Being Displaced - Reminded Me of MAPP Training and "The People Mover"

I have been on vacation for the past two weeks. I am a bluegrass fan and attend the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas every September. This year, there was a flood and the entire campground had to be evacuated. We arrived on a Thursday to set up our camper (in the rain). I went home overnight, returned on Friday in the car (in the rain) and was told there was a mandatory evacuation. It was still raining and the Walnut River was expected to crest many feet over flood stage. There were lots of campers there and lots more on the way. Many people arrive early, set up their campers, lock them up and go home for the weekend. There were tractors driving around the fairgrounds to hook onto those campers and pull them to safety. The festival staff were phoning people to pass along the message that they must come and get their campers, tents, etc. out of the campground. As I was frantically arranging for the loan of a friend's 4 wheel drive pick-up to pull out my camper to the safety of her street in town, there were hundreds of others tearing down their campsite and heading for - well, we didn't really know where everyone was going to go.

That was when it hit me that the evacuation was a lot like the "people mover" exercise we did in foster parent classes. There is a sudden "we are here to move you" without answers to lots of questions like: where are we going, who will look after us, how will we get in touch with our family, etc. I kept imagining what it was like for the children who are removed from homes. I didn't like the feelings I experienced. First it was panic! What was I going to do, where was I going to go? When I got there, would I be all right? How would I get back together with my "family"? There was no time to make a plan: it was pack it up and get out of there asap. Over the next several days, we managed to locate our camp family in various other places. Some friends we never found although we looked for them. Imagine those folks who had locked up their campers and gone home, only to return to find the campground totally flooded and their campers well, somewhere. I would imagine that they felt alot like our families feel: panic, anger, anxiety, frustration, displacement, a sense of this will never be the same.

Now that the yearly bluegrass experience is over, I find myself wondering what it will be like next year. Will this displacement affect our camp family to the point that we will not come together like we had been? Will some of our campmates have found new "families" from this experience and bond with them so much that they will camp with them next year? Wow, this is alot like what our kids experience when they get placed in foster care. Is there any way to reassure them that everything will be the same when they return home, because will it really be the same after that experience? I don't know the answers, I do know that after this vacation experience I feel that I have a better perspective for what it feels like for the children and the family when the "people mover" shows up for the mandatory displacement.

As foster, adoptive and kinship families, we should all remember that displacement can be emotionally painful even under the best of circumstances. Those experiences will be with those children for the rest of their lives, and we need to be considerate of how that feels to the children, the family, the schools, the churches, and the communities when displacements happen either temporarily or permanently.

WOW! I didn't know I knew so little about car seat training.

On August 23, we had our quarterly board meeting of the Kansas Foster and Adoptive Parent Association. Immediately prior to the meeting, we had a training about car seats. Sound boring? I have a hard time sitting through trainings usually, and my mind tends to wander off into fantasyland instead of paying attention to the speaker. Not this training. I was taking notes, asking questions, watching, listening, and learning. Our trainer, an EMT/firefighter, was very motivated in giving us accurate information about car seats and car safety for our children. Who wouldn't be interested in hearing that? And the amount of information he gave us was almost overwhelming. How many of us, especially women who carry purses, throw our purses, bags, water bottles, ink pens, CDs, etc. into the car, usually on the back seat or the passenger seat, so they are handy to reach? I never thought of all that stuff as potential "projectiles" in the event of a sudden hard stop or a wreck. I sure think of it now. I have never figured out the correct way to install a car seat, usually I have someone else put them in the vehicle for me. Lots of people appear to know what they are doing. Yet after this training, I realized that many of the people who "knowingly" put car seats in for me DID IT INCORRECTLY. So while the subject "Car Seat Training" may seem boring, I would recommend that anyone with babies, toddlers and small children review the information via a training, or visit their local police or fire department to see if there is a training individual who can show them the correct way to keep our little ones safe while riding in our vehicles.