Frustrated volunteers go it alone to provide help

Fed up with bureaucratic obstacles to aiding the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, a group of Boston-area women is collecting and sending supplies to Louisiana themselves.

The women are packing an 18-wheeler, set to leave Sunday, with hair care products, toys, clothes, suitcases, and other items to give to thousands of evacuees now staying in Lafayette, La., some 135 miles northwest of New Orleans.

''I must have called 10 volunteer lines where they took my number and couldn't tell me anything," said Terra Friedrichs, a systems integration manager in Acton spearheading the effort. ''We gave up . . . I've project management skills, and I thought, 'Man, this is ridiculous.' People just need to know what to do and they just need direction. And that's what I'll do."

The city of Lafayette, home to the University of Louisiana's Cajun Dome, is overflowing with thousands of hurricane evacuees, said local school board member Beverly Wilson, who is overseeing the warehousing of this relief effort and knows Friedrichs only by phone. About 6,000 evacuees were staying in the dome and thousands more are at churches and in inexpensive motels and hotels, she said.

''There are churches down here that have opened their doors and are not getting help," said Wilson. ''We're getting motels to assess how many evacuees they have. Another thing is, cash is hard to get these days because, for a lot of them, their banks were centered in New Orleans."

Although many local official groups have plans to send aid down south, this band of two dozen strangers decided to pool their resources this week and take action on their own.

The women say they have gathered $5,000 in supplies and hope to collect $50,000 worth of items by the Sunday departure. Some goods will go to the Red Cross of Lafayette, said Friedrichs.

Friedrichs, whose niece is volunteering at a Lafayette shelter, used e-mail list-serves to ask for help. Stephanie Wilson, the Boston daughter of Beverly Wilson, was ready to drive a truck to the South until she heard about Friedrichs. Kay Steeves, a student-faculty support coordinator at Acton-Boxborough Regional High School, knows Friedrichs's niece, who used to attend the school. Jennifer Malone, of Melrose, is a stay-at-home mother who was contacted by Friedrichs via Craigslist. Malone enlisted radio station friends to aid the cause.

Steeves brought the effort to her high school because it gives the youths a chance to do something.

''We have a contact down there who can tell us what stuff is needed," said Steeves, who is organizing today's 6 p.m. donation pickup at the school. ''A lot of people feel like it's nice to do something tangible in addition to writing a check."

Trust at first was an issue in forming the private charity force.

''Terra contacted me through Craigslist and said she was working with a truck," said Malone, of Melrose, who personally called the other people involved. ''Things just snowballed from there."

Attempts to reach the Red Cross of Lafayette were unsuccessful because calls to Louisiana were frequently met with busy signals. However, the Red Cross of Massachusetts said it prefers to self-organize.

''For the Red Cross, we are a disaster relief organization and we have our processes to provide relief and not included in those processes is the capability to address individual donations of goods and resources," said Hugh Drummond, communications director with the Massachusetts Red Cross. ''If we were to get into logistics of individual donations . . . it would add a layer of complexity that . . . is not the way we conduct our disaster relief."

The pickups for Friedrichs's group will occur all weekend. KISS 108-FM is taking in items at their parking lot in Medford on Saturday and Sunday, said Dawn Santolucito, a promotions assistant. Other pickups will be announced via the group's long e-mail lists of community activists.

Although some government officials say these sorts of efforts are hampering relief efforts, Friedrichs doesn't care.

''It's like, 'Are you some kind of pansy? Do you drive 55?' " said Friedrichs. ''At some point this becomes ridiculous, this following the rules thing. I told them it'd take a presidential order for me to stop."

Adrienne Samuels can be reached at asamuels@globe.com.