IRC caseworker Maryam Williams, from Iran, reviews bills with Vu Lam.

Vu Lam's wife, Nhi Nguyen, prepares lunch.

Vu Lam, from Biloxi, Mississippi, assembles furniture for the apartment donated to his family while his mother, Van Dang (standing, left) and IRC caseworker Maryam Williams look on.

Gerry meets with IRC job developer Kelly Irwin. The IRC is helping hurricane evacuees find job opportunities with employers in their new communities and set up interviews.

Lola shows photos of the home the family lost to Hurricane Katrina.

Lola and Gerry Anderson (far right) meet one of their new neighbors.

Rod (left), Lola, and Yulia (far right) check out the apartment's fully stocked kitchen. The IRC is furnishing evacuee families' apartments with kitchen supplies, beds, bedding and other household basics.

Lola Freeman tours the new apartment with IRC caseworkers Rod Conrad and Yulia LeGood.

The Freeman family of New Orleans gets ready to sign the lease on the apartment the IRC found for them in Atlanta.

IRC Atlanta caseworkers Elhamija Kadic (right) and Meliha Bosnjak, former refgees from Bosnia, place an order for mattresses for the evacuee families' new homes.

(Dec 2005) Across the United States, International Rescue Committee resettlement offices, which have long helped refugees from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America rebuild their lives, are extending aid to families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. "These evacuees have essentially lost all of their possessions," says the IRC's national resttlement director Christine Petrie. "They could be separated from family members. They have lost a sense of community and they are concerned about their children’s future." IRC staff members -- many of them former refugees who came to the U.S. with the IRC's help -- are working one-on-one with evacuee families to help them start over in cities around the country. "There is no cookie cutter response to a disaster like Katrina." Petrie says. "In order to bring order to the chaos there has to be an individual family approach." It will be a long time before many of the families can return home, so the IRC has been helping them find and furnish new homes, stock their pantries with food, get new jobs, enroll their children in school, and get comfortable in their new communities. Photographer Jim Stawniak was on hand when two families who lost homes to Hurrican Katrina - Lola Freeman's from Orleans Parish, Louisiana, and Vu Lam's from Biloxi, Mississippi - moved into the new apartments the IRC prepared for them in Atlanta, Georgia.