Wedding photos. Legal documents. Water, and a couple of days' worth of clothing.
These were some of the few items now Indiana Sen. Fady Qaddoura packed when he evacuated New Orleans with his wife and newborn daughter in 2005, just hours before a powerful hurricane would flood streets, destroy infrastructure and take lives.
Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 1,400 people and submerged most of the city after the storm breached vulnerable levees. It exposed leadership failures as the federal government struggled to quickly respond and exacerbated disparities between Black and White areas of the city, which survivors say is not the same as it once was.
Two decades later its impact resonates even in Indianapolis, the city Qaddoura now represents as a Democratic Indiana state senator. The three-term legislator said he came to Indianapolis in 2009 after Hurricane Katrina set him on a path of public service.
“Katrina was a tipping point in my life,” Qaddoura said.
Dreams and plans ‘shattered’ by hurricane
A few days before the hurricane, Qaddoura and his wife were talking about their future together, including whether she would go to graduate school, and plans for their newborn baby.
But as they waited out the storm in the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, packed with more than 9,000 other evacuees in 2005, Qaddoura, his wife, and his 3-week-old daughter were homeless.
It’s a memory he still gets emotional about 20 years later.
“All of the sudden all of your dreams, all of your plans, are shattered by an event that you have no control over,” he said.
Qaddoura held out hope they would be able to return to their home in New Orleans. He didn’t know that it would be two years before he’d see his house, a two-story townhome near the University of New Orleans, where Qaddoura worked as a computer science research assistant as he pursued a master’s degree.
Though the house was elevated slightly above ground, Qaddoura recalls seeing a watermark midway up the second story. The interior was filled with mold; furniture was strewn about as if it had once been submerged. The floodwaters had nearly consumed his home.
Without their home in the early days following the hurricane, his family slept in their car while Qaddoura worried about how he could find a doctor for his wife and daughter, who both needed medical attention. He wasn’t sure where his next meal would come from. He said he hated feeling helpless when his family needed him.
Qaddoura and his family had to accept meals from the nonprofits working to provide relief. It was difficult for Qaddoura, he said, because he had learned to work for what he got when growing up in poverty in an area of the West Bank near Jerusalem.
There, Qaddoura worked odd jobs and began saving his wages. He pushed a cart filled with books and clothes to sell on the street, and he worked construction as a teenager. Eventually, he saved enough to go to college in New Orleans.
Now five years into life in America, Qaddoura had lost nearly everything. He insisted on giving back to the nonprofits that helped his family. For three days, Qaddoura worked recruiting volunteers to help the relief effort as more evacuees arrived in Houston. He didn’t sleep beyond a few naps, he said.
It was an early taste of public service, an experience he said triggered his eventual transition to the public sector.
Exclusive book: How Katrina changed all of us
A personal transformation
Qaddoura and his family spent the first several months in Houston living in a motel before they finally transitioned to an apartment. He finished his master’s degree in computer science online and began working for the University of Texas medical school.
But he couldn’t shake the memory of Katrina and its lessons.
Qaddoura recalls waking up one morning and telling his wife: “This is not for me. I can’t spend the rest of my life behind a screen.”
He decided to enroll in the Leadership Institute for Nonprofit Executives program at Rice University in Houston. After the one-year program, Qaddoura pursued a second master’s degree, this time in public administration, at what was then Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Since he arrived in Indiana in 2009, Qaddoura has held jobs ranging from an Indiana State Senate intern to the controller and chief financial officer for the city of Indianapolis. In addition to his duties in the Indiana General Assembly, Qaddoura works full time as the CFO for Indiana United Ways, a nonprofit that works to improve the well-being of Hoosiers across the state.
Faith and service
It’s a sweltering Saturday in late June, but it doesn’t stop Qaddoura from guiding the patrons of Luts Pantry to the parking lot so he can unload groceries into their cars.
He helps one woman fold her rolling walker into the back seat of the car. She tells him she’s here because her food spoiled during a power outage caused by recent storms.
The mosque where the food pantry operates, Masjid Al Mumineen, is familiar to Qaddoura, who became the first Muslim to be an Indiana state legislator when he was elected in 2020. In addition to his monthly volunteering, he’s attended worship there for 15 years.
When he’s not volunteering, Qaddoura spends his weekends canvassing his district and talking to constituents. It’s that quality that his youngest daughter, Salsabil, admires; Qaddoura is not a politician, she said, he’s a public servant. His friends at Masjid Al Mumineen agree.
“Fady’s always been boots on the ground,” said Sara Alghani, daughter of mosque co-founder Amin Alghani.
“He’s always been willing to help whatever the task is,” she added. “Mopping the floor, he would do it.”
Carts stuffed with milk, fruit and chips roll down the narrow hallway of the mosque for about an hour — the number of patrons has been growing, according to executive director Nashia Abdul-Aleem — before the shelves empty and it starts to quiet. The remaining volunteers joke with one another, waiting for the final few passersby. Qaddoura greets two young girls who are volunteering with their father and thanks them for their time.
This place feels like home for Qaddoura, who has spent much of his life making sense of tragedy and studying the gaps in policy that allow it to fester.
“The most beautiful thing in a human’s life is to belong,” he said.
To him, the issues that make people feel as if they don’t belong — immigrants who experience discrimination or tenants with unsafe and unaffordable housing, for example — are at the core of his service.
While Qaddoura’s efforts to pass legislation to address these issues don’t always pan out, giving up is not an option, he said.
“We cannot afford anything except to be hopeful,” he said. “Because the alternative to hope is destruction.”
Contact Marissa Meador at [email protected] or find her on X at @marissa_meador.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Hurricane Katrina left Fady Qaddoura homeless. Now he's a senator
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