Approaching the end of the beginning

Well, I'm ready to pull back. I've worked about 208 hours as a Red Cross case manager over the last four and a half weeks. For the last few days I have had to use vacation leave. Everything is stacked up on my desk, bills have been left unpaid. I've managed to keep up with most of my online course on anger management. I have a keynote speech and a storytelling concert to do next week that I have not prepared for. So I am ready to take a long pause with Red Cross. I'll get my batteries recharged and then go on-call when I can spare the time.

I still have families with my cell number who are going to call needing help and I have one especially needy family I met last night that I need to find help (where in the Hades is Topeka??? I could have really used their help with this family.)

I feel sad though. We are now in the first week of responding to this flood in northeast Kansas. The case management is light years more difficult than helping the Katrina/Rita families because we have to make judgments about financial payments. This is very difficult and the lack of objective criteria is open to inconsistency.

Yesterday, another exhausted case manager was working with a client about 8:00 pm after 12 hours of working with families in this community’s church facility. This client was very upset (yes, *very* upset) that she didn’t get as much money as another family. I don’t want to say any more than this, except to point out that the case manager was the person I admire the most and has a great deal of experience. She was very tired. I visited with the family member as well, and might have made my coworker’s task more difficult. I still feel comfortable with how I dealt with her, but I think my manner upset my friend who was feeling more violated and combative toward the client (remember, think “fatigue”).

We are short on case managers, the need is great by a large number of families lining up for assistance (some of them unhappy with us), we are working near Topeka and we have no assistance from anyone from the Topeka Red Cross office to help us refer clients to resources in Topeka (a city with more than five times the population of Manhattan). The process of helping these families is light years more difficult than what we faced with hurricane families when they arrived here in Manhattan.

So I feel bad about slipping away from this work and will be thinking about my experienced colleague (retired and without other obligations) who is left with only a few other inexperienced case managers dealing with a complicated circumstance. I would have liked to be in a position where I could have stopped at the “end” of this challenge. I look forward to coming back to Red Cross in the future.

We have shifted now into a very different circumstance, a new phase in the crisis involving the entire range of challenges we have been facing that will require a dramatic shift in management for both shelter workers and case managers. I’ll talk about that in another entry to this journal.