After spending two years with the Peace Corps in West Africa, Katherine Aldrich took a detour to help Gulf Coast hurricane victims before arriving home in Billings for the holidays.

In the states, Aldrich, 26, worked with a little-known offshoot of the Peace Corps known as Crisis Corps, helping evacuees from New Orleans move from hotels in Arkansas to more permanent housing.

In Africa, she was a community health worker in Benin, a small, densely populated country sandwiched between Togo and Nigeria, along what was once known as the Slave Coast. The former French colony is often associated with the tribal religion of Vodun, which originated in Benin and was introduced to the Americas by slaves, where it became known as "voodoo."

Half the population adheres to indigenous religious beliefs, and Aldrich's first encounter with those beliefs began on arrival. On her first night, while she stayed in one part of a Christian convent, an exorcism was going on in another part of the convent. As Aldrich listened to the screams, the power suddenly went out.

"It was a little terrifying, and we were wondering what have we got ourselves into, but it was also interesting, a very interesting way to begin your first day in your new country," she said.

After three months of training, she moved to Kaboua, a village of 5,000 in the country's central province. In Kaboua, Yoruba traditional religious beliefs include a secretive, male-only sect centered on a spirit known as the Oro. Once a year, during the 10-day Oro festival, a curfew is imposed. Since only men are allowed to see the spirit, women must stay indoors, with their windows and doors shut, while the spirit is about.

"Usually, during the 10 days, the Oro would come out at night, it was usually a night thing. But last year, there were too many sorcerers in our village, so they said the Oro needed to come out again and they needed to redo the whole ceremony. He came out a lot during the day last year," Aldrich said.

Because the Oro's purpose is to cleanse the village of evil for the New Year, the Oro comes out frequently during December.

During the night-time ceremonies, Aldrich has been told the men swing a cone-shaped piece of tin attached to a string.

"You can hear it at night, they whip around this thing to make this eerie howling sound," she said.

Despite the strange night-time ceremonies, Aldrich was impressed by the warmth and friendliness of the people in the village.

"I went there hoping that I could give a lot and I think I brought a lot more back than I ever gave," she said.

Aldrich, who majored in international relations in college, gave out information on diseases such as malaria, yellow fever and AIDS. She also taught hygiene to a grade school class, taught a life skills class for older girls and helped high school youths build an outdoor volleyball court.

"Volleyball is sort of the girl's sport in Benin, but there was no volleyball court in Kaboua itself," she said.

Her most satisfying work involved an AIDS project in which she trained and led two teams of village youths in their early 20s and community advisers. The teams provided AIDS education targeting young people who had little access to media information because they did not speak French, the country's official language. In a year, the two teams spoke to more than 3,500 people in their local language.

When she returned from Benin in October, Aldrich applied to spend a month in the Crisis Corps, a program for returning Peace Corps volunteers. After a few days training in Orlando, Fla., with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, she spent nearly a month in Little Rock, Ark., helping hurricane evacuees negotiate the morass of red tape surrounding disaster assistance.

In early November, 1,000 evacuees who had been bused to the Little Rock area after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans were still living in hotels.

In some situations, families were waiting for checks that had been sent to prior addresses at various shelters.

Aldrich often helped evacuees complete FEMA paperwork. Processing mistakes could create formidable delays. In some cases, evacuees had mistakenly hit a computer's "enter" button three times and generated three different applications. Other problems arose when home inspectors in New Orleans were unable to contact evacuees. After three unsuccessful attempts to contact evacuees by phone, the agency could mark an application "voluntarily withdrawn."

One case that sticks in Aldrich's mind was of a young man who had received plenty of FEMA informational materials but was too embarrassed to tell her he could not read.