The setting was a TV studio at 30 Rockefeller Center. Rachel Alban, a counselor from Counseling in Schools National Network and her Canarsie NY-based clients, Geraldine and Ruth, two young Haitian high school students, had joined her. Geraldine and Ruth, leaders in their school and in their communities, close to graduation from high school., were there to tell the story of CSNN’s response to the Haitian earthquake. Geraldine, at the top of her class, has won many awards and scholarships. Ruth will be finishing up school in January. But they are both strong, capable, young women. Smart, funny, they laugh about politics, nominating each other for president. And they have needed all their strength and resiliency to help their fellow students deal with the tragedy. This interview, featuring three eloquent young women describing CSNN’s response to the earthquake’s impact on New York City’s Haitian population, is available for viewing on CSNN’s web-site front page.
The situation in Canarsie is typical for Haitian families in New York. The families are separated. The children stay in New York for schooling, their families stay in Haiti. Fortunately, the family/kinship structure is tight knit and so are the communities. After the Haitian earthquake, if even one person had a functional phone s/he would gather news of all the families in the area and get the news through to New York to all those families that s/he knew. The person who took the call would then form a phone chain, calling around Canarsie and passing along news of anyone injured or lost. Everybody continually stayed in touch.
CSNN’s response in Canarsie schools to the earthquake in Haiti was to set up a case room in the schools where the students could come, meet, work with the counselors, and mourn loss. The room attracted students initially because it was a place where information filtered in. And there was a desperate need for information. The situation was complicated by the fact that many families didn’t want to worry the kids by giving them news of injury or death. . And the kids, already hyper-sensitive to loss, knew that they were not receiving the whole story. In one terrible case, a Haitian student lost 29 people in her family.
Another situation, which created difficulty for counselors and students alike was that students joined the case room group at different times so that they were at different levels of stress, distress, and mourning,. For those who had joined the case room group early on, and had had some counseling, bereavement had set in. Others, who had arrived later, were still in the early stages of defensiveness and denial. The counselors had the task of dealing with many different levels of pain. For the late joiners- kids who had distanced themselves from the main group, the counselors set up a lunch group for individual support, adding new kids to their regular caseload.
Geraldine and Ruth were both exceptional in that they stepped up to help their fellow students. Not every student responded to the crisis in their fashion. The most vulnerable kids, especially if they had already lost their parents, had increasing trouble within school and without it. There were instances of gang activities, drugs. These students needed ongoing therapy. Sadly, this was a “close-out school” and Rachel and her compatriots had to leave Canarsie a full year earlier than they had planned.
For Rachel, however, the experience was both powerful and empowering, and a strong form of life support for the students. Rachel says that the counselors developed a way of operating which was intense and rewarding. The experience strongly resonated with her—she understood how important it was to be in the moment, stay in the moment. They all learned a lot about themselves as therapists
For some Haitian students, also, the aftermath of this experience was transformational. The two young women, Geraldine and Ruth, part of the group which formed just after the earthquake, stepped up to help their friends cope with grief. Geraldine, especially, an exceptional student with high aspirations, said that she felt she had found her calling in life. She wants to help people in pain and distress. She wants to go to medical school. And it is very likely that she will do it.
Rachel Alban completed her BA in Graphic Design and Art Education, and MPS degree in Art Therapy at The School of Visual Arts. She has been working as a Counselor with CSNN since Fall 2008. In addition to her work with students in crisis, she has worked in several programs servicing students who live in temporary housing, as well as attendance improvement and arts enrichment programs.
