Buffalo Chapter Volunteer Bandages Disaster Victims’ Broken Hearts
By Jessica Vosgerchian, The Buffalo News, N.Y.
Jul. 28–During a recent candlelight vigil in Sioux City, Iowa, Peggy Smith watched as a Boy Scout standing for the service collapsed.
The boy, attending a vigil for the Scouts who died when a tornado tore through their camp on June 11, righted himself — and then collapsed again.
“He needs to sit down,” Smith said, recalling the order she barked across the quiet vigil. “Sometimes, you have to get real direct — I mean with simple stuff — in a disaster.”
Smith knows how to take charge of emotionally tense situations. A retired psychiatric nurse from Kenmore, she is one of the most active volunteers at the Buffalo Chapter of the American Red Cross, which has been putting a greater emphasis on mental health in recent years.
Smith has been on-site for many national disasters in the past 12 years — Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, blizzards in Arkansas and tornadoes in Iowa.
In Iowa, Smith worked with the families and fellow Boy Scouts who gathered to wait for news of who survived the tornado that killed four Scouts and injured 48 others when it destroyed a remote camp. When that news came, her job was to comfort the mourners — even as she mourned herself.
“I didn’t think I would be so sad,” she said. In Iowa, mental health workers organized a support group for volunteers depressed by the situation, Smith said.
“I don’t think [the volunteers] anticipated the impact that these disasters would have on them, as well,” Smith said.
When Smith began working for the Red Cross, volunteers with a mental health specialty were in high demand. In the 1990s, the agency, realizing the need for psychological help at disaster sites, began sending more mental health workers.
“It became about meeting the needs of the person holistically,” said Ken Turner, senior director of emergency services for the Buffalo Chapter. “That’s why the Red Cross got involved and qualified [mental health] as one of its areas of service.”
In 1996, Smith, then a nurse at Buffalo Psychiatric Center, received a call from a co-worker connected to the Red Cross who said mental health workers were needed in Puerto Rico and southern regions of the United States that had been ravaged by a hurricane.
After a two-week assignment at flood sites in North Carolina, Smith said, she knew she wouldn’t stay away if the Red Cross called her again.
It soon did; in her 12 years as a volunteer, Smith has been assigned to more than 20 national disasters. She said the only large U. S. disaster she has missed is California’s forest fires in October, which occurred while she was on vacation in Italy.
She has to balance the emotional needs of the world’s disaster victims with those of her family. Smith, who is sometimes gone for months, missed Father’s Day this year to be in Iowa and the birth of her daughter’s first child to be in Thailand after a tsunami.
For her husband, Bob Smith, his pride in his wife’s work overcomes his loneliness.
“When she goes for a long stretch, I don’t like that,” he said. “Thank God all my friends aren’t in the Red Cross.”
jvosgerchian@buffnews.com
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