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-Reader Submitted Article
Urban Survival
Homo Sapiens are a Social Being
I live in a city.
I have a grab-and-go bag with the kinds of emergency supplies you
sell, and I'm looking to get it more and more complete. My first
aid kits are sources of amusement to my sedentary coworkers, and
yesterday's big find was a pocket-sized crank-powered flashlight
that will never need batteries. I keep a reflective blanket and
some super-absorbent cloths for drying, scrubbing, washing, and
cushioning, some disposable wipes for when there's no water for
washing, survival food, a spare bottle for water, money, and maps.
But when the day comes, if it ever comes, that I have to grab my
emergency bag, shove the cat into the carrier with the spare food
and water, and bolt, I may very well end up not halfway up a mountain
with not another human being in three days' travel, but in a shelter,
with 500 people who have just experienced disaster, and may not
have packed emergency bags.
When I started planning my emergency kit, I started thinking about
what survival means in a setting like that. In a shelter, I wouldn't
have to start a fire - in fact, I probably wouldn't be allowed to
- but there are other issues which arise.
Survival means not just maintaining existence, but thriving. Being
able to sleep restfully. Having a solid, rational basis for hope.
And it means having positive interactions with the people around
you. There are animals, like tigers, which are solitary and territorial.
They do not require each other for survival, and thrive when they
are well apart. And there are social animals: bees, ants, otters,
lions...humans. Survival in an urban disaster that throws me into
close quarters with other people, wrecks my privacy, and threatens
all of us with a dull, numbing despair involves more than my trusty
first aid kit and reflective blanket - though it requires that,
too.
And that's why, next to the 'grab-and-go' small duffel bag I keep
with my poncho, my lighter, my waterproof pouch with indelible pen,
my multiple lists in different places of all the phone numbers I
may need, and next to the cat-carrier with spare food and water
in it, I've got a third emergency bag, and that's my shelter kit.
Nothing in my shelter kit runs on batteries. Nothing is expensive.
There's nothing in it I'd be angry to lose or have broken. It's
not there to supplant the services of the shelters themselves. It's
there to have things to offer, as and when I can. And so my shelter
kit has multiple combs and picks and hundreds of tiny hair elastics.
(If you followed - or were involved in - the Katrina aftermath,
one of the most engaging and normalizing activities kids were spending
hours on was doing each others' hair.) It has six or seven well-worn,
used paper back novels with my name along the spine to increase
the chance of them coming back, in order to go out again to someone
else.
It has a dozen individual-sized dispensers of hand-sanitizer, and
I'm working on a way of packing up as many containers as possible
each holding a week's worth of vitamin and immune-boosting supplements,
because if there's a better place to get sick than a shelter, I'm
having a hard time thinking about it.
My survival kit for shelter has several 8-crayon boxes of cheap
crayons, and flimsy coloring books and scrap paper, and there are
pencils with erasers and crosswords, word-finds, and sudoku puzzles.
$10 can buy a lot of sparkly, pretty plastic beads, and a whole
lot of string - useful to have in any case - to string them on.
I've got $0.79 25-piece jigsaw puzzles, and a lot of packs of cards.
I remember, 20 years ago, being told that if I went to Russia,
I should take blue jeans and panty-hose with me to trade with. That's
not what I'm talking about here. I'm not packing these things with
the idea that I'll get them back, or that they'll buy me any favors,
any more than I think I can provide for all the needs of everyone
I end up with. I absolutely can't. It's not my job, and it's not
within my capabilities.
But I can do something, and what I can do, I will do, because humans
need each other, and because once food, shelter, warmth, and safety
have been taken care of, we're still not done.
-Heather Gardener
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