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Katrina's Call
Note to self: Bring a flashlight, towels, soap, toilet
paper, sleeping bag, snacks, medical kit, waterless hand sanitizer,
boots that reach above the ankles (snakes!), and bug spray
(lots of bug spray).
When Hurricane Katrina bulldozed a path through the Gulf
Region of the United States, members of the Seattle Pacific
University community sprang into action to help with relief
efforts. Within days, there were faculty, staff, graduate
students, and alumni flying east. And before long, four students
whose universities were damaged began flying and driving west
to Seattle Pacific.
An alumna of Louisiana State University (LSU), Elizabeth
Torrence is now an SPU associate professor of nursing and
director of the master of science degree program in nursing
(M.S.N.). “I lived in New Orleans for nearly 20 years,”
she says. “I just felt like I had to do something.”
Only days after the hurricane’s winds ended, she and
Darrell Owens, a graduate of the M.S.N. program, were on a
plane bound for Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Once there, Torrence
and Owens, the director of Palliative Care Services at Seattle’s
Harborview Medical Center, began working in a temporary hospital
set up on the LSU campus. For more than a week, they assessed
and treated storm survivors. They also heard the nightmarish
tales, and witnessed the courage, of the area’s residents.
Torrence remembers Mr. Drake, an 80-year-old man, who —
as water rose to his home’s second floor — tied
himself to his elderly wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
They jumped off the house’s roof and swam for a boat
floating by, still on its trailer. After clambering aboard,
he hand-paddled them to a hospital, picking up three more
survivors along the way. “I heard so many other stories,
too,” Torrence says. By week’s end, she became
as much administrator as health care worker.
Staying in contact with Seattle Pacific colleagues, Torrence
spoke midweek with Luana Joslin-Lester, a nurse practitioner
in the University’s Student Health Services. Joslin-Lester
wanted to assist, too, and Torrence encouraged her to contact
the Alabama Red Cross, which still needed more medical volunteers.
She did, and within 48 hours, Joslin-Lester and three more
M.S.N. students had boarded a plane for the Gulf Region. Once
they arrived, Joslin-Lester, and M.S.N. students Linda Robinson
’97, Kristen Goetz Jones ’01, and Colette Dahl
received their assignments from the Red Cross: Joslin-Lester,
Robinson, and Jones went to Pascagoula, Mississippi, to assist
at shelters; and Dahl went to Gulfport, Mississippi, where
she worked with a team of Floridian doctors in an elementary-school-turned-shelter.
Soon, Joslin-Lester and Robinson were asked to travel to
Mississippi’s devastated Jackson County. With Red Cross
signs taped to their car doors, the pair drove over downed
power lines, steered around houses that Katrina had deposited
in the middle of roads, and weaved by heaps of rubble. “The
two of us wondered how anyone survived this hurricane,”
says Joslin-Lester. Yet all along the way, they met with displaced
survivors, many of whom had health care challenges —
including heart disease, diabetes, depression, and chronic
pain — now exacerbated by a natural disaster.
In one week, Joslin-Lester and Robinson served an estimated
500 people, with encounters that included giving out food
bank phone numbers, transferring patients to the hospital,
and providing a compassionate listening ear.
Dahl, also working with endless lines of displaced residents,
treated people with more acute illnesses. Jones helped set
up a medical clinic at a community center and says the devastation
took her by surprise. “I felt like I was in a war zone,”
she explains. “Even seeing it on TV, it’s nothing
like what you see in real life.”
In Seattle, staff and faculty members were working together
to help those affected by Katrina, too. Seattle Pacific President
Philip Eaton established a President’s Disaster Relief
Fund to support the University’s partner John Perkins
and the relief work of the John M. Perkins Foundation in Jackson,
Mississippi. Eaton also set up a SPRINT Team Fund to support
students, faculty, staff, and alumni who will travel to Jackson
in December to assist Perkins in community development work
and the construction of long-term housing for evacuees. (To
read a letter from John Perkins about the Katrina relief efforts,
click
here.)
A day after the storm, Seattle Pacific received its first
call inquiring whether the University was accepting displaced
students from hurricane-affected areas. The answer was “yes.”
SPU opened its doors to four students — three undergraduates
and one graduate student — allowing them to become “visiting
students” while paying tuition only to their home universities.
Carl Lubrano, a master’s degree student in business
administration at the University of New Orleans, had begun
his last required course when Katrina hit the city. Evacuated
to Houston, Texas, and then back to Alexandria, Virginia,
with his parents and grandmother, Lubrano searched for a university
that offered the class he needed — and that didn’t
start until late September. When he contacted SPU’s
School of Business and Economics, Associate Graduate Director
Debbie Wysomierski took the call. “September 7 was my
first contact with Carl,” she remembers. “By the
9th, we had it worked out that he would come.”
Soon, Lubrano was making the long drive from Virginia to
Washington. “I drove 12 hours a day for four days,”
he says. When Lubrano arrived, he learned Seattle Pacific
would pay for his textbook, and he discovered something else:
“SPU reminds me a little bit of Tulane University.”
The nurses were back on campus and the visiting students
had settled in when John Thoburn, associate professor of graduate
psychology, and Michael Tandy, clinical psychology doctoral
student, headed to the Gulf Coast with PsyCorps, an agency
that provides “psychological first aid.” Thoburn,
a co-founder of the organization, says PsyCorps mobilizes
a second wave of disaster relief, offering support not only
to those left homeless or injured, but also to relief workers.
“Psychological first aid isn’t therapy,”
he explains. “It’s helping people tap into their
sense of resiliency, and instilling hope.”
“Sometimes I ask God why I am so blessed,” says
Torrence. “The answer I think lies in the response I
must make when others are in need. My response was deeply
rooted in my own faith journey.”
— BY Hope McPherson
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