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It isn’t easy to just pick up and go… to begin again, when everything you’ve worked for is in shambles. When tragedy hits, it hits hard. The kind of strength it would take one family, one person, to go through something like that and come out even semi-normal, is hard to imagine, let alone understand.
On the Eastern Coast, Hurricane Sandy caused major damage. Homes swept away. Mementos, and family paraphernalia gone… people left to rebuild their lives with nothing more than themselves.
Alabamians can empathize.
During the Spring of 2011, when the April tornados hit, many Alabamians also felt this crippling despair. A week with no electricity. Neighbors, family, and friends without homes. It was a nightmare for many.
Yet when it mattered the most, Alabamians came together. They organized food drives and volunteer building crews. They had people who donate blankets, hairbrushes, clothes, the necessities of everyday life. Neighborhoods worked together to help each other, sharing generators to charge cell phones.
“We cooked out and talked to each other more; my family had a generator. We let others borrow it to charge cell phones and one family even used it to charge their child’s nebulizer for his asthma,” Lillian Strickland, an Alabama resident, explained. “We also hosted a neighborhood movie night with our projector that we hooked up with our generator.”
Empathy means to be able to understand ones suffering because you have been through the same experience–you understand how they feel. Sympathy is just acknowledging a person’s pain and giving your comfort–you can’t imagine how that must have been like.
So if Alabamians understand the hardship of the Hurricane Sandy survivors, why is so little being done to help them here at school? The answer is truly rather simple.
“I don’t have time to head a food drive or money collection.” Lillian Strickland said. “I am working too much and have too many responsibilities. Life keeps me extremely busy. I am taking care of too many other people in my own family.”
It is easy to miss things when everyone is so caught up in their own day-to-day lives. Even when we do take the time to look around, we often let other people’s problems sit on the back burner to our own daily struggles.
“I don’t consider my problems more important, but I do consider them equally so,” Lillian admitted.
This idea is not wrong, but it does explain why drives for food and money collections aren’t top priority. Hurricane Sandy survivors are not forgotten; they just aren’t at the top of most people’s to do list.
If students are compelled to donate to Hurricane Sandy victims here at school, they should talk to their clubs and organizations about organizing a drive or a collection as a service project.
