Looking back...

I am now home, safe and sound in Saint Paul, MN... and here are some things I've learned (or re-learned) from my experience last week...

1) You can prepare for a disaster, but you can never be truly prepared for a disaster. Adding on to that, no two disasters are the same.

2) When working 12 hour days, humor is very important to keeping your sanity. So is being fed.

3) Courage is often found in the most unexpected places... for example the man I met in the trailer park that had been hit really hard by the flood. At first glance, he's nothing you expect to find in a hero... but the day of the flood, he rescued a good number of his neighbors, carrying some of them to safety on his shoulders when the water (with only God knows what in it...) got chest and even almost neck deep. I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty heroic.

4) Wet, moldy insulation and gook left over by a flood smells awful.

5) Disasters bring out the best (the INCREDIBLE number of people who called in to volunteer, who just wanted to do something to help thier neighbors) and the worst (in this case, looters...) in people.

6) Winston Churchill had it right... "Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that matters".

Well, that's all I have for now. If I think of something else to share, I'll post again, otherwise, I'll talk to you again next time the Disaster Response Team is deployed.

Signing off... for now...

~Theresa