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Family & Youth Forum |
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May What's Inside Grief: A Normal Response to Loss The Leadership Center for Youth--Sulphur Open House
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Reconstruction or Restoration by David Duplechian, Associate Executive Director “We have before us perhaps the most difficult and discouraging of all periods. No longer is there the excitement of catastrophe, the stimulation of heroism and fine sacrifice. Reconstruction is always the most trying period of all disasters.” So spoke Herbert Hoover after the 1927 Mississippi River flood, considered at the time to be the worst natural disaster in United States history. Seven months after Hurricane Rita, in the midst of our own recovery, we in Southwest Louisiana are finding some truth to his words. We are tired, frustrated, and angry, to say the least. Perhaps it is our very choice of words, however, that is subconsciously, at least, helping to define our frustration. Webster’s defines reconstruction as “the act of rebuilding.” In today’s language of disaster, reconstruction has been replaced with recovery, which Webster’s defines as “a regaining of balance, control, composure, etc”, and this is indeed what many of us are trying to do. Rita was something we had no control over, and many of us are simply looking to regain some control of our lives and situations. More than one person has been overheard stating that they just want things “to return to normal.” Unfortunately, normal is several years away, and even then, the definition of normal may never be the same. Restoration, however, is defined by MSN Encarta as “the restoring of something … to an earlier and usually better condition”. Herein lies our hope in Southwest Louisiana, and herein lies our inspiration to continue down the path of restoration, as opposed to simply rebuilding and recovering. In a recent visit to Lake Charles, Raymond Jetson, the new head of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corp, stated that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita “had lifted a blanket to expose a culture of dependency.” The truth is that many families were living on the margins of society, battling daily the storms of life, even before the wind and water of Katrina and Rita pushed them further out of the mainstream. Recovery to these families offers no hope, just a return to the fringes of life. Restoration, on the other hand, offers them a chance to be better than they were before. The people of the Mississippi River Valley did reconstruct and recover after the 1927 Mississippi River flood, but history seems to show us that for many, restoration was not something they experienced. We can learn from history, and from the words of Herbert Hoover. We can view Rita as a curse or an opportunity. We can simply return to normal, whatever that represents, or we can restore our lives and communities, making them better than they were before. It is the belief of Family & Youth that all persons possess the abilities to solve their own problems, when professional help is available. Family and Youth is proud to be in a position, through the support of this community in the years before the storm, to offer this help in assisting this same community in its restoration efforts. For more information view Human Service Response Institute web pages.
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