AFTER KATRINA Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette photos
	India Dantzler, 1, lies on a picnic table with Precious, a dog belonging to another evacuee. India's father, Patrick Reaux, sits beside her.
	Oliver Fletcher Jr. holds a photograph of his son, 9-year-old Oliver Fletcher III. Fletcher hasn't seen his son since Aug. 26, the Friday before Katrina hit, when he dropped his son off with the boy's mother.
	Patrick Burke, 83, sits on his bunk in one of the barracks at Camp Dawson. Burke, from Metarie, La., was critical of government efforts at the onset of Katrina and is anxious to get back to his house when conditions permit -- exhorting the government to get started "yesterday, not today or tomorrow" in efforts to rebuild the area.

KINGWOOD, W.Va. -- At a military tactical training center here, children are learning to smile again, families are reuniting and memories that haunt 300 Hurricane Katrina evacuees are slowly subsiding.

At 4,000-acre Camp Dawson, National Guardsmen, special forces and tactical teams training to carry out assaults and helicopter maneuvers steer past children dragging pull toys, young women blaring small boom boxes and domino-playing older men.

A thousand miles from home, the evacuees have begun piecing together what little they have left and contemplating an uncertain future.

Meanwhile, both generosity and rumors have flowed in Kingwood, a town that, like its new neighbors, faces abrupt transition.

Kingwood, population 3,000, is no stranger to economic hardship, federal aid or floods.

But in a town where more than 90 percent of the population is white, rumors surfaced that many of the arrivals from New Orleans were convicted felons. Some expressed fears about disease once the children of evacuees enroll in local schools.

Simultaneously, there has been an outpouring of support. Donation centers in Preston County, home to Kingwood, Masontown, Terra Alta and a handful of other small towns are overflowing with shoes, canned goods, water and clothes.

"These people are caregiving people," said Jim Maier, a Kingwood councilman. "They would do anything for anybody. They have donated like crazy, but when word started spreading that we got the worst of the worst, that's when rumors turned ugly.

"I don't know whether these rumors carry racial overtones or that it's more that they fear change," said Maier. "This community hasn't changed -- ever."

The evacuees, who began arriving more than a week ago, sleep in the National Guard barracks, their belongings packed away in wooden lockers. They are segregated by sex -- single men sleep in one section, single women in another barracks -- and by age and marital status. They have a curfew: lights are to be out at 10 p.m.

They cope with chilly nights, volunteers that have trouble understanding Creole or Cajun accents and a community made wary by rumors.

"This is the complete reverse of the homogenous white makeup of West Virginia," said Joe Thornton, spokesman for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety. "Nine out of 10 of the evacuees are black."

In the barracks are displaced residents of some of New Orleans' most poverty-stricken neighborhoods -- the Ninth Ward and the Sixth Ward. They wander around the base as if permanent house guests, the men wearing fuzzy or corduroy house slippers. Meals are strictly regimented and evacuee trips into Kingwood are treated as major National Guard missions.

"To go through town you have to go through the chain of command. It's not just so-and-so wants to go to so-and-so and the bus is ready to take you there," said Matt Musgrave, head of transportation for the evacuees.

Teams from the West Virginia University Department of Family Medicine, American Red Cross, National Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies are manning a 24-hour command center for what they have dubbed "Camp Safe Haven."

Using one of the free telephones set up by Verizon in tents, Whitney Young searched for her mother. Young and her 2-year-old son fled to a neighbor's house after Katrina's winds tore the roof off their bedroom in the Sixth Ward.

She stayed at the friend's for six days before deciding to leave the city.

"I just want to go to Houston," she said. "My mom is there and hopefully I can go to college in southern Texas."

Inside the cement walls of an "older single men only barracks," Patrick Burke, 83, of Metairie, La., lay in a lower bunk with his arms behind his head, his cane nearby.

Burke lost his three-bedroom brick home, where his wife and he had spent most of their 61 years of marriage. His wife died in 2003 and is buried in Metairie. He described the past week as a series of aggravations no one enjoying retirement should go through, referring to the department of "homeland stupidity."

"I'd love to go back, but I don't know how long we're going to be here," Burke said, hanging a pair of donated Etnies skateboarding shoes on the side of the bed. "I miss my home and I miss my wife ... I want to be buried right beside her."

Outside on the picnic benches most of the evacuees rest on, Kevia Dantzler, 35, her 1-year-old daughter, India, and her father, Patrick Reaux relaxed in the late afternoon. They spent three days in their home of Orleans Parish, listening to their battery-operated radio tell of rape and murder at the convention center and the Superdome.

Dantzler, Reaux, her daughter and 13-year-old son, Roderick, are planning on calling Kingwood home. Reaux kept saying "New Orleans is no more," and the "mayor lost his city."

Roderick, playing basketball nearby, has taken the change very hard, Kevia said. At 13, he was at the age when friends meant the world to him and leaving them behind was difficult.

"We still don't know where my cousins are," said Roderick, who tried to act unmoved by the migration, but later confided, "I miss my friends and my cousins."

On Friday afternoon, Nathan Earle, 40, from downtown New Orleans, got the phone call he had been praying for. He had a job. Soon he will start as a heavy equipment operator at a nearby mining facility.

After spending several days after the hurricane in the Superdome, where he said people stopped acting "human," he said he was glad to be among "hillbillies" and mesmerized by the hills of West Virginia.

"We aren't survivors," he said as he looked into the wilderness surrounding the base, "because we must have died and gone to heaven."