[NYTr] Children of Katrina

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by rick kissell

LA Times - Aug 29, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-tisserand29aug29,0,3590872.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail


Children of Katrina

Gutted houses and destroyed neighborhoods are 'the new normal' 
for many New Orleans youth.

By Michael Tisserand

On the last day of "Dr. Seuss week" at our New Orleans arts camp, my 
6-year-old son proudly brought me his new cardboard house. He'd built
it from shoe boxes and paper-towel rolls, topping his
red-and-white-striped roof with a fantastic stovepipe chimney. A few
days later, I took another look at his creation and noticed something
else: He'd also taken a blue marker and drawn a wave around the walls
and then carefully curved the line over the door. "That's Katrina," he
explained to me. "I remember that it came in through the front."

Not long after that, we met up with old friends who had stayed in the 
city during the flood. They'd spent a fearful week trapped inside a 
hospital, surrounded by the rank water. Surrounded by chaos, their 
youngest son, now 9 and a lively boy with a soft laugh, frequently 
wondered aloud if he was going to die. His mother told me how he
watches weather reports every night, searching for the next hurricane.
He has panic attacks during storms.

It's been two years since Katrina. Two years since my family evacuated, 
driving off for a weekend and never really coming back. Everyone in New 
Orleans experienced different consequences from Katrina -- for us, the 
most immediate result was that my wife, a pediatrician, lost her job.
We made a painful decision: We sold our house, which didn't flood, and 
moved with our two children to Illinois.

Yet we continue to return for visits, including this summer, when our 
kids attended their old camp at the downtown Contemporary Arts Center. 
We return because our close friends live there. We also return because
I believe that New Orleans must be part of my children's future as well
as their past. New Orleans is a teachable moment. What can happen when
the safety and well-being of 500,000 people are neglected? How do
ordinary people tap into their reserves to rebuild communities?

The kids and I have versions of these conversations during each
950-mile drive south, as we play our New Orleans music and start to
feel hunger pangs for our favorite New Orleans food. They like the
Bruce Springsteen song that goes, "There's bodies floatin' on Canal and
the levee's gone to hell," and they know what he's singing about. It's
not the family trip I would have anticipated two years ago. I hope that
my son and daughter will be fine, and, judging from my son's Seussian
house, I have reason to believe that they will continue to be engaged
-- creatively, intellectually, spiritually -- with their hometown.

Yet I also must admit that I don't know the long-term effects of these 
last 24 months of witnessing tragedies and experiencing upheaval. I 
can't help but wonder: Does she not want to be alone because the events 
of the last two years have made her more uncertain? Is he quiet because 
he's thinking about the sad things he saw and heard? Should I be 
sheltering them from all this instead of driving them into the heart of
it?

Unlike so many New Orleanians, we had options. We lived in Uptown New 
Orleans, on relatively high ground. We did not have to spend months 
gutting our house and fighting our insurance company. Nor did we mourn 
family members who drowned.

Instead, we are more acquainted with Katrina's collateral damage. We 
have lost friends to suicide. We've seen other friends' marriages 
crumble. We listen to stories about depression and sudden tempers. We 
watch as our friends make the best of it in a city that is still 
unprotected from the next bad storm.

In New Orleans, the term for all this is "the new normal." For many 
children growing up there, it is now normal to live in a city still 
decimated. "We're living in Lakeview right now, all the houses have Xs 
on them," said Paulette Carter. "My children are 2 and 3; they don't 
know anything different. To them it's normal to have houses all around 
you that are unoccupied and gutted."

Carter is a social worker and president of the Children's Bureau of New 
Orleans, which has been providing crisis counseling for kids in New 
Orleans, where post-traumatic stress disorder is also part of the new 
normal.

Research on kids with PTSD shows that their stress doesn't only result 
from a specific traumatic event such as a hurricane, it rides on the 
aftershocks. Each unsettling change in a child's life triggers new 
symptoms. For many kids in New Orleans, nothing -- not their schools, 
their extended family network, their parents, their friends, their home 
-- is the same as it was. Furthermore, hundreds of children are still 
living in FEMA encampments with no playgrounds, fenced in and patrolled 
by armed security guards. For these kids, Katrina is just beginning.

Despite valiant efforts by Carter and others, there is precious little 
long-term counseling available for children in the city. Two years
after the flood, Carter is still worried. National interest is waning. 
Charitable donations are drying up. The new normal might become an even 
sadder place.

Those of us who got out in time watched our city drown. We saw our 
neighbors on rooftops and outside the Convention Center. Now we must go 
back, again and again. We can't take our eyes off it. To do so would be 
to forget, and that would be a disaster.

[Michael Tisserand is the author of "Sugarcane Academy: How a New 
Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to 
Remember."]