On Catastrophes.

From my personal journal, edited slightly for anonymity.

This is actually my second time in the town where I'm currently rotating.  I guess it will always hold a little place in my heart because even if I successfully go on to do disaster work as my career, this town was the first place where I grabbed my work gloves and dug in to help other people whose lives had just been wrecked.  I showed up with a group a few days after the disaster to do general cleanup and hand out supplies.  I know now that I really should have found out where the medical tents run by the hospitals were and gone there to help, but I was uncertain enough of my skills that I didn't have the courage.  They could have used me.

Someone recently told me the area had been "totally cleaned up," so I was deeply surprised to see how destroyed it still looks.  There are a lot of new little houses, but nothing like the density of homes that was there before.  All the dead trees are still there.  There are still blue tarps around, for goodness' sake.  The two things that moved me most were seeing all the power/ telephone poles, which were all downed the last time I was here, and seeing how the foundation for one of the destroyed hospitals has been removed.  When I was here, everything was a flat, even layer of shredded insulation and fragments of levelled houses...  It was nightmarish.

Remembering back to how awful that whole scene was, for a moment today I couldn't help but wonder why I even want to go into disaster relief.  But part of the answer settled into me as I looked out over the scarred hillside this morning.  This, this brutality and overwhelming power, is how the world truly is.  And the way we deal with these crises - how we crumble, how we push back - is how we truly are.