Kyle Smart - Katrina disaster support - the third day
Dear Friends and Family,I am very encouraged by all of your responses and what I am hearing from Deanne. I hope you do go with the church or the Red Cross or whatever.
We are back in Houston in time to get some rest. I am back to work tomorrow night. It has been a whirlwind, but we all feel like it was well worth it. We hit two sites today and saw another seventy people, unfortunately we were never able to get to the "Water Front" where the five thousand were. Sadly, today we came across two evacuee sites that had not yet received any health care, that is 6-7 days. We were overwhelmed by the need and by the people. These people were broken, and there were many emotional outbursts. I took care of one lady and her eight children, whom poked and prodded Jared & I, while I wrote out all of their prescriptions. Jared worked with one patient that couldn't talk because of her uncontrollable sobs. James and his sister, Ladeta, were able to work with her allowing Jared to keep seeing patients.
The five hour drive back to Houston gave us time to debrief. We made some important realizations. One, the culture of the effected region, especially LA, has deep and large family bonds. Where we might define immediate family as mom, dad, siblings and maybe grandparents, they define immediate family as the above plus aunts, uncles, cousin, etc, etc. So now you have a family group of 20 - 40 people living in and around their great-grandwhatever's home, that are now separated because of the chaos. Not only are these people traumatized, in emotional shock and have lost everything, but now are left without a primary coping mechanism: family. Until this concept is identified and begun to be rectified, the emotional recovery will be hindered. Secondly, we have visited approximately 10 evacuee sites, and the ones that have addressed all of the evacuee's needs were far more positive and better off than those that did not. In other words, its great to house and feed people, but its better to do that and give some basic medical and emotional support. The medical term is biopsychosocialspiritual approach (bio: medical, psycho: mental/emotional, social: family/finance, spiritual: beliefs/values). At one site the volunteers just didn't know how to do this, at other sites it was against protocol. Any help is appreciated, but there were definitely different levels of support out there.
We are staying at Jared's uncles house tonight, the hospitality is unending. Apparently, he lives in Houston, which is 50 miles away from the Houston airport, Houston is BIG.
Sincerely,
Kyle Smart
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