LIFE is confusing for three-year-old Shahira Everidge. She wants to know when she can go home. After ten days away she is worried that her dolls are missing her.

The answer to her question is that she is home. The dolls will not be joining her, but there will be others and she already has a new teddy to stroke.

Home used to be New Orleans, Louisiana. It is now 350 miles to the west in Houston, Texas. When the floodwaters in New Orleans recede, the swollen population here is unlikely to do the same. Houston has embraced more than 100,000 people like Shahira and her family, who fled the horror of Hurricane Katrina, and offered such hospitality that civic authorities expect many to remain permanently.

“We can’t go back to New Orleans — there is no New Orleans,” says Shahira’s aunt, Kynisha Seymore.

Ms Seymore’s family group consists of 25 people including her sister Michelle, Shahira’s mother. Their own mother, and two brothers, ended up 200 miles away in a shelter in San Antonio, and they have traced a third brother to a shelter in the neighbouring state of Arkansas. They have been through the worst upheaval of their lives, but are trying to be positive. Ms Seymore’s daughter Eunisha, nine, is already in a new school, and her husband has found work at a restaurant.

“We were here for three days and Eunisha was in school by the fourth. I didn’t want to keep her out of school too long — she needs a routine. She loves it,” she says.

Houston’s education district is America’s seventh largest, with 209,000 children in 305 schools. Since last Wednesday it has enrolled 1,500 extra pupils and sent school buses to the Houston Astrodome and other shelters to pick them up.

Enrolments continued apace yesterday at Reliant Park, the complex that includes the Astrodome, where the thousands of evacuees have free food, clothing and telephones, and can surf the internet for news of loved ones. Free buses shuttled them to a processing centre where they can apply for emergency financial assistance, housing aid and welfare support. Because they have no address, Reliant Park has been given its own postal code and its own postmen.

The Houston Independent School District was also holding a jobs fair yesterday to recruit displaced workers.

While their parents formed queues to fill out paperwork, some youngsters migrated to a side room manned by the Children’s Museum of Houston, making clown faces out of paper plates and glitter. Outside, lorries pulled up carrying 10,000 donated teddy bears.

From a high of 24,000 evacuees, just 8,000 remained yesterday at Reliant Park and the George R. Brown Convention Centre in downtown New Orleans. Many have gone to live with relatives, or been taken in by organisations such as the Salvation Army, church groups and private families.

Others have been placed in public housing or private rental apartments, where landlords have waived the usual credit checks and references. They will be reimbursed.

There are a few grumbles. Some evacuees say they are fed up with the way decisions are made for them without any consultation, and parts of the relief effort remain chaotic and bureaucratic.

An advocacy group called the Survivors Leadership Group has been set up to help them. Father Paul English, of St Anne’s Parish, Houston, who is among a network of community leaders assisting the SLG, said: “These are capable adults who ten days ago were calling the shots in their own lives. They need to have a voice at the table when decisions are made about where they go and what they do.”

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