Editor's note: This profile will air tonight, Fri., Nov. 24, so I'm elevating Al's post from last week.

Every so often while I'm out on a story someone will ask me, "Who are the best people to interview?" I've done thousands of interviews, with people from all stations and stages of life. I have a special place in my heart for "ordinary" people, the folks who live off the beaten path, anonymously for the most part, because they usually don't hide their passions from anyone.

Once in a while, you find a real gem. Don Teague and I will bring you one such story tonight.

Deep in the piney woods of east Texas, we found Betty Lewing in Lufkin. Through a frankly horrible set of circumstances, she teaches remedial reading to those students who fell through the cracks of our education system. Seven years ago, her daughter was kidnapped and raped. While dealing with the pain and hurt, Betty was offered a job teaching reading to inmates in the Texas prison system. She took it, and soon discovered that many of the issues that put people in prison could be traced back to their lack of reading skills.

She was then offered a job at Lufkin High School, and has made it her mission to help those kids who really need it. "I believe that God led me on this direction," she told us. "This is where I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to do, because without his strength I could not make a difference. I would not have the patience that it takes."

Betty Lewing is very humble about her work. She says she's not doing anything that millions of other teachers aren't doing everyday, all over the world. But she is making a huge difference in the lives of students who truly need it.

"You love them unconditionally, and you accept them as they are, and if you truly can do that in your heart, then you can make a difference."

Tonight on the broadcast Don Teague and I will bring you our "Making a Difference" report for this week. The tiny town of Brighton, Iowa is an unlikely place to find a news story, but we found a good one there.

Don Fields and his wife Sandee are trying to work themselves out of a job. Their mission in life, "their calling" in their words, is to wipe out hunger everywhere on the planet. They organize one satellite operation of "Kids Against Hunger," an organization whose prepackaged meals are financed, packaged, shipped and delivered all with private donations and volunteer labor.

As Don says, "I tell them we're saving lives. This packet of food that you are putting together is probably going to go to somebody someplace that hasn't had anything to eat, maybe in a state of starvation and dying. You are making a difference. You are saving a life."

His wife of 39 years, Sandee, says, "We were able to speak into people's lives because we fed them first."

What is most amazing about their operation is the labor pool. It's mostly children doing the assembly work, from church groups, schools, civic organizations. The Fields say they want to make their operation mobile, to take the assembly process out to the community. Fields also says he wants to expand beyond Brighton.

"We can use Iowa as a prototype and we can go to Illinois and say, 'look what we did, let's do it,' and we help them and get them set up and they help someone else and it's a domino effect. Within a year's time, it's unbelievable what we can do."

In the spirit of full disclosure, I was born and raised in Iowa. It's no accident Iowa is called the heartland. Don and Sandee Fields' work, their mission, comes only from the heart.

Carl Quintanilla and I are preparing a story for the broadcast concerning Jefferson Parish, which adjoins New Orleans on the west. The Parish president, Aaron Broussard, made the painful decision the day before Katrina hit to shut down the pump houses in the parish, and evacuate the operators to safety. Those of us not from the New Orleans area are quickly learning how important the massive and complex system of pumps and canals are to survival and well being. We're all below or at sea level when we arrive here. If you don't pump out the water, you flood. It's just that simple.

Broussard told us today, "No parish president should have to make the decisions that I had to make during Katrina, where you choose between different values. In this instance, I chose life over property. That was a good decision."

Broussard also told us the head of the National Hurricane Center called his office and flatly said, "This is the big one, get your people out or they will die."

A Hobson's choice: flood the parish, or put your employees in mortal danger. Like so many things we've seen during the past seven weeks, a tough and unavoidable choice.

There are a few people, and I must say, just a few, that we have seen dressed in what reasonable people would say are normal clothes. Shoes, a button-down shirt, a suit jacket. Most people here, regardless of income level, race, or previous job, are dressing in "survival" mode. This consists of boots, cargo pants or shorts, leather work gloves stuffed in one back pocket, with a respirator mask shoved into the other. They also typically have a case of water and several MREs in the back seat of their vehicle, and rubber boots and a shovel on the floor. What is most astounding about this "survival mode" is who it affects. Waiters, doctors, lawyers, ditch diggers, truck drivers, bankers, all economic and social levels, all races, all ages. Driving through the CBD (Central Business District), the Garden District and the French Quarter, you can almost convince yourself things are getting back to normal, that it's just a missed trash pickup day, or a good sized construction project in the neighborhood.

But drive out Tulane Avenue, or any major street towards the lake from downtown, and the scene is like something out of a movie. Flooded cars and buildings covered with a chalk white film, left when the waters receded. All plants... grass, shrubs, small trees... dead after being submerged for a month in a toxic soup. The water line is still visible, and will be for months, five feet up on most buildings. Trash is everywhere, stacked up in front of houses, businesses and office buildings, just now beginning to dry out. There are flies swarming everywhere. Power is out, water is out. Two-story buildings show a bottom floor gutted to the bare wood frame, and mold covers everything else.

Citizens are starting to come back, but what are they coming back to?

The city and state here estimate that a million refrigerators will need to be replaced. When the power went out, the food left in them rotted so severely that the stuff became toxic waste, and leached into the plastic and piping. There are hundreds of them on every street, even in areas that are not flooded and only lost power. I think the number will be higher, because most people had more than one, and that doesn't count restaurants that had small models in addition to the large commercial ones.

Unbelievably, traffic is becoming a problem again. I have always found New Orleans to be a difficult place to get around, (the streets were mostly laid out in the 1800's, at least downtown) and for the past six weeks, traffic law abeyance has been interesting to say the least. Driving the wrong way on a one-way, or up the wrong entrance ramp, cutting across the interstate, and going the wrong way on I-10 or the cross-town expressway has been the norm. There were so few people in the city right after the storm, you just put on the emergency flashers and were careful when you got to an intersection. After driving like that for a few weeks, you start to feel like that's the way it should be.

The most interesting thing for the past few days has been the smells. This weekend we were shooting a story next to a five-star restaurant that was being cleaned. Imagine a garbage can, filled with really ripe things, sealed up and left in the Louisiana sun for five weeks. Now open the can and crawl inside. That's just about every eating establishment in the city, five-star to fast food; all had things rotting in the cooler. Walking through New Orleans was once a joy; you could smell the special of the day from each place, sometimes good, usually excellent. Now the smell of what's cooking fights with the stench of rotting food and garbage.