PEARLINGTON, Miss., Oct. 11 - It was the moment when the portable toilets were taken away that almost took the fight out of Tony Earl.
For six weeks, ever since Hurricane Katrina destroyed his trailer home and his town, Mr. Earl and his family have been living in a tent, with no sign of the housing promised by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and President Bush.
So when FEMA, without explanation, carted off the portable outhouses the Earls had been using, he realized he had little choice. He is now struggling to build a free-standing bathroom out of the slabs of wood and tin that have washed up nearby.
"It's slow," he said, "but it's coming together."
Signs of normal life now mark the Mississippi Gulf Coast on the drive west from Biloxi. The Waffle Houses are serving again. The Gulfport airport is open.
But at the southwestern tip of the state here in Hancock County, where the Pearl River overflowed, hundreds of people are living like the Earls, in tents and under tarps in the ruins of what used to be their homes.
The belongings they managed to save are stacked outdoors in bags and bins as if offered in a grim yard sale. The roadside garbage grows around them in the dirt and watery ditches, adding fresh refuse to the molding carcasses originally left by the storm: washing machines, couches, mattresses. No one comes to collect it. The trailers for which they applied to FEMA are, for the most part, nowhere in sight.
"What is wrong with our federal government?" said Yvette Earl, who is living in difficult conditions not only with her husband, Tony, and their two children but also with two grandchildren and her father. "I got children starting school Friday, and they're in tents."
Eugene Brezany, a spokesman for FEMA in Mississippi, said his office was doing what it could.
"We're working with people on a first-come-first-served basis," Mr. Brezany said.
As for the portable toilets that were hauled away more than a week ago, they had been provided by a company whose federal contract expired, according to FEMA, which is trying to shift contracts to state and local governments.
The 42-year-old Ms. Earl said that in a quest for housing, she had initially waited three hours in nearby Waveland to fill out FEMA forms and had been back four times in the last week. "Today they told me to do a new application," she said.
She worries about the approach of cold weather, because her children have chronic bronchitis and her father suffers from emphysema. Her skin has broken out from all the mosquito bites.
Pearlington, with a population of 1,684 as of the 2000 census, has no mayor or town government even in ordinary times. Its residents call themselves "the forgotten people," said Angela J. Cole, a nurse who has spent the last three weeks doing independent relief work in the area.
Ms. Cole, who by now seems to know most everyone by name, hands out water, Ensure and other supplies, and listens to stories from people who call her "angel." She grows more frustrated by the day.
"We have standing water, piles of debris, zero sanitation," she said. "We have a public health crisis here, and no one seems to think it's their responsibility."
Ms. Cole says she has tried to get the attention of public officials, who reassure her that they have the situation under control and discourage her from distributing goods directly rather than working through them. She nevertheless continues - "going to people where they are so they don't have to stand in lines and fill out forms."
Blacks and whites alike occupy the tent encampments. And what Ms. Cole perceives as neglect has nothing to do with race, she says.
"This is an issue of poverty: they have no voice," she said. "Officials have just quietly focused their attention elsewhere."
Mr. Brezany, of FEMA, said the issue was simply one of logistics.
"We took in 1,400 applications yesterday across the state," he said.
Those who count themselves among the forgotten include Isaiah Oliver, known to most as Ike, who bathes by filling a plastic pail with water heated on a griddle. He stores the clothes that stayed dry in garbage bags in his broken-down Nissan.
"I'm a military man - I know how to survive," Mr. Oliver said. "I was in Korea and Vietnam ."
Mr. Oliver, 77, is living in a small tent pitched beside the house built by his parents in 1950. He took refuge in the attic as the water rose, until a neighbor came by in a boat to rescue him. He signed up for help at the train station in Bay St. Louis, but says no officials have come to look in on him.
"They ain't checked nothing out here yet," he said. "So many other people in distress. I figure, when they get to me, they get to me."
Sleeping in a tent makes his bones stiffen and ache.
"I wake up in the morning, my side, my hip - they be sore," he said. "I have three blankets, but it gets cold."
He too was sorry to see the portable toilets go. He now fills two five-gallon buckets from a friend's well and hauls it home in his arthritic fists to pour into the toilet of his uninhabitable house. It is a lot of effort, but beats crouching outdoors. "The flies and mosquitoes eat you up inside the woods," he said.
Still, Mr. Oliver does not radiate defeat. There is always the prospect of a cold beer to ease his burdens, and he told a visitor that he was planning to cook on his griddle.
"I bought bacon, smoked sausage, bell pepper and onion," he said. "I'm fixing a stew tomorrow."
Some sporadic services are available, Pearlington residents say. A Red Cross truck recently started coming through twice a day with plastic-foam containers of lunch and dinner, though they often contain tuna fish. The local school offers supplies, but with strict rationing. A couple of people from the Salvation Army sometimes come through. And the other night, a lone truck cruised the barren streets as the sun went down, leaving mosquito spray in its wake.
For now, anyway, the people of Pearlington continue to live like refugees in conditions not unlike those of the primitive tent city of Cité Soleil in Haiti , where sewage runs in the gutters.
The other day, the Earls' children and grandchildren passed the time by rolling their toy trucks in the dirt, their clothing soiled, their faces streaked with dust. Ms. Earl collected containers of that evening's meal from the Red Cross truck: a watery pile of grated cheese and shredded lettuce that was supposed to be fajitas.
The couple's 10-year-old son, Michael, said that he did not mind sleeping in a tent and that the hurricane had "happened for a reason."
"Too many bad things on the earth," he said. "People doing bad stuff. Too much cussing in the world."
