Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com

Published - Friday, June 27, 2008

Lutheran Social Services helps spirits rise about floodwaters

By Joe Orso | La Crosse Tribune

Cyndi Jacobson’s family lost three vehicles and filled five Dumpsters with trash because of flooding in August.

When the water receded, she said, it smelled like a pig farm at her home near Goose Island.

“I said, ‘Nobody cries here,’” said Jacobson, 49. “I was afraid if I started crying, I’d never stop.”

But then one Sunday while her family was cleaning up, a stranger came to the home, gave her $20, and Jacobson sobbed for a half-hour.

“That act of kindness is something I’ll never forget,” she said.

And when Jacobson told that story to Gil Hoel, a project coordinator for Project Recovery, she broke down into tears again.

“It’s through those initial random acts of kindness that people do recover,” Hoel said. “Something has to counteract the violence that has occurred to the landscape, and I really think it is the human spirit that begins to rise above it.”

Project Recovery is a program that since late September has been attending to the emotional needs of survivors of the 2007 flood.

With 27 staff members in 14 counties, the program is run by Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan in partnership with the Federal Center for Mental Health Services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, and the Wisconsin Farm Center.

“We’re kind of the eyes and ears of the long-haul recovery process,” Hoel said. “This is as much a grief process as it is anything else.”

And with a second round of flooding, people and communities who had been planning events to commemorate the flood anniversary are having to deal with grief anew.

Kim Sines, an outreach worker for Project Recovery, said she sees Project Recovery staff as good neighbors, especially when people don’t have family around like they might have years ago.

“Recovering from one disaster is a big enough task, let alone having to bounce back from two,” said Sines, who lives in Westby, Wis. “We’re available to chat to people who need to talk to somebody with absolutely no agenda.”

With teachers, Sines helped organize a display of art and

stories by students about the first flood, which she said gives children a voice in the recovery process.

A piece in the display that stands out for her is a 7-year-old girl’s statement, written in brown, green and black: “There was so much mud.”

While this most recent flood did not affect Jacobson’s family as bad as the first one, they used a Shop-Vac to get water out of the basement from 2 p.m. June 8 until about 7 a.m. the next morning.

She said she hasn’t gone through some of the wet boxes because she dreads having to deal with anything ruined or lost again.

“Whenever it rains really hard, I’m up and down all night long, looking outside,” she said. “I can’t lay in bed and sleep.”

Hoel, who has done training for programs like Project Recovery around the country, said now is not the time to tell people they’ll make it through, but to honor their feelings and just listen.

“This is a faith journey,” he said. “My experience with disasters has been that there’s something in it that’s very powerful and almost beckons people to pay attention to each other differently.”

Contact Project Recovery at 1-866-422-3742.