Mental health in the wake of the CA fires : Paula Claycomb

©Sammy Roth, LA Times

16 January 2025

As the wildfires in the Los Angeles continue to rage, sustained by strong Santa Ana winds, I have tucked-away images of emergency situations where I served with UNICEF appearing unbidden in my mind. That got me to wondering if UNICEF has improved its ability to provide briefings to staff going into humanitarian situations and if counseling services have improved.

When I was asked to serve as daily SitRep writer during the Rwanda genocide in 1994, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. In the few days between accepting the assignment and leaving New York HQs, nobody offered any advice and I did not ask the right questions. It was thus a shock when I attended an inter-agency meeting of communications and reports officers on my first day at the Gigiri compound, to see dozens of photos of bodies, bloated and turned white by the Kagera River as they floated into Lake Victoria. Fellow staff members wept as they passed the photos around the huge table.

That was the beginning of my humanitarian experiences over the next several years, spending time in Goma, DRC (then Zaire) and later on in Dili, East Timor, and Darfur, Sudan. Those duty stations do not include post-war Mozambique in the early 1990s, when highways were still strewn with shattered tanks and survivors of forced amputations sat along the roadways. Nor Afghanistan during the first Taliban regime where, based in Islamabad, we saw the wounds on a female staff member’s arm where she had been struck by a multi-pronged wire whip by a Taliban as she reached for her daughter’s hand. Or helped free a male colleague from detention for having allowed a musical instrument to be played in his house. Nor Darfur, where we arrived in a village moments after it had been burned to the ground, the Janjaweed (now the dreaded RFP) sauntering away on their camels.

Decades later, I can still smell the unique odor of burning homes and of dead animals and human bodies. From all those duty stations and others, the images of emaciated bodies, donkeys struggling to carry their families away from burnt homes, mothers holding malnourished children while they awaited a tube of PlumpyNut have reappeared in my head.

Last week, when my son and his family were informed at 3:30 a.m. by roving police cars with loudspeakers to evacuate their home in Pasadena, CA, to escape the Eaton fire (one of three then burning), I was transported back to these and other periods of my life with UNICEF. Our son confirmed that one 24-hour day of their evacuation was so long and fraught with anxiety, from 6 in the morning ‘til late at night, that he could not remember what day and month it was. I remembered looking at the Acting Rep in an abandoned school in Dili, where UNICEF had set up its offices, and hearing him say, “I don’t know where I am right now.”

Fortunately, our son’s house was spared from the flames and they moved back in, shell shocked but healthy and grateful to have been spared the worst. Three of our granddaughter’s classmates lost their homes and two cousins remain with friends, one not knowing if her apartment building is still intact. All this while the incoming US President and his MAGA supporters (and newer supports like Elon and Vivek) threaten to hold the victims of the Los Angeles wildfires hostage to their efforts to raise the national debt limit, which is necessary to extend the 2017 tax cuts to billionaires and corporations. I have not seen a word of sympathy from the incoming administration.

What is the point of this little essay?

I think I started writing to share some of the horror of unwanted images that enter my mind from time to time even 30 years after my first genocide. Unsurprisingly, experts in emergencies are already noting that the mental issues resulting from these fires will be as serious as the physical loss of homes and livelihoods.

In addition, for many Americans, there is already a palpable sense of dread about what is to come, beginning next Monday afternoon, January 20th.

Does anyone know if UNICEF does a better job these days of briefing and de-briefing staff who serve in humanitarian postings – some of them four, five, six duty stations in a row as they demonstrate their ability to develop an education strategy or a supplies plan amidst such destruction and suffering?

Please do not think that I have put my head in the sand. Quite the contrary, I am an active member of Third Act New Mexico. We are a group of people over 60 who are taking direct action to mitigate the worst climate change. I am statewide coordinator for our Fossil Free Finance campaign. In the coming weeks, I will write more about this. I will ask for YOUR action in ensuring that your savings are invested with institutions that protect the environment, promote sustainability and practice good governance!

Paula Claycomb, Taos, New Mexico, USA