If you are interested in helping build Students Supporting Health and Recovery Efforts, contact Ashley Hackler at [email protected]

A little more than a year ago, Vice President for Student Affairs Thomas Hill was settling into another semester at Iowa State. He had heard news reports that Hurricane Katrina had rebounded off a scrape with Florida. Some forecasters predicted the storm would make its second landfall near the city of New Orleans.

Hill, a New Orleans native with four brothers still living in the city, had seen his share of storms challenge his hometown. For the moment, he was relatively unconcerned.

“Growing up in New Orleans, they always say, ‘This will be the big one,'” Hill said. “If you live for 40 or 50 years and it’s always, ‘The big one is coming,’ and it never makes it, you think, ‘No big deal.'”

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Seeing is believing

Almost a year later when Ashley Hackler, graduate student in psychology, made her way to the Gulf Coast, the big one was already history.

She was on her way to New Orleans for a convention of the American Psychological Association.

“I was pretty hesitant because I had heard about the city and safety and things like that,” Hackler said. “A lot of people were telling me, ‘Oh, it’s OK, though, because the Latin quarter was fine.'”

Hackler was still far from the Latin quarter when the effects of Katrina started to be seen. Undaunted, she stopped at a Mississippi welcome center to ask which sites a first-time visitor should see in the area. The reply was not what she was expecting.

“What the woman at the welcome center ended up saying was, ‘You can look at the hurricane destruction, but there is not much more,'” Hackler said.

From there, she began a self-guided tour of the Gulf Coast, taking random exits and exploring the devastated landscape Katrina had left behind.

A year earlier, as Hill watched the coverage of the hurricane, the event could not have been more personal.

“[New Orleans] survived the hurricane, which is what they have always done,” Hill said. “The difference in this one was that there was a breach in the levee. When I heard there was a breach in the levee, that’s when I began to worry.”

Soon, water was spilling through the city. Two of Hill’s brothers, who lived in the outskirts of the city, were safe. The other two, who lived near the downtown area, were swallowed up, along with thousands of other New Orleans residents in a suddenly cut-off mass of humanity.

In less than a week, Hill had gone from unconcerned to desperately searching for his lost brothers.

With no phone service or other means of contacting them, Hill watched as many reports as he could.

He called numerous relief organizations hoping for some word of his brothers. He feared especially for his brother Charles, who couldn’t swim, but for nearly a week, there was no word.

Emotional scars

As Hackler explored the Gulf Coast, she saw that finding any person at all was a rarity. She found areas with seemingly fresh debris and others areas disquietingly bare, where the surging sea had taken wreckage back with it.

When she reached New Orleans, Hackler talked with residents about their experiences. One particularly poignant conversation was with a young doctor.

The doctor had stayed with his patients in a partially flooded hospital, even as new reports announced that all hospitals in New Orleans had been evacuated. The doctor told Hackler of the extreme mental impact the disaster had on its victims, something which Hill had encountered a year before.

After nearly six days of uncertainty, both of Hill’s brothers were located. One was in north Texas. The other made it to a shelter in Louisiana.

When Hill finally called his brother in Louisiana, he found the trust they had shared since childhood suddenly suspended.

“I told him, ‘Sit tight. Your nephews are coming to get you just as soon as they can get there,'” Hill said. “His response to me was, ‘Will they really come? Are they really going to do that?’ That really touched me.”

Hill said he suspects the conditions of the shelter, living side by side with refugees and having no family to count on were the causes of his brother’s passing mistrust. Not all the emotional scars left by Katrina were so short lived.

Hackler learned from her doctor friend that medical doctors in New Orleans were now, in addition to caring for the patients’ physical health, attending to many more psychological issues. She even found that only 40 hospital beds remained, in the city, for psychiatric patients.

A call to action

On her way back to Iowa, Hackler became determined to help.

“I started thinking, ‘I have to go back down there. I have to do something,'” Hackler said.

She called the counseling center at the University of New Orleans. The conversation was a fateful one.

The student who answered the phone shared her own story of Katrina. She told Hackler about her ex-boyfriend. The student’s relationship had survived the water, but not the memories.

“They couldn’t talk to each other anymore because the hurricane was all they had to talk about,” Hackler said. “It was really sad to hear her talk about it, because her main source of support was gone.”

During the conversation, Hackler said she became determined to do more than just volunteer her services as a counselor. She decided to form a group to organize psychology students to help victims of Katrina and other traumatic events.

Hackler’s crusade quickly gained support. Fellow psychology graduate student Sarah Anthoney signed on as treasurer and grants coordinator. Hackler gained backing within the psychology department, most importantly from Louis Paradise, a professor at the University of New Orleans who helped prepare Hackler and her fledgling group for their mission.

In less than a week, about the same amount of time it took Hill to reassemble his family, an obscure sense of urgency in Hackler’s’ mind became Students Supporting Health and Recovery Efforts.

Hackler said she and Anthoney eventually plan to recruit as many psychology students as possible and make their services available to victims of all types of mental trauma.

The immediate goal, however, is to send Hackler herself to New Orleans.

Hill agreed that the mental health counseling need in the city is great.

He has returned to New Orleans on two occasions since Katrina and said he has found the physical and emotional impact to the city profound.

“It’s a tale of multiple cities,” Hill said. “You go into some neighborhoods and you can see that they are trying real hard to come back. You go into other neighborhoods, and it’s like Katrina happened yesterday.”

He said that although the mental health aspect of the recovery is very important, physical rebuilding will play a large part in restoring the mood of the city he grew up in.

“It’s one thing to suffer a loss but another thing to see the recovery take place,” Hill said. “If you suffer a loss, but have to look at the ruins every day, you will never move beyond the devastation.”

Hackler’s part in the recovery is just beginning, but she has already recognized her new mission will not lend itself to a swift completion of her graduate studies.

She said her new responsibilities as an organizer will probably delay her graduation by at least a year.

Despite a year or two of extra school, Hackler remains focused on her mission. Rather than postponing her graduation, she says she looks on the upcoming adventure as the true beginning of her career.

“What I have found out is that I don’t have to wait six years to start my life,” Hackler said. “This is what I want to be doing. I can start it right now.”