My name is Brenda, I was in hurricane Rita. I am a sophemore at Vidor High School. I found out at school that a hurricane was coming towards Texas. When I went home I found out that we had a manditory eveacuation. They told us to leave on a thursday. We left thursday night. We were not going to leave at all but we decided to. We boarded up our windows and headed to Austin, Texas. To stay with my Aunt. It usually takes us 4 1/2 hours to get to Austin but on that night it took us around 14 hours. That was the longest ride of my life, because I had my 2 year old brother with me. We got there finally and stayed one night because my dad was determined to come back home and see what our 2 year old house looked like. So we headed home late saturday night and the hurricane hit on that saturday so we bypassed all the debris and made our way home. We were either the first one from out of town or one of the first people to come back home from evacuating. It was horrible the power lines and trees were down everywhere. Before we left our home my mom said a pray on our house and our family to be ok. Well when we got home our house was completly fine and not one thing was wrong with it. There was trees down everywhere but not one hit my house. We had several generators and plenty of gas and food and drinks. We had 5 families staying with us in a 3 bedroom house. It was crazy. But within the next two weeks we cleaned my yard and got everything back to normal. Red cross helped us so much. But with all our damage done outside and all the money we used to help other people, Fema did NOT help us one bit.