Meet Lee.

Lee's going to be getting a new house built for her. I talked with her a little while this morning and hearing about her story made me think that it's one worth sharing with you all-- very worthwhile. She talked and I wrote and I hope what I came up with does some justice to this wonderfully strong and beautiful woman.




My name is Lee Brignone and I've lived in Mississippi for 16 years. I'm a widow and have one son. I worked as a contractor building houses. Before Hurricane Katrina came, I knew the storm was going to be a bad one. I took every wedding picture, every baby picture I had and packed them up. The night before the storm hit, both my husband and I were busy boarding up houses in Pass Christian until 11 at night. After that, my family and I left straight for Atlanta. I knew
the damage was going to be bad, but didn't know what I'd see when I returned home.

After the storm left, I thought things looked absolutely horrible. My house was gone. We followed a trail of our stuff-- my bathing suit top stuck high up in a tree, a shirt from our closet wrapped around a tree branch-- to try to find our house. I found one small chunk of a
wall, but everything else that made up my house was gone. The first wall of water that hit Pass Christian knocked everything down and then the second wall of water sucked everything back out into the Gulf—my house included. My family had to move into a FEMA camper. As soon as
my husband and I stepped inside, our eyes started burning. We thought that we would air out the trailer and maybe the situation would get better. Then the summer came. We had to close the windows and turn on the air conditioning. Three months in, the air conditioning running all the while, my husband got really sick. We were both tested for formaldehyde and it turns out that we had some of the highest levels of formaldehyde in the state. The government had our
trailer was removed and we were sent hotel after hotel. I said to my husband, 'We've got one choice left—we have to go live with my mom.' He said, 'Do we have to?'

After things settled down a little, I tried to rebuild my house. Both my husband and I were working very hard to rebuild other peoples' houses so we kept putting off building our own. It was difficult to save a nickel to put away because the prices for materials were going up, but the wages for labor were staying the same. Then my husband died. It was very sudden—he had a massive heart attack and he died in my arms. I gave him CPR for 25 minutes, but there was nothing to be done.

Attempting to rebuild my house has been nearly impossible. But I'm thankful for the help and am looking forward to working with the volunteers on my own house.