Article originally published in the Panama City News Herald.
PANAMA CITY — Kaelee and Kaydee Johnson are just about ready to go to school. Kaelee has her Chromebook and pencils, but Kaydee can’t find her pencil case. In the family’s 26-foot trailer in the FEMA group site on the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and 15th Street, there are only so many places it could be.
Their father, Chris Brockman, steps outside to check the family’s truck. He doesn’t find the pencil case, but instead finds a pool of water. The murky water flows down the cracked pavement and spreads into their neighbor’s yard.
Chris and his wife, Holly Johnson, are frustrated. Just the day before, after days of waiting, FEMA sent a maintenance worker to repair a leaking water pipe in the trailer that made it impossible to wash dishes. Both of them take out their cellphones and try calling maintenance.
With a cellphone in one hand, Chris looks into Kaydee’s bunk and moves around her toys and bedding, finding the pencil box. As he is on the phone with FEMA explaining the seriousness of the situation flooding his street, he hands her the box.
The Brockman-Johnson family moved into their trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency with one bedroom and one bunk bed near the end of January after losing their apartment at Foxwood Apartments. After Hurricane Michael, the family stayed with friends in town, then an RV in Destin, a rental condo and then received housing assistance from FEMA to stay in a hotel. In December, the family was told FEMA would stop providing rent assistance and instead provide them a trailer.
Holly and Chris feel incredibly fortunate to have a safe place to live. In some ways, they prefer their new home to their old apartment.
“We’ve been trying to get out of (Foxwood), and so now we’re finally out and we’re in here, and I really do not want to go back in there,” Holly says.
With shooting after shooting, the parents were tired of living somewhere they couldn’t let their kids play outside. Now, the girls can play on their front porch made of wood pallets without fear of another daylight shooting.
But living in the group site is not without problems. The site is mostly fenced off, but gaps in the fencing and the angle the trailer is placed at worry Chris and Holly. The street lights are bright and cast a wide beam, ridding the family of any sense of privacy in their own home. And limited storage space means constantly reshuffling their belongings to find items they use daily.
“I feel bad for being that way, because we have people coming around asking how to get in these trailers because they are in their cars,” Holly says. “At the same time, this is really small.”
One of the most disruptive changes in their lives is simply the address. The group site is only a few blocks away from their old apartment, but living there moved their youngest daughter out of the zone for her elementary school and their eldest out of the busing zone for her middle school. Because of that, Chris, the only licensed driver in the family, has to spend upwards of three hours a day ferrying his children to and from school everyday.
Still, Holly and Chris feel this is part of God’s plan for them, that the obstacles in their path are not roadblocks, but redirection towards His mission for them.
“Like it’s God telling me, ‘I don’t want you to do this. If you finish this application you will get the job and that’s not what I have for you.’” Chris says.
After talking about the list of problems her family faces, Holly laughs.
“Nothing can stop me! Jesus got me!” she says.