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  • Not Business as Usual
  • Howard Straker MPH, PA-C (bio) and Sheron Finister PhD (bio)

The disaster precipitated by Hurricane Katrina is one of the largest and longest lasting in U.S. history. What began as a storm of wind and water hit the Gulf Coast the morning of August 23, 2005, and continues today. This storm has re-educated many who responded. Here, we offer some of our experiences and lessons learned through working with people directly affected by this disaster.

We are both members of ACU, and felt an obligation to work with the residents who lived through the disaster. Here, we describe our own experiences after Katrina.

Introduction from Howard Straker, MPH, PA-C

I am a physician assistant and a university faculty member. I worked with the survivors in two capacities. After looking to work with response efforts of local residents, I volunteered for a week, caring for patients in a New Orleans free clinic in November 2005. The Common Ground Collective, a community-initiated volunteer organization, created the clinic. I discovered them via the Internet and through a word-of-mouth network of community activists. I returned in March 2006, after helping to organize an alternate spring break for college and graduate students to work with residents in rebuilding their homes, again through the Common Ground Collective.

Introduction from Sheron Finister, PhD

I am a licensed professional counselor, and a pastor who lives and works in rural Louisiana. I am a survivor of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and have been working with resident survivors since the storm. Days after Katrina struck, thousands of New Orleans residents were temporarily relocated near my town and I responded to counsel individuals and groups of survivors in coping with the disaster. I also worked to help authorities understand the needs of survivors. Since the storm I have continued counseling residents of my town.

Most of the survivors with whom we worked were from underserved communities. We see our choosing to work with them as an extension of the reason that we are [End Page 241] members of ACU. We hoped that our previous experience of working in these and similar communities would enhance the effectiveness of our work.

A year after the storm, the two of us met and began sharing our experiences of working with the storm's survivors. As a means of taking stock of our experiences, we wrote individual reflection pieces, which are the basis of the lessons learned that we present here. It is not that we hadn't learned these things before, but rather that the situation shed a much clearer light on these lessons. The quotations that are interspersed in what follows are taken from those written reflections.

One of the first lessons we learned is that historical legacies of inadequate and unequal care for the medically underserved of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, deeply rooted before the storm, remained in place after the storm, only deeper. Additionally, people's negative experiences with health systems, especially legacies of distrust, were amplified during the disaster.

It really helped me to facilitate healthy communication when they learned that even though I was not "home grown," that my family had made Louisiana our home when we relocated to help after Hurricane Andrew. The elders then perceived me as a daughter they could trust. The younger adults realized that I was not a "spy" from a federal agency to cause them further distress.

—SF

Another lesson is that the intensity of the destruction altered survivors' lives and self-concepts, as is illustrated in the following journal entry:

One man informed me that if one more mental health professional asked him what his future plan was he was going to physically assault him. He added that his future plan was to figure out who he was now because he was not the same person he used to be.

SF

We also re-learned that understanding the strength and culture of the survivors is crucial to being able to truly help. This understanding helps to stabilize people in times of chaos, and to provide a starting place for rebuilding. It is important to recognize ahead of time that...

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