Whilst on the topic of displaced people and lost identity…
It’s one of those moments that my small brain holds tight to. A Where were you when? moment… Moon Landing, 9-11 Attacks, Hurricane Katrina.
Pre-trauma, the mind tends to speed up – like when your entire wedding reception is a blur in retrospect. In true trauma, my mind tends to slow W-A-Y, W–A–Y, D — O — W — N… driving a car when it starts flipping and you have time to consider your family … your relationships … your place in the universe … very, slowly, thoughtfully before the full impact of the crash.
Hurricane Katrina was like that. I was a newlywed. I had a new job in Washington DC. We saw the storm coming on the Weather Channel. We saw the images on the victims on TV. We saw the train going off the rails, our brutally unAmerican response. It was the biggest U.S. crisis in my adult life.
“We have to go,” I said to my freshly minted husband.
“Not until we get paid to go,” said his sage mentor.
“We have the skills to help,” I said.
“Let’s see what we can do.”
And we did go. And we did help. The skills of disaster management were natural for us. This was the most meaningful job of my career.
In the aftermath of this American disaster, the children of Katrina were left to manage their own trauma. As humans, seeking the healing we need is our work to do. And there is much to do.
At last we will have a chance to see the perspective of these children in the new HBO documentary from filmmaker Edward Buckles Jr., who was 13 years old during Katrina. Buckles spent seven years documenting the stories of his peers who survived the storm as children and processing his own grief, displacement story, and loss.
If you don’t know where you came from, it’s hard to know where you are going.
One reply on “Katrina Babies”
My Way Down memory is of a seemingly detached president peering at the devastation from a far up window of Air Force 1.