Kimberly Crowley was an average person until a month ago.

She owned a house and an air conditioning unit. She enjoyed her job and had friends to hang out with on weekends. But this was her life a month ago. Now she’s a hurricane evacuee.

Crowley worked at New Orleans’ Tulane University’s Substance Abuse Clinic where she worked closely with Tulane’s former associate vice president for student affairs, Dan Nadler, who is now Eastern’s vice president for student affairs.

After the hurricane, Nadler called Crowley to offer her a position as Eastern’s substance abuse counselor.

“It’s a temporary appointment,” Nadler said. “But it’s an appointment that’s going to benefit both Kim and our university.”

Crowley said was reluctant to accept at first because she didn’t know what was going to happen.

Before Crowley came to campus for her interview, she worried that Eastern would place expectations on her that she couldn’t fill because of her need to fix her life.

“I expected (administrators) to be more rigid about what they needed,” she said.

But she found the opposite.

“What I found was they were more interested in what I needed and that continues to baffle me because they didn’t even know me,” she said.

She noted that without Sandy Cox, the director of the counseling center, and the staff’s support she probably wouldn’t have come to Eastern.

“More than anything Sandy made me feel no pressure because I was already feeling pressure in all these other ways,” she said.

Crowley started Monday at Eastern’s counseling center and plans to remain through the semester. When she arrived, the center presented her with a care basket. A colleague opened up her home to Crowley and her dog, Ruby.

Crowley loves hurricane season because when an evacuation order is implemented, the people who don’t leave party. She referred to “hurricane mind set.” She said she thinks it’s a cultural difference that she notices, just because she’s originally from the mid-west.

“People have this different hurricane-mindset,” she said. “The whole city shuts down and you’re not working and it’s fun. I think people talk to each other more, they’re more vulnerable and I think the people who stay are bigger risk-takers so there’s something about that dynamic.”

Crowley doesn’t describe her experience as traumatic, but as “difficult” and “stressful.” Hurricane Katrina ripped the roof of her house off, the fence off her yard and the air conditioning box out of her window. She’d been able to tarp her house after a recent trip back, but said she doubts that it’s still in place after Hurricane Rita.

“I feel grateful that I don’t have to go through what other people are going through,” she said referring to the people who have lost everything.

The hardest part for Crowley, she said, is not knowing when she can go back or what she’s going back to. But despite this, she considers it a great experience.

“How many times in your life will sometime like this happen?” she said.

Because of the hurricanes, she’s been able to visit her family in St. Louis for the first time and hear from friends she hasn’t talked to in years. She said she feels that everything happens for a reason, and she was happy to have time to spend with her family.

“For me, I think it’s out of our control,” she said about her experience. “And I think that’s something that this country has a problem with, is thinking that you can control everything, and when something like this happens it really humbles you to realize that you don’t have all the control and in one minute your life can be completely turned upside down.”