Hurricane Ike may have tapered off and its accompanying flood waters receded, but many at TAMIU will remember the university’s role in welcoming and assisting student evacuees from Texas A&M Corpus Christi and Texas A&M Kingsville. Having strengthened in the Gulf of Mexico into a Category 2 storm, Ike prompted administrators at the sister campuses to suspend classes and issue an evacuation warning to their students. Early Wednesday night, according to Dr. Juan Castillo, Vice President for Finance and Administration, TAMIU opened its Kinesiology and Convocation Building (KCB) to approximately 158 Corpus Christi students. By the following morning, Castillo expected roughly 195 from Kingsville. “We’re not an evacuation center,” Castillo stressed. “We have agreements with sister campuses, and we’re doing our best to get these students situated.” Castillo also emphasized the interdepartmental coordination at work: campus police provided security, Dusty’s Diner cooked food, the University Village staff shuttled people back and forth on golf carts, and the Canseco School of Nursing was on hand in case anyone required medical care. The emergency response team converted the KCB basketball court into evacuee lodging. Corpus students rested on cots, used the locker rooms’ lavatory facilities, and tried to cope with the anxiety. “I’m nervous,” said Azra Alkan, aSee IKE, page 4TAMU-CC freshman. “I’ve only been in Corpus a month, and we had to leave.” Originally from Turkey, Alkan had just come to study in the United States when she heard about the impending storm. She said many of the evacuees were international students new to the Texas Coast. “We have to get used to it,” she said. Like Alkan, many evacuees expressed gratitude for the accommodations, yet they shared a common concern: not being able to connect to the internet. Evacuees gathered around laptops trying to use Bluetooth technology to communicate with friends and loved ones. Itzl Hinojosa, Senior Resident Advisor with the Residential Learning Community, explained the internet issue as “a problem with the settings,” referring to the normal restrictions placed on wireless Ethernet access around campus. By the morning of Thursday, Sep. 12, Student Government (SG) coordinated an effort involving various student organizations. “They did well,” said SG Senator Matthew Hall about the performance of SG’s new Dusty Corp. “I’m absolutely glowing. They just did very well.” Initiated this fall, the Dusty Corp is Student Government’s civil service group. It consists mainly of first-time freshman who want to get involved with campus life. Aside from the Dusty Corp, Greek organizations Sigma Nu Delta and Kappa Delta Chi assisted from Thursday through the weekend. That’s not including “unaffiliated” students who turned out to help. “It was amazing,” beamed Hall. “Just random students not connected with any organization were coming in asking, ‘How can I help?'” All student volunteers were given a maroon TAMIU t-shirt and sent to the field, where they performed duties ranging from escorting evacuees to computers on campus to sitting down and hearing them vent-“impromptu crisis counseling,” as Hall put it. Also instrumental was the Campus Activities Board, which Hall considered “a godsend.” Hall and CAB President Luis Stagg estimated that between the KCB and Kinesiology and Wellness Recreation Center, TAMIU housed about 200 evacuees from both TAMU-CC and TAMUK, evacuees for whom CAB planned a number of activities such as karaoke and beach volleyball. “They really seemed to enjoy [the activities],” said Stagg, adding that he noticed a clear boost in the TAMUK evacuees’ moral after the entertainment on Thursday and Friday evenings. About 15 students served throughout the weekend under the CAB umbrella; Hall puts the total student volunteer estimate for the weekend at 30. “That’s circulating volunteers,” said Hall. “We worked in shifts, and everyone was really good and relieving other volunteers so they could get some rest.” The most tenured officer in the legislative branch of Student Government, Hall lauded the performance of the group’s chief executives, Student Body President James Cortez and Vice President Eliezar Castañeda. Cortez and Castañeda split their time over the weekend between aiding evacuees and collecting canned goods on behalf of Food for Thought, a local nonprofit organization. “The administration was great,” added Hall, referring to multi-departmental effort. “The lines of communication were clean cut. Everything was streamlined, wonderful. All the more amazing considering Ike warranted us virtually no time for preparation and neither the SG nor the administration had any previous experience handling this level of evacuee situation.”