Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

The picture that caused a broken heart

Day 5 -- Tuesday, August 10, 2010

When I woke up Tuesday morning I made the mistake of reading email, mostly hoping to hear from my family.  Unfortunately, there were a few fairly petty work emails that really struck me the wrong way.  Between how ineffective I had been feeling the day before and these, I went quite quickly into a funk.  I went into the bathroom and stood under the shower and cried.

After breakfast, it was time to go out to the gazebo and get ready for the morning assembly.  This day, a little girl who I didn't remember at all from the day before decided to attach herself to me.  She liked having her picture taken in a variety of poses with a variety of people, and also enjoyed telling other people where they should stand and what they should do while I took their pictures.  When the assembly started, she carefully made sure I had a chair and sat down beside me with her chair (and leg) touching mine.

The kids sang their morning prayers and then sang the same welcome song they had sung the day before.  Three new volunteers had arrived the night before from a different project, and they needed welcoming, too!  I should mention that this welcome song has motions to it and involves standing up, sitting down, shaking hands and various other things. 

My little shadow for the day felt strongly that I needed to participate in this, but of course I didn't understand most of the words to the song.  This was not of concern to her.  She stood me up and sat me down, grabbed my hand, and, at the very end of the song when they sang "we're glad you're here" she kissed me on the cheek.  At this point, I started to cry.  I couldn't help it.  The whole scene just struck me as so touching, and I had gotten off to such a rotten start that morning.

Today Amelia and I were not given time to work with the kids in our group.  Instead, they were learning a particular way to braid string to make straps for sandals.  The counselors showed each of the volunteers how to do it and we each took turns practicing.  Once we had it, we were sent to teach it to the kids.

Those of you who know me know that handicrafts are not exactly my strong suit.  I could do the braiding . . . sort of.  Add to this the fact that while I had learned to do it with four strands, kids were coming over to learn who had been given six or eight strands, and I hadn't the slightest idea how to braid them.  Plus, of course, I didn't really speak the language.  I'm embarrassed to say I did a lot of demonstrating a step or two, badly, and then giving the string back to the kid and hoping that he or she figured out what to do.  Some of them did, most of them didn't.

After lunch I was extremely tired and my mood was lousy, so I went and took a nap.  I then went out to the porch and, almost immediately, Daniel and Christopher showed up.  They wanted to play cards and Doodle Jump on my iPod.  We frittered away the rest of the afternoon hanging out, drawing and playing.

I asked the boys to draw me pictures of their houses before the earthquake.  Then I tried to find out what had happened to their houses, but this was easier said than done.  As it turns out, three years of high school French included very few of the necessary vocabulary words to discuss earthquake damage.  However, pantomime holding my hands apart vertically and then slapping them together worked well to convey the concept of a house collapsing, and Daniel said his house had indeed collapsed. 

Christopher said his house had not collapsed, and also was not broken.  This seemed somewhat unlikely given that he was living in a tent on the property.  I asked him what had happened to his house.  He stood up and started shaking, first to the right, then to the left, then forward, then backwards, saying, "Il fait comme ça, et comme ça, et comme ça . . ." ("It goes like this, and like this, and like this . . .")  I'm still not exactly sure what happened to his house, but it was pretty funny!

The high point, such as it was, of the evening came from a man who also lives on the property named Jean.  He had been watching me and Daniel after Christopher went back to his family, and he was starting to make me a little nervous -- he clearly was watching pretty intently.  Then he said, "Je t'aime," ("I love you") and then something else I couldn't quite catch, and then he told me I was beautiful.  Then he said, in English, "I said I love you.  You did not say you love me."  Given the cultural and language barriers, I really couldn't tell if he was goofing around or actually trying to pick me up.

Better to be safe than sorry, I always say, so I went into the house and got my little photo album with pictures of my family.  He looked through it and asked how many children I had and commented on how good looking they were (and who was I to argue?).  Then he came to a picture of me with my husband, and his face fell.  He asked if I was married.  I said yes, for 18 years.  He asked if I had gotten married as an infant.  Then he again told me he loved me and I was beautiful, and again said something I didn't understand.

At this point Daniel started to laugh uncontrollably, and all kinds of ideas were racing through my head about what Jean, who loved me and thought I was beautiful, was trying to tell me.  I offered to go get Amelia to translate, but he was insistent that I not.  This only made me more suspicious.  Finally, when it was time for dinner, Amelia walked by on her way into the house.  I flagged her down and asked her to find out what Jean was trying to tell me.  They talked animatedly for a few minutes, and then she whispered to me, "I'll tell you later."  My curiosity was certainly piqued. 

After dinner, I pulled Amelia into our room and asked her again what Jean had said to me.  She said, "He likes the way you keep yourself and your body after two children."  No wonder Daniel was laughing!  Amelia said she had registered her disapproval with Jean, and he never tried to say anything more than hello to me for the rest of the week.

Tomorrow:  Assessing the Damage

Kids play with my iPod and journal in the dark.

Day 4 -- Monday, August 9, 2010

Today was a camp day.  We were told that the children arrive at 8:30 and the morning assembly starts at 9 and goes for 45 minutes or an hour.  And so it was that I was introduced to the concept of "Haitian time."  Some of the kids showed up as early as 8, but most came right around 9.  The assembly started more like 9:20.  It was over around 10:15.  This was exceedingly prompt as these things go, and closer to "on time" than anything the rest of the week.

Before the assembly, we met with all of the counselors.  We agreed that Amelia and I would work with the older kids while Hillary worked with the youngest ones.  Before we came, Hillary took the children's book Brave Bart, a story about a black cat who had a "bad, sad and scary thing" happen to him and who learns about trauma, and rewrote it to be about a turtle because there are superstitions about black cats in Haiti.  She redid the illustrations and a friend of hers translated it into Kreyol.  She was reading it with the kids and using it as a way to help them deal.  They could talk about Kiki (the turtle) instead of about themselves, and make suggestions for what might help Kiki.  She also made puppets with them and told them they could talk to their puppets anytime a bad, sad or scary thing happened to them.

The assembly began with a prayer.  The children closed their eyes and sang in French.  Amelia translated for me, but once she started I recognized what they were saying:

My God
My God
Give me the serenity
To accept the things that I cannot change
The courage to change
That which I can
And the wisdom
To know the difference

It was lovely, and so powerful given the situation that these kids are in.

After prayer, the head counselor told the kids that they had new visitors and introduced us.  The kids then sang a song of welcome to us, and then they sang some songs and danced in a circle.  I took lots of pictures, mostly of individual kids (who kept coming up to me saying, "Fais le photo!")

After the assembly, Amelia and I took the two oldest groups and combined them into one group of 50.  I explained, and she translated, that we had come to talk to them about the earthquake.  I've never been through something like that, I told them, but I've worked with lots of kids who have and I might be able to help.  I told them they didn't have to talk if they didn't want to, and that while they might be feeling OK they might be able to help someone else who isn't.

Then we handed out the workbooks.  These books take the kids through a deliberate process of thinking about who they are, who and what is important to them, what their lives were like before the earthquake, what happened during the earthquake, the good things that happened after the earthquake, the bad things that happened afterwards, the reactions (particularly nightmares) they may be having, their hopes for the future, their ideas about safety, and the things they can do to help themselves feel secure.  It also has a triage assessment in the back.

Just getting the kids situated, handing out the books and making sure everyone had something to write with was a major undertaking.  As we worked, more kids trickled in, but we were out of workbooks.  We had the kids turn to the first page and answer the first questions:  My name is ________ and Here is a portrait of myself.  That may not seem like a lot to ask, but those of you who have been teachers may relate to the notion that getting a big group of kids to do something that would be trivial for an individual child is a lot like herding cats or, perhaps, stuffing spaghetti into a cocktail straw.  The kids wanted to draw very detailed pictures of themselves, and that was taking a long time.

Finally, we looked at our watches and realized we'd probably better skip ahead if we were going to get to talk about anything about the earthquake at all.  We skipped to what I consider a very interesting section of the book -- a reading about the history of Haiti.  That might seem like an odd thing to put in a workbook like this, but actually it was very interesting to the kids and very relevant to the work we were doing.  The reading began with the slave revolt in 1804 and the pride of Haiti at being the first free black country in the Western Hemisphere.  It also talked about how the French demanded and received reparations and the US blockaded Haiti after independence, and said, "Haiti has never recovered from this unfair beginning."  It talked briefly about other natural disasters, corruption in the government and various coups d'etat, and pointed out that Haiti has gone through difficulties before.  For the kids, this was both interesting intellectually and gave them a sense of community, pride and dermination -- all good things following a traumatic event.

The next page asked the children to tell and/or draw where they were when the earthquake started and who they were with.  We circulated, looking at their pictures.  This was very frustrating for me, because ordinarily at this point I would take the opportunity to talk to some kids one-on-one about their drawings and do a little processing with them.  However, my French, and certainly my Kreyol, are not sufficient to do that, so the aim of splitting up and circulating was mutually exclusive with the aim of processing with kids.

Our alotted time was coming to an end and we had done about 6 pages of this 70+ page book.  Some of the kids really wanted to keep working, while others were tired of it.  I asked the kids how many of them had told their story about the earthquake to someone before, and most raised their hands.  I asked how many had never told it to anyone, and was surprised by the large minority for whom that was true.  In seven months, they had never told anyone where they were and what happened to them during the earthquake.

Many of us have had the experience of being in a stressful or emergent situation and going into a sort of "autopilot" where our training just takes over.  At this point in the activity, that's what happened to me.  We had 50 kids writing about emotional stuff and no way to process it with them effectively.  My training kicked in, and I remembered a mantra I once heard from Jeff Mitchell:  "When all else fails, push information."  While some of the kids continued to work, I shared some good stress management and stress reaction education with them.  My key points were:

• This is your story.  It will always be yours, and no one can take it away from you.  You may feel like it's upsetting and you wish you didn't have it, but it is very important and it is very important to tell it to other people because it will help it not be so upsetting.
  
• You are among the only people in the world who know what happened in Leogane that day.  That makes you very important, too.
• Nightmares (which a lot of kids said they had) are your brain's way of trying to make sense of what happened and put it away.  They're no fun, but they're normal.
• Being grumpy and moody is a typical reaction to stress.  (None of them admitted to being grumpy themselves, but they identified with their caregivers being grumpy.)
• You can help yourself by doing things that you like to do, being with people who care about you, getting exercise and other ways of taking good care of yourself.

Despite this decent information push, I felt pretty ineffective by lunchtime.  Hillary and Amelia were raving about how well things went, but I felt like this had been a truly half-assed job of even getting started with the kids.

In the afternoon, I sat down to write in my journal and Daniel came by with the baby.  He simply walked up and plopped the baby into my arms -- he knew I liked holding him, and this was the most direct way to accomplish that.  After a while he took the baby back down to the tents and then returned, soon followed by a 14-year-old girl named Iris.  They sat on either side of me, and I drew some basic pictures and we exchanged English and Kreyol vocabulary words.  They helped me draw a simple family tree for each of them so I could understand how many parents they each had, their brothers and sisters and their ages.  We covered terms for family members, weather, parts of a house, clothes and parts of the body.  Then we attempted sports. 

The football/soccer/American football distinctions were complicated enough, but then I tried to explain hockey.  Keep in mind that these kids do not have and possibly have never watched television, and they live in a climate where "cold" is 50 degrees.  They had a concept of ice, and so I thought we were getting somewhere.  However, when they thought of ice they thought of ice cubes.  When I told them that the players in hockey stand on ice, they looked at me like I had three heads.

Iris taught me to play a card game they called "casino," which bore no resemblance to the game of the same name I knew.  She taught it to me with no words at all, which was cool in and of itself.  After a while, more kids came.  The generator wasn't working because someone had accidentally put the wrong fuel in and damaged it, so as the evening came the house got darker and darker.  By 8 o'clock, there were two groups of kids sitting in the main room of the guest house.  The first were passing my journal back and forth and drawing pictures while other kids held my flashlight so they could see.  The second were sharing my iPod, playing Doodle Jump, which is apparently addictive in any culture.

In my journal, I wrote:

I don't know how much I'm helping from a CISM standpoint here, but I'm glad I'm spending quality time with some of the kids.  It's going to be hard to leave, I can tell already.  At the same time, I really want to go home.  Internet is out so I haven't talked to [my husband and son] today.  I miss them terribly.  Five more days.

Tomorrow:  A Whole Lot of Nothing

If you're not familiar with the history of Haiti, it's worth a few minutes of your time to read the Wikipedia article on this topic.  It puts a lot of what is happening there now in very important context. You can access it here.

Over the next several days, I will be sharing my thoughts and experiences from my week in Léogâne, Haiti.  Léogâne was essentially the epicenter of January's earthquake, and 30,000 people, more than 15% of the population, were killed.  I went to Léogâne to provide crisis intervention and assistance to children attending a summer camp there.

The first several days of this "serial blog" are my travelog.  I'm devoting a day in this space to each day of the trip.  I'll then wrap things up with a day or two of reflections on the experience, lessons learned, etc.  Because I'm writing about real people with real traumas , I'm changing everyone's name to protect their privacy.  I hope you find this interesting and informative.  I'll be back to my usual combing of the news for various awful things in about 10 days.

Day 1 -- Friday, August 6, 2010

My travels to Haiti began when I caught a plane from Detroit to Fort Lauderdale.  My flight to Port-Au-Prince on Saturday was to be at 7:30 AM, so I flew to Florida the night before and took the shuttle to the hotel.  Amelia, the Haitian-American woman going on the deployment as a translator, had called Thursday night to ask me to leave some space in my luggage for some materials which a friend of hers would be delivering to the hotel Friday evening.

Something you should understand -- my husband does all the packing in our house, whether or not he is going on the trip in question.  In this instance, he had managed to pack the body of my suitcase with my son's outgrown clothes to bring to the kids in Haiti, and my  clothes for the trip were packed entirely into the pockets of the lid.  He made sure I had about 11 pounds of allowable luggage weight to play with for the materials.  My backpack carried the things I would need if my suitcase never made it to Léogâne:  toiletries, medications (including some antibiotics, just in case), a change of clothes, my journal, mosquito repellent, mosquito net, flashlight, flip flops, passport, wallet, cards and iPod.

When Amelia's friend arrived at the hotel, I immediately saw we had a problem.  The materials, which had been sent by the coordinator for this deployment, were, unbeknownst to both Amelia and me, 50 fairly lengthy workbooks for children, they weighed a lot more than 11 pounds, and they took up a lot more space than I had in my luggage.  This being a trip on Spirit Airlines (slogan:  "We Can Get Blood from a Rock, and We'll Charge You For It!"), all checked and carry-on luggage has a charge, you are limited to one of each, and you cannot go over 50 pounds even if you are willing to pay for it.

I stuck out my arm to shake Amelia's friend's hand, just at the same moment he leaned in to kiss me on the cheek.  "Oh, I forgot," he said, "You're not Haitian."  I laughed and said, "What, don't I look Haitian to you?"  We shook hands and then kissed, and I was struck with the sudden realization that I needed to start remembering that I was not on my turf.  The last thing I needed to do was come in to Haiti expecting to do everything my way, the American way.  One cultural faux pas down, a zillion to go.

I wrestled half the books into my suitcase and half into my backpack, which now weighed rougly five thousand pounds, give or take.  My back was going to hurt.  A quick shower and it was time for bed.  Tomorrow would be a long day.

Tomorrow:  My first glimpse of an absolutely devastated country.


Photo copyright istockphoto/yinyang

Last week, after a 9th grader shot another in the back of the head in Madison, Alabama, the mayor of Madison urged people to pray for the victim and the students at the school.  Local churches sent counselors.  The city and the school system worked with local clergy as well as crisis responders to provide support for those affected. 

To some extent, there is a great divide in this country with regards to the role of churches and clergy in situations like this one.  In the South, in poorer communities, and in heavily African-American communities you are much more likely to see churches stepping up to offer support.  In the North, particularly in affluent northern White communities, this is less common.  Where you fall in these groupings probably has a lot to do with how you feel about this practice. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I am White and have only worked in northern schools, although of varying degrees of poverty and varying racial demographics. So, do I think this is a good idea?  Like most things, it depends.  But I certainly think it can be if it's done well. 

The potential problem, of course, comes in trying to do an effective job of meeting people's spiritual needs in a public school setting.  I say it's a potential problem because I have seen it done both really well and really poorly.  I think we can all imagine what doing it poorly might look like.  Students come for counseling and are greeted by someone who tells them the deceased is going to hell, or to heaven, or that they should adopt that person's faith to find comfort.  Not only is this bad from a constitutional standpoint, it's not good crisis response.  This is not a good time to proselytize, and offering simple platitudes often turns out to be much less comforting than people think.

When this sort of work is done well, it is done by lay or clergy-people who have been specially trained both as chaplains and as crisis responders.  They understand the psychological process that people are going through as well as the spiritual need.  A good chaplain will follow the lead of the person they are talking to in exploring the role of faith in their thinking.  They will answer questions about God with questions about what the person themself believes.  They will offer prayer only when asked, and yes, they will be asked.  It is this training that allows chaplains of one denomination to serve in the military, hospitals or prisons and assist people with a wide array of beliefs.  They are not faith dictators, they are faith facilitators.
Every community and every culture in the world has particular expectations for the role of religion and the clergy in their lives.  If, as seems likely, that role is very prominent in Madison, Alabama, it would be wrong not to involve the religious community in supporting the children.  Furthermore, people who have experienced trauma often find themselves with strong spiritual needs, either because they want comfort or because they have serious spiritual or theological questions.  A good chaplain can help with that.  As with anything in a crisis, however, it's important that everyone knows exactly what their job is and how to do it, and sticks to that.