The clouds were still gray as I entered the FEMA tent and
took my place behind the table marked, “counselor”. I had received a call about an hour earlier
that several tornadoes had touched down in a local community and there was need
of crisis counseling. I made the forty
five minute drive to what looked like the edge of the world. It was what could only be described as utter
devastation. Outside of spending a week
in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, this was one of the worst sights I had
ever witnessed.
With Katrina it was everywhere. So after a while you lost your sense of
perspective. Every neighborhood saw the
devastation, every family was directly touched.
The community pulled together and in the midst of the devastation you
saw neighbors helping neighbors, friends weeping with friends, community
organizations pulling together with such speed and efficiency it was almost
uncanny. Here though, after the
tornadoes had passed only hours before was chaos.
Crisis counseling is so much different than the counseling
done in the office. Much of the goal is
helping provide a very pragmatic stability.
You are dealing with people in shock, and on some occasions you find yourself
dealing with your own shock in the midst of it.
This day however nothing was going as planned, the FEMA tent
was full. There were people just wanting
to get out of the rain, and others who had just lost everything to the fierce
winds. I heard crying, yelling, there
were emergency responders coming in and out.
It felt like we were all experiencing the disaster together and no one
had a clear picture of what helping or responding really looked like.
I found my role becoming that of an advocate for those who
seemed lost in the shuffle. I began to
walk up to individuals and ask what they needed. The needs were all the basic kind that you
would need after any disaster; food, water, shelter, and some semblance of
safety. We started unpacking the food
boxes as they came, handing them out to countless faces. Inside the tent it became eerily quiet as for
the first time since the storms the community was engaged in some normal
activity.
I sat with so many people that afternoon and heard some of
the bravest stories of survival: Fathers
risking their lives for their children, families huddling together in prayer
and utter desperation hoping that they would make it through the dark night.
I left feeling a sense of urgency. I had witnessed what truly happens when
things fall apart. I had seen a
community whose buildings and homes had been destroyed, but their commitment to
one another strengthened. I don’t know
what the town had been like before, or what drama had been on the front burner
the day before, but it was gone now.
It made me think of the families and individual’s that I
work with. In a very real way they were
all going through their own private tornadoes.
Many had not experienced the compassion of their own community. For some
it was because there was no “exterior damage”, nothing that you could assess
with the naked eye. For others it was
because they were hiding in the rubble of broken relationships. I began to realize that much of my experience
in counseling wasn’t that different than the work of crisis counseling. I learned that the underlying factor wasn’t
what methodology was the most effective or what intervention gets to the point
most quickly. It was, rather,
compassion. I had gone to help the
broken and found that they had helped me.
That instead of heading to disaster I was heading from disaster into a functioning
community.
My guiding rules in my practice of counseling have been very
simple since then, counsel in compassion and become a student to everyone.
