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Hollywood Women Visit Katrina's Children Katrina's children desperately need hope, emergency mental health and health care, and educational enrichment to make up for lost time and longstanding educational neglect. On May 8th, a delegation of prominent Hollywood and Washington, D.C. women, including New Orleans native and Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Board Member Reese Witherspoon (this year’s Oscar winner for Best Actress), Cicely Tyson, Jennifer Garner, Holly Robinson Peete, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Regina King, Deborah Santana, and over a dozen other prominent entertainment, cultural, media, and community leaders, traveled to New Orleans for a Katrina Child WatchSM visit sponsored by CDF. They were there to see, hear, and help call attention to the acute mental health, health, and education crises of children traumatized by Hurricane Katrina over eight months ago. I am deeply grateful that these powerful and caring women came to shine a bright light on the tragic plight of hundreds of thousands of Katrina’s children not high enough on the radar screen of our political leaders and citizens. Katrina’s children desperately need hope, emergency mental health and health care, and educational enrichment to make up for lost time and longstanding educational neglect. They also need better housing than the shelters, trailer parks, and unstable living conditions so many currently face. In a report released on April 4th, Katrina’s Children: A Call to Conscience and Action, CDF described the emergency and long-term needs of Katrina’s children and what can and must be done to prevent irreversible child damage and give Katrina’s children a better life. CDF calls for immediate national leadership to enact Disaster Relief Medicaid for 24 months to cut through the complex 50 different state bureaucracies and eligibility requirements for Katrina survivors still scattered across the country, and to prevent similar suffering in future disasters. These children and families have suffered enough and need health and mental health care right now. The prominent women who spent the day in New Orleans were deeply moved by the stories of mothers and children and health and mental health care professionals and are determined to do something. The delegation began by meeting with children and parents at the opening of the first of thirteen planned CDF Freedom SchoolsSM sites in Louisiana to provide children summer educational and cultural enrichment and mental health and health supports. Oscar nominee Cicely Tyson movingly read a children’s book during Harambee time after the children did joyful Freedom School chants. At the end, the children gave a rousing performance of “Something Inside So Strong,” a Freedom School theme song. The delegation later visited St. Roch Trailer Village, where we met with displaced families, heard about their challenges, and saw the dirt play space, activities and services for children and families, and cramped living space in tiny trailers. We also met with women leaders from Gulf Coast states under a big oak tree to hear more about the continuing struggles of Katrina’s families and communities. A tour of the devastated Lower Ninth Ward that would rival most war zones in Iraq broke our hearts, as did the health center in a former Lord and Taylor’s store, where the valiant Charity Hospital doctors are providing care in unbelievably cramped quarters for patients after their historic facility closed. “I don’t think you get a real clear perspective unless you come down and see it,” Reese Witherspoon told an Associated Press reporter. “The children need attention right now.” Jennifer Garner summed up what many of the visitors felt when she told the reporter she had been “shocked and heartbroken” by the visit. You would be too. This Child WatchSM visit will be the first of many to the Gulf Coast states and to the doors of our political leaders until they act to prevent irreversible harm to Katrina’s children and provide comprehensive national coverage to the nine million children denied the basic right to health and mental health care and the children denied a safe place from the streets and a decent public education in the richest nation on earth. All Americans have a self interest in ensuring preventive and effective disaster emergency procedures, systems, and competent personnel before the next disaster, which could affect any of us. Katrina’s children are our warning siren to wake up, be prepared, and act compassionately now. We must not let our children down. That conditions like those in New Orleans could still exist—eight months after Katrina—in the richest nation on earth is a moral disgrace. (For a copy of CDF’s report Katrina’s Children: A Call to Conscience and Action and to learn more about Freedom Schools and other ways you can help, including contacting your Congresspeople right now about ensuring health and mental health care to Katrina’s victims and Disaster Relief Medicaid to prevent such suffering in future disasters, visit http://www.childrensdefense.org/ for more information.) |
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