God, liquor, and Katrina Coping with the devastation of the mind and spirit at Camp Edwards BY DEIRDRE FULTON
	More Photos: Click here for slide show

Standing outside the three-story barracks he will call home for the foreseeable future, Don Vavasseur recounts how he navigated the streets of his New Orleans neighborhood, Gentilly, looking for stranded victims. On the first day, Vavasseur and a companion encountered a dead body and covered it with a blanket. Days later, the same body lay in the same place, draped with the same blanket. By then, it was bloated from the water and the heat.

This is just one of countless gruesome images that will haunt thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims, including many of the 209 evacuees who arrived at Camp Edwards, located on Otis Air Force base in Buzzard’s Bay last week.

In the weeks following the category-four storm, government officials and aid workers have concentrated on ensuring physical survival. Rescuing people. Feeding people. Housing people. Clothing people. But volunteers at Camp Edwards, like those at evacuation centers across the country, are trying to create an environment that also replenishes the spirit of the survivors. That could be even more vital for this group since, according to organizers, most of the 209 survivors were among the last hold-outs — those who stayed through the storm and the first part of the aftermath before finally being coaxed away from the devastation. Research shows that approximately five percent of natural-disaster victims develop diagnosable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Yet others will be at risk for depression, substance abuse, and other disorders.

At Camp Edwards, organizers are doing a number of things to help ease the shock. At breakfast last Friday, for example, they made a last-minute decision to serve grits to help the evacuees feel more at home. On Sunday, residents attended a rousing worship service led by Camp Edwards’s unofficial "mayor," Reverend Jeffrey Brown. They’re also getting cable installed and new recreation equipment.

In addition, crisis counselors are on hand to offer more-tangible assistance. As soon as the evacuees got off the plane, the Massachusetts departments of public and mental health administered physical and mental triage to identify those who needed immediate help. Approximately 12 people were sent to the hospital; three or four of those because they were "mentally fatigued from the whole ordeal," says Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency spokesperson Peter Judge. Since then, counselors have followed up with all evacuees, "to make sure that someone who was fine when they got off the plane, after one or two days into the process, still needs some counseling," he says. "A lot of these people are going to need ongoing counseling, obviously, with what they’ve been through for the last week, 10 days."

PINNING DOWN TRAUMA

Such is the nature of PTSD, a condition that can affect war veterans, rape victims, and survivors of natural disasters. Symptoms — such as startle reactions, difficulty sleeping, and recurring visions of the traumatic experience — can show up in the immediate aftermath, or not emerge for months or even years. Trauma victims who don’t fit the exact diagnosis for PTSD can still suffer from depression, substance abuse, or panic disorders.

The mental-health havoc Katrina will wreak on her victims, in other words, remains to be seen.

"When we talk about reacting to a catastrophic event, an extremely stressful event, everybody’s different," says Matt Friedman, executive director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (NCPTSD), a research and education arm of the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. "The more that people have lost in terms of personal property, in terms of loved ones — that’s a traumatic reminder. And we know that many of the people who were least advantaged were the people who were stuck in the Convention Center, the ones who were evacuated much later."

Yet Friedman, a psychiatry and pharmacology professor at Dartmouth Medical School, cautions against making too-dark predictions that don’t factor in the "courage and resilience of the human spirit."

Consider the 1974 tornado in Xenia, Ohio, which killed 33 people and injured 1600 more. Parts of the city were destroyed, and its people were in shock. But a mental-health survey after the disaster found that "the majority described positive outcomes: they learned that they could handle crises effectively, and felt they were better off for having met this type of challenge," according to the NCPTSD.

It’s impossible to tell, for instance, how things will turn out for 71-year-old Gracie Bell Beauvais. Two things are certain, though: so far, it’s been overwhelming and she’s drawn heavily on her faith. The Louisiana native had never been on a plane before last Thursday, and had ridden out every previous hurricane in the region. Though she wasn’t scared, she knew she had to leave.

When the rain started coming down, Beauvais began to pray. "As I prayed, the mattress on my bed was just a-rockin’." Soon after, glass shattered, "trees fell in front of my house, and the water turned green, and that’s not good."

Beauvais knows she’s better off far away from that mess, but she misses her neighborhood and the sense of community that came from knowing that her doctors were right down the street, the Walgreens was a few blocks in one direction, and the grocery store was a short walk in the other. She puts faith in God, and in the word of the president, who "said he’s going to build New Orleans back.... He said it’ll take some time."

Then there’s Don Vavasseur, who wants to go back as soon as he can. The 48-year-old photographer and lighting technician teamed up with strangers to rescue as many neighbors as possible, transporting them by the boatload to the roof of Saint Raphael Elementary School, where he eventually counted a full 340 people waiting for salvation from the toxic, rising floodwaters. He stayed in New Orleans as long as he could, and he believes he was the last to leave a three-block radius before the Tennessee National Guard finally escorted him away.

Vavasseur has never been a big drinker. But as he toured his broken neighborhood on his rescue missions, he indulged in wine, screwdrivers, and cold beers on the boat. During his mental-health screening, he divulged this recent drinking pattern, and raised some eyebrows.

His response? " ‘What would you do in this? Would you want to be sober doing this?’ My home is gone. Everything I’ve ever done is under water."

"It broke all of our hearts to see it," he says, pulling on a Marlboro Red. "It literally broke my heart to see it."

SOUTHERN COMFORT

Now, at Camp Edwards, Vavasseur, Beauvais, and the 207 other evacuees are finding common ground in both their traumatic experience and their shared love for red beans and rice. Whether any of them will develop serious mental illness down the road is still unknown, but even as camp volunteers do what they can to help, the survivors themselves are not without their own social resources. And they’re better off for it, Friedman says, citing the benefits of community networks in the aftermath of disaster.

"We constantly talk to each other," Vavasseur says of life so far inside the village, where they use Southern slang and understand each others’ accents. "This is every day in New Orleans. We talk like this all day every day and that’s how we get through problems."

Deirdre Fulton can be reached at dfulton[a]phx.com.