What is Green Cross?

I heard those words many times during our deployment to Rockport, TX. It was actually a pretty good segue into the conversation we were hoping to have. We would explain that we were in Rockport by invitation, to help first responders and survivors cope with compassion fatigue and stress responses, and the person would start telling us how great that was and how much other people surely needed that service. Then they would begin their own hurricane story, and shed some tears, and laugh some, and say that this community takes care of each other. Then we would part ways. And everyone said it was other people who needed to talk. But everyone told us the story.

We listened as people told us how they continued to sleep with the TV on because they could still hear the wind. We listened as a man told us of kicking open a door to escape the storm, finishing the memory with, “I could hear people scream. They don’t tell you about the screams.”  We watched the power plays of disaster politics as state politicians and federal agencies made promises that cannot be kept. We watched chaos slowly turn into organized chaos.   And beneath it all, beneath the rubble, and the politics, and the ambition, and the trauma, and beneath all the windswept hopes and discarded dreams, we found what was important and what cannot be destroyed. We found the power and the strength of the human spirit.

God bless the people of Rockport, TX.