Day Five

Elsewhere I read how someone snapped at his wife for no apparent reason other than he had been blogging all week about the disaster in Vermont. It's time for psychological first aid for the entire state... of course for those directly affected but, in time, for the whole state of Vermont which is still reeling from the massive flooding Sunday and the frustration that even last night there were flash floods that took out some of the tenuous temporary roads that had been put it.

We used this chart with the clergy and lay leaders of l'Eglise Episcopal d'Haiti last year in the CREDO Strength for the Journey program. I have back-translated it from Creole to English but you get the gist.

I'd say we are somewhere along the hill up or at the top: people are helping out one another, there has been incredible esprit de corps at work in all communities, particularly the isolated ones that now at least have one goat path in/out. Communities all have their emergency response teams and have organised themselves into traffic patrols, limiting access in and out of the village; putting up the water and MREs that the Illinois National Guard has dropped; communicating with the outside world by cell phone to folks with full internet access.

But, even the hardiest people will get weary. And that's where the long slog kicks in. As we kept telling the Haitians: You can't sleep at night? That's normal. You are tired? That's normal. You don't have an appetite? That's normal. You're running on fumes? You need to put some gas in your tank.

It is what one calls the 'new normal.' Things won't be the same as they were Saturday 27 August. Our landscape has been greatly altered; people have lost everything they have.

But the human will to survive, the human spirit is a remarkable thing. And Vermonters are tough and Vermont will rise again.