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Will we rebuild their broken spirits?
By Marie Cocco, Newsday
September 13, 2005
Children make for the best pictures.
The best pictures pull at our hearts and open our eyes. The pictures of Katrina's children call to us: diaper-clad toddlers wading through water higher than their little bottoms. The boy who collapsed in tears and then in vomit, as his dog, Snowball, was pried away because the pet couldn't be admitted to a shelter. The scared yet somehow hopeful faces of the schoolchildren who showed up for class in Houston, which has opened its heart and its classrooms to kids whose adress is now the Astrodome. About 300,000 children have been displaced by Katrina, according to the relief group Save the Children, and are living in shelters, hotels or some other makeshift place they now call home.
Another 500,000 have lost part of their homes, their relatives, their pets or the routine of being a kid - school, sports, friends, the luxury of eating a favorite cereal. Some have seen parents drown and relatives carried off by the fetid water; others have become separated from family.
"What I'm seeing on the Gulf Coast is not too different from what I saw in Banda Aceh and Aceh and Sri Lanka," Charles MacCormack, president of Save the Children, said in an interview.
MacCormack has been saving the children of disaster since the Biafra hunger crisis more than three decades ago. He says there is little difference between the stricken children of Darfur or the Congo or Bosnia - or Biloxi. When disaster hits, "children react more on their emotions and have fewer intellectual defenses," he says.
So the children of Katrina now have needs that have nothing to do with rebuilding highways and restocking grocery shelves or retooling government bureaucracies that failed them. We must rebuild their spirits.
It is done, MacCormack says, by giving them structured and safe places to play, after-school programs where they are with other kids their age and day care where they know they will be secure while their parents start work anew. They need counseling and support. They need a routine to start their recovery. They need, in fact, what many poor children - and so many of Katrina's displaced are poor - needed long before the hurricane struck.
"We at Save the Children are sounding that trumpet day in and day out, before Katrina and after," MacCormack says. "There's no doubt that good child-care programs, especially for poor kids, are disastrously underfunded - equally ignored by Republicans and Democrats at both the presidential and state levels."
Save the Children already runs after-school programs for rural poor in a dozen states, including some affected by the hurricane. When he met with President George W. Bush last week, MacCormack said he stressed the need to provide not just emergency relief but "ongoing support for hundreds of thousands of traumatized kids." He said the president replied: "We gotta make sure this happens."
Will we?
No one in power talks about day care anymore, or after-school programs, or otherwise tending to the social needs of kids we know need help. The last memorable debate on the topic was a brouhaha over midnight basketball. Congressional Republicans ridiculed the Clinton administration idea that perhaps if kids were on a well-lighted court instead of a dim street corner, they - and the country - might be better off.
Yet, it is the experience of Save the Children that structured, supervised activities help children recover from trauma. It has worked after an earthquake in Turkey, a tsunami in Indonesia, amid political violence in the West Bank and Gaza, during civil conflict in Nepal. Why wouldn't it work here?
The safety net for America's children already was threadbare before the hurricane. Nearly one in five of our kids live in poverty, a dismally consistent statistic. Many of the parents of children whose jobs were swept away by the hurricane worked for low wages at casinos or hotels.
Yet, before Katrina struck, Congress was poised to enact budget cuts in Medicaid, the only health insurance many of these kids have had. The ax was set to fall on food stamps, too.
We will see, soon enough, if priorities are reshuffled out of guilt or the glare of public attention. Or we will see if the pictures of children that so move us now become darker portraits of national shame.
Donate to the Gulf Coast Hurricanes Recovery Fund for Children
