texas.
Her first priority was a tour of some of the bigger restaurants in downtown Dallas to see if anyone needed a waitress with 10 years' experience. Her old job in New Orleans has gone, swept away along with her family's home and any hope they might have had of resuming a normal life.
"There's nothing left for us in New Orleans, I guess we've got to make a new start and make the best of what we got," said Ms Kell (28), who has spent three nights in a Red Cross shelter in Dallas with her daughter Keisha (4) and her son Daryn (6) - and thousands of other evacuees. Her husband Sidney stayed in the shelter to look after the children so she could begin job hunting.
Like so many of those displaced by the flooding that followed last week's catastrophic storm, the Kells think they will probably never return to New Orleans, even after the city is drained and rebuilt. They are a religious family and instead of bemoaning their misfortune, chose instead to rise to the challenge of starting anew. "God will show us the way ahead and help us build, because he kept us safe and together," said Ms Kell, who also hopes to find a cheap apartment in Dallas.
The family has only the few possessions they managed to cram into two large suitcases before they fled their home for the Louisiana Superdome when water levels began to rise: clothes, two dolls for the children and their birth certificates.
She realises it will not be easy, despite the immediate help of aid agencies such as the Red Cross, longer-term financial support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the warm hospitality, for now at least, of the Dallas population.
Jason Paul, a Red Cross spokesman for two shelters in the city that have 14,000 registered evacuees, said the response of local families had been "overwhelming" in offering their spare rooms and that the owners of several businesses had driven in to invite people for interviews.
Even so, the number of those seeking accommodation and jobs will far outstrip supply, and there are concerns of racial tensions in some areas of Texas that have suddenly acquired a sizeable influx of black evacuees.
Fema officials were arriving in Dallas yesterday to start offering support to evacuees housed at the Reunion Arena and Convention Centre, where the Kells were taken after their bus was turned away in Houston when the Astrodome reached capacity.
At the Dallas Convention Centre yesterday, where almost 2,000 people had slept overnight, children were picking through soft toys, books and games donated by well-wishers, and volunteers were cooking and serving hot dogs for the evacuees in batches of a hundred at a time.
Yet not everything has gone smoothly. Texas has put up the "state full" sign after absorbing up to 240,000 evacuees in less than five days and governor Rick Parry has made arrangements for new arrivals to be flown to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan or Iowa.
The mayor of Dallas Laura Miller criticised Mr Perry for not supplying state aid and for not providing notice that several busloads of evacuees were on the way after Houston reached capacity. - (Guardian service)