How Do The Residents Of Joplin Move On? @ Tony Cece

How Do The Residents Of Joplin Move On?

When I asked Randy, a 51-year-old Joplin resident, how he would move on after the tornado, he simply answered, “You’ve just got to live it every day, and the next day will be better than the day before and it will get better.” This is true both physically and emotionally. Each day in Joplin, progress is being made in the cleanup process as compassionate volunteers swarm the streets and lend their hands and hearts to the survivors of this terrible tornado.

We first met Randy on Friday when teams from Operation Blessing were walking the streets of Joplin looking for survivors who needed help and having them fill out work orders. He was proudly flying an American flag and had his windows boarded up warning would-be looters to “Keep Out.” When the tornado hit, Randy was at Walmart. Having seen the pile of debris that used to be Walmart, I asked him what happened and how he walked out. He said it sounded like a freight train rolling into town… shelves started shaking like an earthquake, and the building and items around him were lifted and dropped. He was in the back of the store near a concrete wall, but was knocked over onto debris that broke several ribs and a vertebrate in his back. As we talked, his movements were visibly stiff and painful.

He lifted his shirt to show a large, dark bruise on his back. He told me that as he left the store, the scene was like being in “a combat zone in Panama. It looked like an atomic bomb had gone off,” he said.

PHOTOGRAPHER’S REACTION:
The devastation left behind by this tornado is visually the most unreal thing I have seen. I flew into Haiti 3 days after the earthquake and spent weeks in the hardest hit areas of Port-au-Prince and the actual destruction and injuries were worse, but to stand in the middle of where this tornado hit Joplin is frightening. Having been at ground zero of the tornado for several days, I pictured it much the same way as Randy described it – like an atomic bomb had gone off. As a film major who studied movie making, the city was reminiscent of scenes Hollywood uses to depict Armageddon or the end of the world. I literally cannot imagine what went through the minds of survivors who crawled out of the debris to see nothing but devastation all around them. It would’ve been terrifying. That’s what makes Randy’s statements so powerful – while it will never be erased from the minds of these survivors, each day they find hope in a day better than the one before.