Children make the best pictures.
The images pull at our hearts and open our eyes. The photos of Katrina’s children call to us: Diaper-clad toddlers wading through water higher than their little bottoms. The boy who collapsed in tears and then in vomit as his dog, Snowball, was pried away because the pet could not be admitted to a shelter. The scared, yet somehow polished and hopeful faces of the schoolchildren who showed up for classes in Houston, which has opened its heart and its schools to kids whose address is now the Astrodome.
About 300,000 children have been displaced by Katrina, living in shelters, hotels or some other makeshift place they now call home.
Another 500,000 children have lost part of their home or their pets, friends or relatives and the routine of being a kid – school, sports, friends, the luxury of eating a favorite cereal. Some have seen parents drown and relatives carried off by the fetid water; others have been separated from family.
“What I’m seeing on the Gulf Coast is not too different from what I saw in Banda Aceh and Aceh and Sri Lanka,” Charles MacCormack, chairman of the relief group Save the Children, said.
MacCormack has been saving the children of disaster since the Biafra crisis more than three decades ago. He says there is little difference among the children of Darfur or Congo or Bosnia – or Biloxi. When disaster strikes, “children react more on their emotions and have fewer intellectual defenses,” than do adults, he says.
And so the children of Katrina now have needs that have nothing to do with rebuilding highways and restocking grocery shelves or retooling the government bureaucracies that failed them. We must rebuild their spirits.
It is done, MacCormack says, by giving them structured and safe places to play, after-school programs where they are with other kids their age and day care where they know they will be secure while their parents start work anew. They need counseling and support. They need a routine to start their recovery. They need, in fact, what many poor children – so many of Katrina’s displaced are poor – needed long before the hurricane struck.
“We at Save the Children are sounding that trumpet day in and day out, before Katrina and after,” MacCormack says. “There’s no doubt that good child-care programs, especially for poor kids, are disastrously underfunded – equally ignored by Republicans and Democrats at both the presidential and state levels.” Save the Children already runs after-school programs for the rural poor in a dozen states, including some affected by the hurricane. When he met with President Bush last week, MacCormack said he stressed the need to provide not just emergency relief but “ongoing support for hundreds of thousands of traumatized kids.” The president replied: “We gotta make sure this happens.” Will we? No one in power ever talks about day care anymore, or after-school programs, or otherwise tending to the psychological and social needs of kids we know need tending. The last memorable debate on the topic was a brouhaha over midnight basketball. Congressional Republicans ridiculed the Clinton administration idea that perhaps if kids were on a well-lighted court instead of a dim street corner, they – and the country – might be better off.
Yet it is the experience of Save the Children that structured, supervised activities help children recover from trauma. It has worked after an earthquake in Turkey, a tsunami in Indonesia, amid political violence in the West Bank and Gaza, and during civil conflict in Nepal. Why wouldn’t it work here? The safety net for America’s children already was threadbare before the hurricane. Nearly one in five of our kids lives in poverty, a dismally consistent statistic. Many of the parents of children whose jobs were swept away by the hurricane worked for low wages in the tourist trade, which isn’t known for generous benefits.
Yet before Katrina struck, Congress was poised to enact budget cuts in Medicaid, the only health insurance many of these kids have ever had. The knife was set to fall on food stamps, too.
We will see, soon enough, if priorities are reshuffled out of guilt or the glare of public attention. Or we will see if the pictures of children that so move us now become darker portraits of national shame.
Marie Cocco can be reached at mariecocco@washpost.com.
