This Friday, just in time to help them put the Thanksgiving turkey in the oven, the St. Bernard Project will dedicate the home of Paul and Beverly Dantoni, marking our 154th rebuild, and my first “finish” as a site supervisor. It is just one of the 25 homes we will race to complete in the month leading up to Christmas. Here’s the story of the Dantoni family, to whom I’ve grown especially attached in these last couple months:Paul and Beverly Dantoni were married soon after high school. They’ve lived in St. Bernard Parish for most of their lives, and they have three very spirited boys. Paul is nine, and Logan and Austin are both seven. The boys will be welcoming a little sister in February. To round things off, the family has three dogs (Max, Angel, and Rambo) and two cats. The house they bought in 2000 is about 1200 square feet, and each boy will be able to claim his own bedroom when they move back in. For the last year and half, they’ve all been living in a double-sized FEMA trailer. Prior to that, the whole family squeezed into a standard FEMA trailer (26 feet long, 8 feet wide) for more than a year. I measured the walkable floor space of one of these trailers at another site recently – 45 square feet.
Paul has been a deputy sheriff in St. Bernard since the hurricane, and Beverly works the 9-5 night shift at Harrah’s casino downtown. She gets home from work just in time to get the boys up and ready for school, sleeps a bit, then wakes to deal with afternoon pickup, dinner, and bedtime before heading back into the city. It’s an especially grueling schedule for a woman who’s six months pregnant, but she takes everything in stride. Since times are tight, Paul and Beverly share one car, which makes life just a bit more complicated than it would otherwise be.
When Katrina hit, the Dantonis evacuated to Texas, leaving two of their three dogs behind. Though they expected to be gone just a few days, their exile quickly turned into five months. The floodwater had risen to within a foot of the ceiling. About three weeks after the storm, Paul ventured home to check on the house. He was amazed to find the two dogs full of life, sitting on the front stoop, as if they’d been waiting there since the storm. One window had somehow broken, and the dogs had apparently swum out. A little miracle.
Eager to rebuild close to family, the Dantonis used their savings and Road Home money to hire a contractor. But as has so often been the case in post-Katrina construction, the contractor took the money and ran, leaving the family with a half finished house and no funds to complete the project. We’ve been working with them to get things finished for about three months. In the two months that I’ve been at the site, Paul has spent just about every single off day working with me and any other volunteers assigned to the house. On every other day, he stops by on his way to lunch, just to check in, greet the volunteers, and see if we need anything.At around 4:00 each day, Beverly drives up with the boys to feed the dogs, who live outside at the house. They run in to check the progress on their rooms, want to touch and use every tool, play games in the yard, and eventually start screaming at each other for some perceived injustice. As if I needed a reminder why I’m here, it arrives every day in these three little packages. Knowing that these boys will be out of that subhuman FEMA trailer and back into their home means everything.
This Friday, more than three years later, the Dantonis will finally get their lives back. A good story to be sure.
