Contributor: Rhonda Barton

New Orleans, Louisiana - Lynn Hobbs lost her home, her office, and - worst of all - her eldest son in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Such circumstances might break and embitter a person - but not Hobbs.

Multiple tragedies have only strengthened her resolve to provide eye care and health education to the children of this battered city.

Hobbs is the director and dynamo behind The Eyes Have It, a nonprofit agency that offers vision screenings, eye examinations and free or discounted eyeglasses at almost a dozen public schools scattered around New Orleans. In the wake of the storm, with all but a handful of the city's schools closed and medical services severely strained, Hobbs and her staff have managed to screen almost 3,000 youngsters - including 700 displaced students in four schools in Baton Rouge.

Mercy Corps helped Hobbs's organization continue and expand its life-changing work with a grant of $18,480. These funds have paid for a computer and partial salaries for two clinical technicians who assist Hobbs in her work. The funding is especially critical this year since one of Hobbs's primary sources of revenue - the Orleans Parish school district - remains in financial and physical ruins.

"Vision care for children is one of the city's greatest unmet needs, both before and after Hurricane Katrina," Hobbs says.

A fortunate change in plans

Meeting the need wasn't something she planned on as her life's work: Hobbs was an established mental health social worker when her son Jonathon begged her to help one of his high school football teammates.

"He couldn't read the playbook and the coach had written him off as mentally retarded," Hobbs remembers, "but Jonathon said the kid needed glasses and I had to ‘hook him up.' I said, ‘why can't his mom do that,' but Jonathon told me she was on crack."

Hobbs persuaded a friend to screen the teen, who had minus 700 vision in one eye - meaning that he had severe visual impairment. Shortly after that, the football coach talked her into arranging screenings for all of the school's teams.

"Since my job was to assist in developing learning plans for special education students, I noticed that a lot of kids were wrongly placed in that program or labeled as mentally retarded because they had a vision or hearing problem," Hobbs says. That fact got her thinking that all children deserved an accurate diagnosis and corrective action, if needed.

Hobbs started The Eyes Have It four years ago - her office a card table in her living room and her funding coming from her social work paycheck - and served 900 youngsters in her first year. In the 2004-2005 school year, the agency saw almost 5,700 children and then contacted parents of the 60 percent of youngsters who failed their screenings and needed more extensive exams.

One boy - described by Hobbs as "a sweet quiet young man who was only seeing through shadows" - was discovered to have retinitis pigmentosa, an irreversible condition that eventually leads to blindness. Hobbs was able to educate him and his family about the disease and link him to services that helped prepare him for a future without sight.

"This program is really needed because there's a massive shortage of health care professionals in New Orleans now, and even when we had more, this population would fall through the cracks," says optometrist Eugene Oppman, a volunteer with The Eyes Have It. "[These children] need correction so they can see the board, see their books."

For school nurse Daphne Walker, the most important part of Hobbs's program is that it offers all services on site. "They do the exams and even deliver the glasses to the school so that takes care of children with transportation problems and those whose parents can't take time off work to get them to a doctor," she says.

At the elementary school where Walker works, The Eyes Have It screened more than 300 students this year. Many, says Walker, had "gone years without detecting eye problems."

The vision to make a difference

One of the best testimonials comes directly from one of the students whose life was transformed by the program.

"Being able to see clearly has made a difference and understanding my vision problems has made me feel better and work harder in class," says Jasmine, a high school student with a radiant smile and large, round, wire-rimmed glasses. " Having no insurance and still being able to see the eye doctor at school and pick out the cutest glasses on campus means a lot to me."

Like Jasmine, no youngster is turned away for lack of funds. Still, Hobbs's heart goes out to the children who she knows need help but can't be reached.

"We've gotten calls from kids who say they lost their glasses in the Superdome or broke them when they evacuated and they don't know where to go," she says. "I feel bad because I can't reach them where they are now."

Hobbs doesn't let herself stay down for long, though. She has too many children counting on her and a son's memory to honor. Jonathon Hobbs, the inspiration for the program, died in a collision with a speeding truck two days after he returned to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He was 22 years old.

"After that, I was going to shut things down. But then I had a dream about him," Hobbs recalls tearfully. "He said to me, ‘you've got to keep going.' And I am - it's what keeps me from thinking about what I've lost."

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New Orleans, Louisiana — Rebuilding the ravaged Gulf Coast isn't simply a matter of bricks and mortar, plywood and stucco. Like the splintered houses and barren landscape, the emotional well-being of the area's residents was ripped apart by last fall's storms and must be carefully repaired.

With the 2006 hurricane season already here, the need to heal the psychic scars in one of the region's most vulnerable populations, the children of greater New Orleans and coastal Mississippi, has never been greater. Partnering with the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, Mercy Corps has invested $600,000 to restore a collapsed system of youth support services. One element of the initiative, Comfort for Kids, reaches out to educators, social workers, and health professionals, giving them the tools they need to minister to traumatized youngsters.

Reckoning With Loss

In a brightly lit classroom of a turn-of-the-century settlement house, now a New Orleans community center, trainer Olayeela Daste welcomes about two dozen youth workers, some of the 2,000 whom Mercy Corps hopes to reach — and, through them, thousands more children.

In attendance today include nurses, teachers, mental health counselors, and day care directors. All were touched by Katrina. Two still live in cramped FEMA trailers. Daste, a single mother of six, discloses matter-of-factly that she also lost her home to the waters that flooded 148 square miles here.

Daste passes out small sheets of brown paper and asks the participants to take a moment to write down their own emotions since Katrina. The words, posted on the front wall, spill out like a dark river of despair touched with a few rays of light. Tired, frustrated, strong, scared, brave, hot, displaced, sad, guilty, pissed, dedicated, hopeful, overwhelmed, blessed, read the signs.

"I can understand blessed," Daste says. "I sleep on a friend's sofa, but I met someone who lives in a car."

It's clear that to help heal the city's children, these caregivers must first come to terms with their own grief. Strategies fly around the room. "I practice my faith," says one member of the group. Others suggest going for walks, reading, getting plenty of sleep and healthy food, finding normalcy in routine, and connecting to scattered relatives by cell phone or the Internet. "Many things we do for ourselves also work for children," Daste notes.

Preparing for the Worst

With the 2006 hurricane season here, and the experiences of the previous one still burned in memory, many children in the Gulf region are exhibiting troubling behaviors.

"We've seen a lot of aggression. Even children who have outgrown biting are starting to bite again," says Sharon Gancarz-Davies, a social worker who deals with babies and toddlers, as well as their older siblings. She says that some of her young cases also cry more and are harder to comfort now.

Daste asks the participants to reflect on how to recreate for children the "pillars of security" — people, routine, ritual, and place. The exchange of ideas offers new approaches as well as an affirmation of steps that the youth workers are already taking.

For example, a toy-lending library can help replace playthings lost in the storm; art therapy is a powerful tool for children to deal with feelings that can't be verbalized; and establishing a predictable routine of storytimes and other activities goes a long way toward restoring a sense of order. For younger children, playing with construction toys can provide a sense of rebuilding their environment. Older children can feel empowered by writing letters to lawmakers, creating a Web site to share community information, or gathering donated supplies for hurricane preparedness kits.

Trainer Olayeela Daste, far left, demonstrates some musical instruments that caregivers can use to promote healing in children. Photo: Rhonda Barton for Mercy Corps

Building on Resiliency

For children of all ages, hurricane workbooks provide a powerful tool for processing traumatic experiences and moving on. Mercy Corps is providing thousands of copies of two publications, My Hurricane Story and My Katrina and Rita Workbook, to schools and health care workers in Louisiana and Mississippi. Together with a curriculum titled What Happened to My World, the resources guide children and adults in the healing process.

Dr. Janet Johnson, a Tulane University associate professor of psychiatry and an evaluator for the Mercy Corps program, walks the group through the workbooks, which she used successfully with hurricane evacuees in Houston.

"It was the most amazing thing," she informs the gathering. "They had such a quieting effect on the kids. It was very poignant to see what was in their workbooks, and the art was heartbreaking, but it calmed them down."

Johnson believes the materials and trainings like this one are an invaluable part of restoring psychological well-being, and that most young people in New Orleans will be able to heal without needing mental health interventions.

"Children are resilient in general," Johnson says, "and most people get through disasters using existing resources and their own coping mechanisms. The problem with this disaster though is that the normal network of support systems — churches, neighborhoods, schools — was wiped out. You weren't left with much to turn to. But, New Orleans is resilient. People are back and they're determined to maintain their culture. I've been very heartened by that."

Taking Away Lessons

As the session draws to a close, Daste gives out a constellation of construction paper stars that proclaim, "What I know now is…".

One by one, the men and women in the room fill in the blank. A child psychologist offers, "I can easily say that regardless of the everyday annoyances of life today in New Orleans, I am so astounded that people here can get up in the morning, come to trainings like this one, and be committed to helping others." A daycare teacher says she knows there's still a community and things will get better as time goes on. Another educator simply states, "The children of New Orleans are all heroes."

One final epiphany lingers over the group as everyone gets ready to return to their jobs and to life in a city bracing for a new hurricane season. "What I know now," one star reads, "is that nothing is ever certain, and that's okay."

View our Hurricane Katrina publications to find out more about the materials referenced in this article.

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