Remembering

I was thinking about it (it's hard not to, given the news focus) Hurricane Katrina this morning, and I also see Dave has a post up about it. And Rob is linking to the posts he wrote five years ago, as he rode it out. (I remember reading those back then and praying for him and his loved ones, that they'd be safe and OK.)

This is a tough time of year. It's the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and then a couple weeks later, the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. I find I feel similarly about them, in some regards: my main feeling at the time of the event was a sort of astonished helplessness....I don't mean "helpless" in the sense that I was ever in any danger (I am at least 1200 miles from NYC, and I am far enough inland that the worst I ever see of hurricanes is heavy rain). What I mean, is I felt like, "There are these terrible things happening...and there is nothing concrete I can do." I find I have turned out to be a "fixer." I want to step in and DO something when stuff is bad. I suppose that's a very natural impulse. And when you can't...when going to the site of the problem would make things worse (I'd have had to be housed, fed, and protected, and I had no training like the firefighters or EMTs who went down there did).

I guess in a way, the initial "hit" of Katrina wasn't as bad, in my mind...it was what happened after that was so horrifying and hard to hear about. The idea of humans being inhuman to other humans. (Though a lot of the stuff that was reported for the Superdome - the real Lord of the Flies sounding stuff - turned out to be overblown). The people who were lying out on the street, unable to go any further. The people who had to cut through their roofs, and climb up on the rooftop, because of the flooding.

I know, on some level, this is one of those "it's no one's fault because no one can control the weather" things. Maybe the levees could have been built better. Maybe the evacuations could have been started earlier. I don't know, I wasn't there, and, thank God, I wasn't someone who had to make decisions in the thing.

I remember seeing a lot of the stuff on the news - the people being herded onto buses, with the hope of getting them out of there, somewhere, somewhere safe where there were services that could help them. The families that got separated. The kids crying. The people walking on the deserted highways, accosting the news crews, pointing out that they had no food and no water and couldn't keep going much longer.

It was the kind of scenario that sometimes plays out in my nightmares.

And then the blamestorming began. I remember thinking at the time that it was unseemly to point fingers while people were still in shelters, and there were still people unaccounted for.

And today, I think it's unseemly, the level to which some of the news outlets are replaying some of the saddest of the footage - where they stuck a camera in an old woman's face and asked her about her house that had blown down. Or footage of a disabled person lying on a sort of pallet on the street, being tended by her children, unable to move any further. Or the people screaming at the camera that they had no water, no formula for their infants, no food....I know it happened, I suppose it's part of the history, but somehow, to me, some of the stations and programs showing it - it almost borders on a form of pornography at this point, showing human misery in that way.

I have a friend who often points out that in disasters, God is not those situations - God is in the people who come to help. The Baptist Men groups from a number of states, who quietly loaded up trailers with chainsaws and tools to try to clear roads. The Salvation Army people who went in. The companies who donated bottled water and other necessities. The people who gave money to try to help out. The EMTs - we even sent a few from my community - who went down there to just try to help if they could.

(I think that's what should be focused on - the people who did what they could, who tried to make things better.)

I will say that the event sort of crystallized something that I knew in my mind already - that you have to do what you can, if you can, to help yourself. Even the best government in the world can't always move fast enough. Even disaster-relief organizations can't always get in to you. It was after Katrina that I made absolutely sure to have, in addition to the canned food I always kept on hand, enough bottled water to keep me going for at least a few days (Actually, I need to restock that sometime soon). And a "secret stash" of money in small bills in case the banks have to close for a while. And several flashlights, both battery powered and crank-powered. A battery-powered radio (And I keep thinking of buying one of those ones that has a solar panel and a crank on it...just in case you can't get batteries). And I keep my car gassed up, I never let it drop below 1/2 a tank.

I don't know what kind of disasters we could suffer...probably the most likely right here would be a tornado or an ice storm (We've had a few ice storms in past years). With an ice storm, for me, heat would be the greatest issue, as my gas furnace has an electrical igniter, and AFAIK, it can't be defeated and hand-lit like furnaces of old. (I might be able to manage, shutting myself up in my bathroom, with enough candles burning, to stay warm. Or I keep looking at the oil lamps in the Lehman's catalog I get, and thinking that maybe the "Jupiter" model (which they say can actually be used as a supplemental heat source in greenhouses) and a case of the lamp oil might be a wise investment).

Of course, if I had fair warning, my first thought would be to bug out - to go somewhere unlikely to be affected by the storm, or at least somewhere (like a colleague's farmhouse) where there's a fireplace and enough wood. (I THINK my colleague and her husband would take me in in that situation. I'm pretty sure they would...especially if I brought extra canned goods and such).

But anyway. I just decided that "sometimes even the best responders can't get to you that fast in a real emergency" and tried to make a plan to survive myself. (Oh, I know - there are some situations that even a huge stock of canned goods and lots of candles won't let me survive, but those are relatively rare.)

Another thought: people are still rebuilding. There are still places that are suffering, even five years later.


Another story: A pastor I knew took a mission trip to Mississippi about 8 months after Katrina. He and his group wound up working with a mother of two kids. She was divorced mom of 2, but had a decent career, and would have been considered middle-class, socioeconomically. She had a lot of problems getting her house fixed up - it wasn't totally a loss, and because of her status she was less eligible for help than some.

She had had great difficulty hiring workers - workmen were in short supply (the professionals, the pastor said, had mostly been hired to repair the casinos. I don't know if that's true or not but it was his assertion). She had hired a couple people who took the money and ran, and others who did substandard work. She could afford the supplies with her insurance money, but could not get help to rebuild. So this mission group started helping her.

And one man in the group was kind of...unhappy? about it. "We came down here to help The Poor," he said. "This woman is the same group as I am. She can help herself."

Except, at that point, she couldn't. And I have to admit, that story, that man's attitude, makes me a little angry. The woman seemed to me to be at the end of her rope - as much as people to work, she needed convincing that people weren't just all jerks who'd take her for what they could get. And to have someone grumbling that because she wasn't The Poor, she didn't deserve help...well.

Later, he softened his attitude when another group member talked to him, talked about how grateful everyone seemed for the help...and said something along the lines of, "If you were in this woman's position, wouldn't you long for someone to help you?" (Also, most of the really poor people, the type I presume he thought he was there to help - they had either left town or had been eligible for FEMA trailers, which, while they pretty much sucked to live in, were at least an intact housing, whereas this woman DIDN'T have intact housing. And, as the pastor pointed out: she could afford to buy supplies and just needed someone to do the work, whereas the truly poor, had no money at that time to buy supplies...meaning there was little the mission group COULD do for them, seeing as they had few funds themselves. Some of the members did go and provide childcare while the parents were out trying to navigate the red tape, and they did little things like planting flowers and cutting brush.)

I do think sometimes people - particularly Christians of a certain stripe - do get all hung up in Helping The Poor and forget that sometimes other people need help. And that help takes different forms - really and truly, sometimes the "help" a person needs is more encouragement, more a sense that they're not forgotten and not left totally on their own, as much as they need the actual, material help.

I hope we never see another storm like Katrina. (We probably will, but perhaps somewhere else). I hope in future disasters that human suffering is kept to a minimum and real, tangible help is forthcoming - something to show people that they're loved, that they're seen as fellow humans, that they have value.