Relief Worker’s Advice: Tend to Your Own Needs as You Tend to Others

Dan Kurtenbach knows only too well the months and years of hard work that lie ahead for charity workers in New York, Washington, and elsewhere who are now helping people affected by the September 11 terrorist attacks.

As president of Oklahoma Goodwill Industries in Oklahoma City at the time of the bombing there,

Mr. Kurtenbach headed the Resource Coordination Committee of charities and governments that gathered every week for more than a year — and then every other week until last year — to figure out how best to respond to victims and their families.

He advises charity leaders today to be mindful of the toll the disaster is taking on their own lives.

He cautions relief workers and others helping the victims of the September 11 attacks to settle into a routine as quickly as possible and realize that helping people with financial, medical, and mental-health needs will take years, not months. When he talked with various charity officials on the East Coast after the recent attacks, Mr. Kurtenbach says, he “tried to impress on them that they need to be as calm and as calculating as they can be: Don’t react too much, think about the process, think about your skills in managing and your skills in coping. Because the immediacy of the situation is overwhelming.”

Mr. Kurtenbach, who recently left Oklahoma City’s Goodwill after 14 years to join Goodwill Industries of Central Arizona, in Phoenix, says that charity officials providing aid need to step back from their work every so often and look at how the long hours of emotionally exhausting work might be affecting their own lives.

Seeing ‘Titanic’

It took Mr. Kurtenbach nearly three years after the Oklahoma City bombing to realize that he needed help coming to terms with its impact. He had gone to see the movie Titanic with his wife, expecting to be entertained by the historical aspects of the tale. But the movie’s portrayal of the ship’s final minutes made him remember people crying at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building when he arrived 10 minutes after the truck bomb exploded.

“For the next two weeks, every single night, I dreamt about the bombing,” says Mr. Kurtenbach. “And I realized, there’s something going on here. I found out I had post-traumatic stress disorder and didn’t even know it.”

Mr. Kurtenbach says the diagnosis took him by surprise, particularly because he’d spent the previous years hearing about the disorder and helping people who had suffered from it. “We’d had periodic debriefings on how to handle post-traumatic stress disorder, and all of us in a very intellectual way said, OK, I understand PTSD,” he says. “But until it really happens, you don’t really understand it. It’s sort of like when your mother dies. Somebody can say, this is how you’ll feel, and you know that it’s tragic and sad and all. But until it really happens to you, you don’t really know what it’s like.”

Lots of things can be a trigger, Mr. Kurtenbach says. “You can watch a movie, you can be at a party, it could be hearing a siren. And somehow, for whatever reason, that time when you heard the siren, it just brings it forward.”

Among the signs to watch for, he says, “is if you have an unknown fear of something — you say, this isn’t real, I can’t go on the subway, why can’t I go on a subway? You need to talk to somebody. Because it can be corrected many times just really simply by talking to a professional. And it doesn’t have to negatively impact your life for a long period of time, if you can recognize it when it happens.”

Mr. Kurtenbach says it will take several years before New York and Washington get a handle on just how many people were hurt in some way by the attacks.

Right now, most charity officials are helping those who had some immediate connection to the attacks, such as family and friends of the nearly 4,000 people who were killed. “But in three, four, five years you are going to have many other people,” says Mr. Kurtenbach. He says Oklahoma City experienced suicides in the years after the attacks and rises in cases of spousal and child abuse, as well as divorces.

Mr. Kurtenbach says that even some city residents with no direct ties to the bombing, other than what they witnessed on television and through their personal connections to people killed or injured, sometimes suffered emotional distress. “They were survivors in the broadest sense of survivor. Not, as I say, where the pebble hits the water, but in ripples beyond that, and they were impacted.”

Getting On With Life

The long-term nature of disaster recovery often proves to be a challenge in and of itself, says Mr. Kurtenbach. “One of the things I’m sure they’ll find in New York and other places, especially with all the money available with this disaster, is that people not directly affected by the tragedy will want to forget it, in a certain sense,” he says. “Most will want to go on with their lives. And that’s what they are going to say, or at least their actions will say it: Let’s get on with it. We don’t want to talk about the terrorist attack forever.”

He tells charity workers to try to remember that such impatience in a community is natural, and to try not to take it personally. “Charity people must be stalwart in their dedication to service and not be intimidated by the lack of interest,” he said. “It is a long-term recovery. For the most part, the agencies understand that. It’s the community that doesn’t.”

To keep track of all of the various needs of victims over the years that stem from a tragedy like a terrorist attack or tornado, Mr. Kurtenbach says a central computerized database proves invaluable. In Oklahoma City, he says, the database, set up by the United Way of Metro Oklahoma City with the help of other charities and corporations, could be viewed by 45 charity officials and others “on a need to know” basis, and was “password protected” to keep information confidential. The goal of such a system should be two-pronged, he says: to insure accountability of charities and avoid duplication of services.

But just as important as the computer program, he says, were the Resource Coordination Committee meetings in which charity leaders shared information about donors and aid, and coordinated their response.

Mr. Kurtenbach says that in the six years since the Oklahoma City bombing, technology has improved to the point that the use of e-mail or other electronic tools might help avoid the need for weekly in-person meetings. But he cautions against an overreliance on technology. “Charity people should actually hear the voice of a case manager presenting a case and hear other people saying, Well, have you tried this? What about this? Or, I can talk to so and so.”

Such personal exchanges help charity officials cope with the stress of their work and can help cut down on confusion, says Mr. Kurtenbach.

Building Relationships

In fact, relationships among charity officials need to be built and nurtured long before a disaster hits, says Mr. Kurtenbach, so that the nonprofit organizations they lead can react quickly. He recommends that local nonprofit leaders meet with each other regularly at breakfasts or other informal events, so that they can build up a level of trust.

“Even if you are in a large city, you could have people from 30 or 40 key groups periodically just sit down and talk, to get together and get to know each other,” he says.

Mr. Kurtenbach says that, in his new job as a development and marketing executive for Goodwill in Phoenix, he is already working to “get to know all the other nonprofits, the significant ones, those that are going to be called upon in times of community stress — the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, Catholic Charities, the Boy Scouts, the United Way, the Girl Scouts, St. Vincent de Paul.”

Adds Mr. Kurtenbach: “You can kind of count on it that there’s gonna be some type of disaster — let’s hope it’s not terrorism — an earthquake in the West, or hurricanes, or floods, or tornadoes. And why wait until the stressful situation comes to get to know each other? Why not just go have a cup of coffee with people periodically, get to know them? That’s very important.”