Coping with the quake in Queens
Yesterday’s New York Times had a story about how Sts. Joachim and Anne Catholic School in Queens, New York, is helping its students understand and deal with the tragedy in Haiti. Approximately 80% of the students there are Haitian.
They pray. They scrounge up donations. The quake informs class discussions about politics, about helping the poor, about the afterlife. And when the children are not talking about it, their teachers suspect, they are thinking about it.
…
As 250,000 Haitian-Americans in the New York area mourn, children bear their own burdens. Many feel as much at home in Haiti as in New York. They struggle to picture the houses where they spent summers now in rubble, grandparents and cousins dead, missing, homeless. For others, Haiti exists in tales parents tell — a place they long to visit and now wonder if they will ever see.
And, as three days this week at the school make clear, a subtle but evident role reversal is under way, as child after child feels responsibility to take care of parents bewildered by grief.
The story (which ran on the front page) is more human-interest than news, but the details it offers may enrich your own prayers for the victims and their families today. Also worth reading is the previous article by reporter Anne Barnard about the parish of Sts. Joachim and Anne and its response to the disaster.
More human interest than news? I’d say this story underscores the magnitude of the earthquake and the far-reaching human impact–all valid news values.
Interesting story from “On the Media” (NPR) this weekend about the journo/doctors from the news networks doing street treatment in Haiti on camera, and whether this is news or violates journalistic ethics. Interesting short listen:
onthemedia.org
I saw Dr. Gupta treat that tiny baby. It was most touching. If he adn’t helped it would have been wrong. He says he’s a doctor first and a journalist second. Yesterday he went into a warehouse at the airport and asked for anti-biotics and pain-killers that were just sitting there. A psoldier helped him take the stuff. Was that looting? It broke some rules. So what.
The “On the Media” story points out that in the rush for drama, journo-docs may be doing needlessly dramatic things or even needlessly endangering the sick by doing street surgery when they could be getting people to a medical facility.
I’m not against doctors helping people at all. Or even showing the straits people are in. But I think Dr. Bob Arnott’s comments in the piece are worth thinking about.
Jean –
Sorry, but I can’t understand audios.
I suppose in chaotic situations where semms to be no real control prudential judgments can be a matter of guesswork as much as anything.
By the way, it looks like that Dr. Pou who has been accused of eutanizing patients before Katrina hit might be brought to trial after all. I’m just not sure that people in such horrendous situations can ever be judged fairly.
Ann, sorry. A story transcript will appear on Monday in the link to the segment, if anyone cares to listen.
But essentially. Dr. Arnott, in a similar situation in Bosnia, I believe, did help people he was sent to cover, but insisted that it be off-camera. He made some good points about whether putting the medical dramas in the spotlight was good for patients–or for the network ratings.
Would be interested in hearing what Paul Moses and other working reporters think about the issue.
Certainly reporters do help victims outside the camera eye. The little girl so badly burned by napalm in the famous photo from Vietnam was helped by the reporter, Nick Ut. He got her to a hospital and continued to visit her for a some time. She lives in Canada, I believe.
But what will the school teach the kids about what made Haiti so ripe for devastation? Will they mention exploitation and U.S. interventions that have done nothing but set the stage for the catastrophe?