Hurricane Katrina, Community Psychology, and Being Really Pissed Off

Today, in my community psychology class, we discussed our upcoming project. It's taking form slowly but surely. The class typically participates in a community psychology context at Lawndale Christian Health Center, an ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged clinic on the near west side of Chicago. But this year, our class is going to somehow, some way, reach out to Katrina evacuees in the Chicago area. Sure, it's hard to conceptualize, hard to know what's needed, and hard to do so when we're all just learning about community psych ourselves.

But part of our training is to figure out what types of experiences have evacuees experienced, so that we can better design interventions that will meet their needs. Evacuees have lost their homes, been traumatized, seen others die, been treated like animals,watched water trucks pass by when they were literally dying of thirst, feared for their lives in more than one context, so on and so forth.

So, in class today we listened to this broadcast from This American Life. About 4 minutes in, the stories of three people who experienced different aspects of Katrina tell their stories. The real stories. Not the hyped up media bullshit. Not the talking points and agendas of the "blame game" (yes, I said it).

So did you know that gang members procured guns, instituted their own security, and then looted a Rite Aid so that they could provide juice for babies, medications for the elderly, and then they even organized themselves by taking matching color ponchos so that they could easily be identified? They were the ones protecting women from being raped, people from being hurt, and babies from dying of dehydration.

While the National Guard protected the affluent neighborhood of Algiers...preventing people from leaving the Convention Center?

200 tourists at a paramedic convention pooled money to charter busses after being stuck at the Hotel Monte Leon (which I stayed at about 4 years ago) for days, and the government comandeered those busses, and left them with nowhere to go, no food, no water, and then told them that they were on their own for getting out of New Orleans. They were then promised that there were busses on the bridge, the Ponchatrain Expressway, two miles away. So they started walking, and other people started following, so they numbered 800 by the time they reached the bridge. And armed sheriffs began firing on them with no explanation when they got there...

Sad story after story...person after person...you should really listen and be moved. Weep for the injustice and the pain. That's all I know to do.