Remembers her Red Cross relief effort experiences after Hurricane Audrey
Ida Turcan by Adele Foster, 1997; 4700.0829
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Ida Turcan
TEMPESTS: Storms in the Archives
Ida Turcan: The most traumatic thing I remember at Audrey was a man coming to me with this story, he said, "I just found my little girl's leg and we want to keep it until we find the rest of her body, so they can be buried together." And I cried.
Adele Foster: But you say they found that little girl?
Turcan: Yeah. But some of them they didn't. Of course, they had mass graves, you know. They ended up having to bury those people. And I understood from Red Cross that lots of people - that were so poor that they couldn't afford a funeral - did not identify their bodies when they knew it, because they knew they couldn't afford to bury them. I think that's sadder than anything.