Friends and Family,

Greetings from New Orleans. I’m down here for the week filming EFCA’s work in cajun country post-Katrina.

The people seem very weary, and for good reason. So many of them have been working 12-14 hour days for two months straight, coordinating disaster relief, cleaning debris, while at the same time dealing with the stress of losing everything, and feelings of guilt if they didn’t lose as much, but their neighbor lost more.

We just drove around downtown New Orleans today. It was really unbelievable. For as far as the eye could see, there were damaged houses that were completely deserted. We drove for probably a good hour or two through residential neighborhoods, and didn’t see more than a handful of people in their homes that whole time. The flood waters had risen at times high enough to drench their entire first floor, and many of the homes are just rotting and falling apart.

The damage I have seen thus far is much different than the damage I saw from the Tsunami. Whereas Banda Aceh, Indonesia was flattened so badly that you couldn’t even tell a city ever existed there, in New Orleans, all the old buildings are still present, but they’re deserted. I have been told that over a half a million New Orleans residents are living as refugees around the US right now.

About two weeks before heading to New Orleans, I hit a breaking point of sorts. I had witnessed so much human suffering this past year (tsunami, refugees in Sudan, after effects of the genocide in Rwanda, AIDS, etc.), and it finally got to me. I could hardly function, I was depressed, felt overwhelmed, guilty, wanted to flee these experiences, and felt disconnected relationally…just to name a few of the emotions.

Upon cueing some people in on the way I was feeling, I was told that many of the feelings I had were the results of Critical Incident Stress, or Post-Traumatic Stress…largely due to my time in Sudan. The brain simply reacts in a certain way to incidents of trauma that protects itself, and this results in many of the emotions described above. Everyone from soldiers to police officers to hurricane survivors to third world relief workers experience some or all of these symptoms after traumatic instances, and it would be abnormal not to experience them.

To make a long story short, I wound up taking some time to go meet with the pastor I grew up with to debrief through some of my experiences in Africa and Asia, and come to grips with them, so that my brain could return to a state of normalcy (my pastor is a police chaplain, and does these kinds of sessions with police officers after they witness murders or suicides all the time).

I found the debriefing time and the time taken to recoup emotionally and physically absolutely invaluable. Up to that point, I felt emotionally battered. A pressure had been constantly building from within my chest, and I could never release it fast enough to keep it down. But I really do feel like a different person now…with a newfound vigor I hadn’t felt for a long time.

I share all of this because I feel like so many of the people of New Orleans need that same time to debrief and recoup after this disaster. They say that the rate of divorce after a natural disaster increases something like 200 or 300 percent in the following year, and having experienced on a much lesser level some of the trauma that these people have gone through, I can completely understand how this would be the case. If the time is not taken to deal with the trauma and debrief, the mind simply shuts down and disconnects, and relationships and so many other things suffer as a result. I hope and pray that many people will take the time to debrief, but fear that many of them won’t…

Be in prayer for the people of the Gulf, Pakistan, the Indian Ocean and so many other disaster-hit areas around the world. Maybe I’m just more aware of natural disasters now because I know that every disaster could mean a potential trip to that region for me, but it just seems like every time I turn around, there’s a new crisis on the radar. And having gone through a small incident of trauma and the resulting Critical Incident Stress myself, I cannot even imagine the level of strain all of these people are collectively feeling in the wake of all of this.

-Dave

P.S. Please be in prayer for this trip also. I will be in New Orleans filming until Saturday. Pray I will lighten up and find the story. As is often the case, I’m just not feeling it yet at this early stage of the trip. Pray that I will truly connect with the plight of these people, and not just cynically compare it with the harsher plights of so many others I have seen in Africa and elsewhere. Pray that my heart would be in this, because right now, it’s not all there. Thanks.