FRIDAY FORUM: Resilience

We’ve all seen a lot of photos of destruction this week.  Those photos are important, but disasters are not structural, they are human.  What makes it a disaster are the human elements associated with such damage: the stories, memories, lives, families, friends all upended or taken by the violence of a broken world.  It can be easy to lose hope, to make statements like “We will never recover.” But this is not the case, because human resilience will surprise you.

Almost 20 years ago, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast and I had the opportunity to spend 3 months there assisting with the recovery effort, arriving about a week after the storm.  If you trace my photos, they begin with destruction, in awe over the magnitude of the broken and flooded buildings.  But they end with people.  As I grew to look past the debris piles to the stories they told, I found I was more in awe of the fight in everyday folks who lost so much than the fact that water could completely remove a home from its foundation.  And they recovered.  

And so, I believe, it will be with Helene.  While it's easy to mourn now, joy comes in the morning.  The man in the blue shirt lives in a steep gorge along a small river that became a raging monster one week ago.  While his house remains, he literally watched many of neighbors' homes float away.  His home is only accessible by a long hike or helicopter, as the only road in was destroyed by a landslide.  And yet, he is already out there, directing teams of volunteers who made the hike in, loving his neighbors, and planning the bounce back.  

And bounce back they will.  While tragic, events like this often teach us more about love than they do destruction.  Because disasters are human stories.  And humans are more resilient than you think.