Last week, Narrative focused on South Carolina students who survived 2015’s historic “thousand-year flood.” This week, the focus shifts to the other side of the classroom, through the eyes of two teachers.
Elizabeth Webb and Louise Cruea survived South Carolina's flood before surviving a second massive flood in West Virginia the following summer. Their children, who were with them during both evacuations, have struggled with trauma from these disasters, like so many of the elementary-age children that Elizabeth and Louise teach.
In 2016, they shared their experience with StoryCorps, a national initiative to record and collect stories of everyday people. This excerpt was selected and produced by Linda Nunez.
TRANSCRIPT:
Elizabeth Webb: We're teachers, so we know, like, if you're around the age 4, around the age 7, 8, it's like a fear year where fear and anxiety start to become real to children. So, if something happens like that, it causes a lot of fear and a lot of questions.
Louise Cruea: When it rains, it's very matter-of-fact. “Is it gonna flood?” “Is it raining or is it flooding?” That's what we always hear, “Is it raining or is it flooding?” every single time it rains. My situation, though, with the four-year-old is way different. She's having a terrible time. After the second flood, she just…she can't take it. I mean, I had to try to kind of, like, explain it to her on her level. Like, I told her it was God. I think one day I told her it was God taking a shower and that if it's thundering, he's just stomping around too much, and he needed to cool the plants off. That worked for a while, but she, just the other day, actually, they had gone down to that same neighbor that had woken me up the morning of the flood. And Jane, my four-year-old, and my husband walked down there, and he called me and said, “You have to come.” I said, “Why do I have to come? It's raining.” And he said, “She's screaming, screaming uncontrollably.” If it's thundering, lightning, or raining, she thinks instantly it's gonna flood. I mean, we talk about the flood every single day. Thankfully, I have a really good friend who's a therapist, and I asked her about it, and she said as long as she's talking about it, it's fine. As long as it kind of stays, the outcome's positive. So, it's been really interesting because she loves baby dolls, so she plays with her babies every day. But I'd say almost every day her babies are evacuated and she…she'll take them, put them in my room and say, “I had to evacuate my babies, you need to watch them. I have to go back to the house to get a few things, but I'll be back.” I tried to really kind of keep a lot of it from her. That's why I sent my children away, especially during the first flood. But it's really affected her. It's been interesting to me. I'm just kind of keeping an eye on it. But my friend said, as long as children that age play, pretend play is how they work it out. And as long as the outcome is not bad, you know, as long as the outcome is, everybody's saved, everybody's fine, then it's fine. So, for now, I just kind of let her talk about it, and I'm just kind of taking that one day at a time.
Elizabeth Webb: She starts school this year where we teach, and I actually teach the grade that she'll be in. And I think there's going to have to be a major conversation with her on tornado and fire drill warning days, because even though it's a drill in her mind, I teach second, and I had some children in my class that were affected by it. So, I really kind of tried to prepare myself before I went back to school because I thought they would have a lot of problems with it. But it was pretty interesting. A lot of times kids…they just don't talk about it. They stop talking, and then that's when you have to just decide what's going on. You know, I had a kid that his house burned down this year, and he just never talked about it. But he, at school, that was kind of his escape. Then he'd come home, and he was having a hard time. And I think that kind of happened probably with some kids around here, too. But, you know, everybody's doing the best they can.
