Empathic Infrastructure

What Do We Mean: RenegAID

One of our board members keeps reminding the rest of us to keep our focus on Natural Disaster like a focal point for a laboring mother. A focal point to distract us from the pain and fear that keeps popping into our heads. I am ever grateful for her reminders as our thoughts wonder around the landscape of chaos, expressing our opinions on what we see as haunting.

Last evening I spent time catching up on some inspiration by watching TED talks.

The one I have referenced here made me think…

Shouldn’t RenegAID be to survivors of Natural Disaster what TED talks are to inspiration and ideas? And shouldn’t RenegAID be to survivors of Natural Disasters what Burning Man is to art?

The event of natural disaster is not political. And we are about the event. In a catastrophic disaster, people who spontaneously show up to engage and help on their own volition, their own time, their own risk, their own money are called renegaid. They do whatever presents itself in the world of absolute chaos. They are not bound by policy and procedure and insurance clauses like volunteers who arrive from relief organizations such as Red Cross, etc. They are not bound by their schooling and corporate level. They are the off duty neighbors who drop what they are doing and run in to help, led by the spirit and not by rules. Rules don’t work well anyway in pure chaos. Corporations and governments exist awhile and then change but neighbors are forever.

In her TED talk, Nora Atkinson calls the Burning Man experiment in collective dreaming, off the grid, anti consumer community an “active collaborative making community.” It exists internationally year round but comes together once a year in the desert… made up of artists, scientists, welders, engineers, garbage collectors, etc. And when their time together is over, they disappear without a trace. Although the art is amazing, what inspires Nora most is why people come there again and again to make. She believes it gets to something that’s essentially human. She says that when people first come to Burning Man, they don’t know how to make this stuff. It’s the “active collaborative maker community” that makes it possible. And when artists stop worrying about critics and collectors and start making for themselves, these are the marvelous toys they create.

I loved the Burning Man people who came immediately and spontaneously to Katrina with bulldozers and tents and set up neighborhood with the Buddhist Temple. Spontaneous, engaging, willing to give of their talents and do whatever needed to be done in the moment, not worried about money or insurance. They were pretty renegaid.

Eunice
Referenced TED Talk: Why Art Thrives at Burning Man by Nora Atkinson

Hosting a Disaster???

The term, Hosting, is used by international government officials when describing nations who have events such as the Olympic Games. For instance, the host nation for the winter Olympics 2010 was Canada. The traditions of hosting go back to ancient cultures. It was the responsibility of the host to “equalize” the stranger. Host is the root word for hospital, a place for a “stranger” to be brought back to health. It is the root word for hospitality – the stranger is fed and lodged and basic needs are met.
Now consider catastrophe. The host is not the location where the event occurred. Nor is it the survivor. The host is the responder, whether individual, organization, government or foreign nation. As responders, what kind of hospitality are we providing?
——-
This thought is from:
Comprehending Chaos, A Framework for Understanding Disaster, Class #12 Ramifications Part 2, What Am I Dealing With Here?

Caught in the Wave

The image of being caught in a wave changed for me when I met a young mother in Banda Aceh in 2006. She had been swept into the 2004 Christmas tsunami wave that together with its preceding magnitude 9 earthquake had killed 1 out of 3 people in that city on Sumatra island, Indonesia. The official tally of deaths from that duel event was epic, so epic, that the counting stopped at about a quarter of a million. Deaths were recorded as far away as Africa.

There is another wave I want to dedicate this blog post to. It happened so long ago that it has vanished out of our collective memory. Yet if we care enough to put the pieces together, we can step by step see how we got to the place we are at today. There are two languages. Always have been. One language is our everyday language. It is the language of order, the language of power, the language of science, the language of math. It is well structured and extremely useful in the world of business to keep things straight.

There is another language. It doesn’t care about the niceties of structure. Matter of fact, it works best in no structure at all. It is plastic and can form to any situation. It is the language of survival and regeneration. Unfortunately this language has been relegated to the world of the human lower nature or a more animal or primitive nature. How that happened, I do not know. This second language is our saving grace in catastrophic disaster.

Now I am going to go way back in time… If I have my facts correct, roughly 2000 years ago, a man began teaching us about this second language. It was never to be used as a political language or as a language of structure. It was to understand what was happening in catastrophic disaster. And to be able to communicate with and help survivors. Now go forward to the time of Constantine when the language was mainstreamed into a power structure.

Then fast forward to today.
When Naomi Klein notes that we need to deal with our foundational issues when dealing with our disaster responses, I contend we need to look way farther back than 1776 (for US). A language that was meant to get us through the random catastrophic times in life, was overtaken and absorbed into the language of structure and order. It changed into a domination language. That confused humanity’s ability to see the difference between the two languages. Now we blame the Victim and see our selves as good for responding that way. We took what was suppose to be not of this world order and changed it into… of this world order. The language of survival and regeneration was suppose to be for survivors and responders of catastrophe, not for politicians. Now we can’t even understand how a single act of giving of oneself can start a disaster-destroyed neighborhood’s heart beating again.

Eunice

Catastrophe Disaster and The Pursuit of Artificial

A hallmark of western modern age medicine and health care has been to strive to not only imitate nature but to outdo nature. Where this influenced me the most in my primary field of work was the generation-long debate of which is better…breastfeeding or formula. For a long period of time, marketers of formula had strong influence over the entire population in the US, backed by the education system for healthcare providers including doctors, nurses and government public health officials. The Pursuit of Artificial (and its profit-making schemes) came at the expense of the natural. If you wanted to breastfeed your infant, you had to go outside of the system because not only did the system shun you, it inferred you were not following best practices as a parent since breastfeeding was inferior to artificial and might even contain dangerous chemicals.

During those dark days in modern obstetrics, care givers even forgot how breastfeeding was suppose to work. If you were in most US hospitals during those days and you wanted to breastfeed, your baby was still given a bottle of glucose water by the nurses first. Or you were given that bottle to feed your newborn before you attempted breastfeeding. There were all kinds of “medical” reasons put forth as to why that bottle was policy. Truth was that artificial formula does not contain the mother’s first milk, the natural laxative to start the bowels working. Glucose water was given to be the artificial substitute. Another example from my early RN experience was the policy that only the delivering mother and the medical team were allowed to witness the birth. And during labor, support persons were not allowed to stay at the bedside, only to visit at the bedside a few minutes each hour. Natural childbirth as we know it today with its support system was never an option.

…..then one day things began to change and the natural way began to gain ground again against the Pursuit of Artificial. Like a quiet rebellion. Like a quiet resistance. Nature regained its rightful place. Nature refuses to follow this path.

In our rush to fill in the void created by catastrophic disaster, let’s remember to respect Nature’s lead in supporting those survivors left behind. The new neighborhood is self-stabilizing. It does not need the Pursuit of Artificial (and its profit-making schemes).

-Eunice

Disaster and Rebirth

Eunice takes us to the Gangway this week with some words on how we should view survivors of a catastrophic disaster.. and how we should act to support them.. -dc

A Thought from the Gangway

Disaster and Rebirth are stuck together like two sides of one coin. They are one thing.
Disaster-Rebirth
Power-Weakness
Lion-Lamb
Parent-Newborn Infant
It is imbalances of power- neither good nor evil. It exists. And it is dynamic. It’s our reactions, responses and relation, individually and together, to its existence that makes up the entirety of our lives. And it brings out our humanness.

Survivors of catastrophic disaster are like the lamb or newborn infant. They are in the weakest form of humanness. Do we blame a newborn infant for its weakness and inability to figure life out? Do we expect a newborn infant to understand it’s unfamiliar surroundings? That newborn infant only knows that it is cold for the first time. Hungry for the first time. Alone for the first time. And afraid, needing to be comforted with a blanket and eye contact. So it is with catastrophic disaster survivors. The human senses are all screwed up. Would we leave alone a nursery full of newborn infants with plenty enough formula-filled bottles in the nursery pantry? Or even would we leave them alone with a bottle full of formula in the foot of their individual cribs?

Sending emergency relief and medical supplies into a disaster without the immediate means of local distribution and communication within a broken distribution infrastructure is like leaving the bottles of formula in the foot of the cribs and expecting the newborn infants to make the connection and survive and thrive.

If you have ever been through the process of giving birth, those closest to the situation will remember those sleepless and fearful first days and nights which flowed into weeks and months without surfacing for air. You were in it thick. You were trying to figure out how to communicate with your infant. You cried a lot. But you were also amazed a lot at the little things you were witness to. The most blatantly pure form of imbalance of power and pure potential can be seen in a mother and infant learning how to make the connection in breastfeeding. It is nature’s supply and demand at its best. And it requires a support network of those closest to the situation. When it works poorly, it can mean failure to thrive for the infant and self blame for the mother and support system.

So it is with catastrophic disaster. If supply and demand doesn’t work well, it might mean failure to thrive for the survivors as individuals and as a neighborhood. Their potential may be stunted. And for the rest of us…we are left with a horrendous feeling of guilt and shame and division and blame.

So the moral of this narrative is: Let’s get it right. Even if it takes our lifetime.

And let’s forgive ourselves and others for not truly understanding what we are up against.

-Eunice