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Red River Communities Display Stoicism, Volunteerism
by Christi Harlan and Allen Crabtree
March 20 |
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Jackie Crawford and her husband learned to appreciate the generosity of the American Red Cross and its donors when waters from the Red River surrounded their home and forced them to evacuate by boat.
The Red Cross provided temporary housing for Crawford after that flood in 1997, but the aid gave her something much more lasting: the inspiration to join the Red Cross as a volunteer in disaster mental health.
This week, as the Red River again menaced Moorhead, Minn., and Fargo, N.D., Crawford joined more than 100 Red Cross workers to help address the needs of residents as they prepared for the river’s crest.
With most of the workers coming from the affected communities, the Red Cross response underscored the resilience and resourcefulness of the residents of an area that is regularly threatened by flooding.
“This community is remarkable in that they’ve been fighting floods for a long time,” said Jay Beech of Moorhead, who joined the Red Cross workers as a first-time volunteer this week. “There’s a certain stoicism. They go about this work in a positive and deliberate way.”
But even the stoic need support. Crawford, who spearheaded a community-wide mental health initiative after the March 2009 floods, admitted that she was bothered to see the return this year of dump trucks full of sand, and water lapping over familiar roads.
“I found my stomach knotting up,” she said.
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