Jermol Stinson

“I think about how cut off we were from Africa — how our culture, our language, our God was taken away from us. So I think about New Orleans and it’s like, ‘Well, this is where I come from. This is where my family comes from.’ … As a young man, one thing that really struck me when I walked down streets like Esplanade [Avenue] with the brick streets and the brick sidewalks: I’d say to myself that somewhere in my ancestors’ history, I’m taking the exact same footsteps that they took. I took great pride in the fact that I had a large family and that I was from New Orleans. … That filled me with so much pride.” – Jermol Stinson

There has been, of course, some excellent reporting on post-Katrina New Orleans from the very beginning. Who can forget the Robert Siegel interview of Michael Chertoff on Sept. 1, 2005? Recently, hard-won correctives to the mainstream story are being published with increasing frequency: A.C. Thompson’s investigative work documenting the vigilante murders of young black men in Algiers, Samuel Freedman’s piece on churches in the Lower 9th Ward, and Laura Sheeter’s BBC interview of Deacon Harold Toussaint’s experience with the military in Mid-City the week after the storm. Collectively, these efforts five years after the fact bring some relief and help to puncture, if not shatter, the feeling of living in an unending Twilight-Zone episode.

From the point of view of almost all of the black survivors I interviewed, the worst “anniversary” journalistic treatments echo the unabashedly white power narrative, which can be summed up thus: “Historical” New Orleans (read Uptown, the French Quarter, Lakeview and parts of Gentilly) is New Orleans. We’ve been back for years now. New Orleans is better than ever. Our schools and our medical facilities are flourishing like never before. Hurricane Katrina was a blessing in disguise.

Doubtless there are many white people for whom this narrative summary aptly captures their experiences and feelings. It should be one component of the grand meta-narrative. But when it is allowed to stand for the whole, when it is propagated as if it is the only narrative that matters, then it effaces other equally important, arguably more interesting, narratives and it insults nonwhite people, displaced or otherwise.

“Our job is to document, as meticulously and as honestly as we can, the complex workings of a vast machinery rooted in a political economy that only a romantic would term fragile. What is fragile is rather our enterprise of creating a more truthful accounting and fighting amnesia.” – Paul Farmer

Slightly more than 12 hours after an NBC anchorman read from the script of the transcendent narrative about how much better post-Katrina medical care is in New Orleans, I observe that half of the church is missing this emotionally fraught Sunday morning. The answer, it seems, lies in a volunteer-run, dental-care and eye-examination program in a nearby public park. One 72-year-old woman in fragile health got up at 4 a.m. to stand in line to have her teeth cleaned, according to her daughter, Kim. All around them were men, women, and children of varying ages and class backgrounds waiting for tooth extractions because they no longer had any other viable options. Where is the investigative journalist who will explore this challenge to the mainstream narrative?

One way to make disaster reporting less traumatizing would be to make sure that all of the major groups are represented in the narrative. It is offensive to middle-class and upper-class African-Americans that the black diaspora is mistaken as overwhelmingly poor. The empty houses in New Orleans East testify to the substantial loss of middle-class professionals. The triumphant narrative leaves many people feeling particularly isolated. Even when the cameras move to the Lower 9th Ward and an African-American focus, the 100,000 displaced people continue to feel neglected and forgotten. They too worked two or three jobs, paid taxes, taught our students, delivered first-rate medical care to all their patients, and supported the Saints loyally as others were going to the games with paper bags over their heads. Exploring the conundrums would make the news feel less surreal. Why would people who loved a city so passionately not be able to move home five years after the storm?

Audiences need to be reminded of the complicated histories preceding contemporary events because very few people bring with them an accurate sense of history, especially of a group other than their own, to the reading of any isolated text. For example, it is easy to blame elderly homeowners who have been strong-armed into giving up their land for being under-educated, if, that is, one forgets the realities of their childhoods: segregation, low wages for blacks, and the desire many young men felt to abandon an education that seemed pointless in their world in order to financially support their overworked, exhausted mothers. If we don’t know the history of Hurricane Betsy and the Lower 9th Ward, then we don’t understand that the original homeowners who risked their lives in at least one major war — in exchange for the dream of homeownership away from the reaches of an unwelcoming dominant society — already rebuilt their homes, lives, and families from scratch once. And we don’t know to ask what is so different about 2010. Who were the builders who made it possible to stretch the SBA loans of the mid-1960s enough to rebuild? And to which cities were they relocated in 2005?

Similarly, too many of us come to each new story with our belief in equal opportunities for all intact. We need to have our memories refreshed routinely. We forget that the damage to New Orleans was a product of the Army Corps of Engineer’s negligence and not Hurricane Katrina. We need to be reminded of how the deportations from New Orleans after the storm were organized, how much choice deportees had over their destination points, and what category of people was transported furthest from home. Perhaps we never knew that the homeowners of the Lower 9th Ward were prevented from refurbishing their furniture and rebuilding their houses for over four months, while other homeowners from different neighborhoods were allowed to start after two or three weeks. Maybe we have not read that the average difference between the amount of money given to white and black homeowners for rebuilding was approximately $10,000, irrespective of the cost of repairs for actual damages. Probably we need help imagining what it is like to work a full-time, low-paying job in Houston or Dallas, raise a family, and commute back to New Orleans to wrangle with insurance adjusters, Road Home bureaucrats, and the contractors rebuilding one’s home. If we have never dealt with FEMA or Road Home, it may not be readily apparent the extent to which we will have to file the same paperwork multiple times because of bureaucratic ineptitude.

Cynthia Banks

Cynthia Delores Banks has been overcoming adversity since she was five years old and her family’s house burnt down because of faulty wiring. She credits the Desire Project to which they were moved by the Red Cross with teaching her resourcefulness. When her husband died during open heart surgery and left her with four children under the age of 14, she moved from New York back to New Orleans, made a down payment on a house in Lake Carmel, and kept the note paid by working two, full-time, professional jobs. When her oldest son, Jermol Stinson, was shot in the neck, she orchestrated around-the-clock volunteer homecare for him. After Katrina, Banks fixed up a rundown house near Dallas, Texas, and began working and driving 60 hours a week as an uninsured, home health nurse. On weekends, she commuted to New Orleans to oversee the rebuilding of her house. Stress and chronic exhaustion led to a heart attack and strokes in the fall of 2008. If this story stood as a metaphor for the resilience of the people in the diaspora and the breadth and width of the obstacles they are facing, then perhaps political leaders would begin to expend energy thinking of ways to lessen the obstacles to returning, while simultaneously implementing a plan to woo our people back home where they are needed and wanted.

D’Ann Penner, Ph.D., is the co-editor, with Keith C. Ferdinand, M.D., of “Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond,” which in 2009 won the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Leadership in Journalism Award. She is at work updating the counter-narratives of Overcoming Katrina to release them more directly into a public sphere visited primarily by journalists who cover trauma and racism on a daily basis. Currently the Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, Penner is a second-year law student at Loyola University New Orleans and works at the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans.

Her article, “Assault Rifles, Separated Families, and Murder in Their Eyes: Unasked Questions after Hurricane Katrina,” was recently published by Cambridge University’s Journal of American Studies.

“Yet the history of my family, like that of all black Southerners, is a history of dispossession. We loved the land and worked the land, but we never owned it; and even if we bought land, as my great-grandfather did after the Civil War, it was always in danger of being taken away, as his was, during the period following Reconstruction.” – Alice Walker

Two weeks ago I sat with Reverend Mildred Alcorn on her red couch in a small rental unit on Royal Street in the Lower 9th Ward, only blocks from her former home. Before the storm, the now 58-year-old woman combined ministry with her work as the director of a program of last resort for homeless women they helped transition to employment and safe housing.

“We were their last hope. Failure was not an option,” she recalled.

As Alcorn reflected on the fates of the significant people in her pre-storm social network — the sisters, nephews, god-children, friends, and church members who all lived within a six-block radius before Katrina — she paused to admit that she still tears up every two to three days as she worries about how they are coping in distant cities. She misses their companionship achingly. “Some losses can’t be overcome,” she gently chides me, the co-editor of Overcoming Katrina.

Repeatedly over five years, I have witnessed the pain of separation. It is palpable in the intense hugs and unbidden tears of embrace when someone loved by an entire congregation makes it home for a rare visit. It was there again this morning, Aug. 29, 2010, when Pastor Cotton announced from the pulpit that the entire church was going to Greensboro, N.C. the fourth Sunday in September to visit Ms. Pearl. She has been in a nursing home in North Carolina since Katrina. Our informant, Ms. Pearl’s niece, reported that her aunt smiled for the first time in three months when Cotton visited her a few weeks ago. Our hearts are heavy at the injustice of not being able to bring her comfort in her old age as she did for us as we were coming of age, raising our own children, and finding our way in a world filled with obstacles, naysayers, and distractions. She always had a bowl of steaming hot gumbo or red beans and rice for us when we passed by. Ms. Pearl listened to our hopes and dreams. She believed in us when we didn’t believe in ourselves. To the outsider, our elderly people may not seem that special, with their love for fried food, occasional missing tooth, pressed but worn clothes, and dated hair styles. But to us, they are national treasures.

Before our eyes, our rigorously independent elders are dying prematurely or being transformed into renters or occupants of a distant relative’s spare bedroom. Our people are losing their land, land that miraculously for southern African-Americans had been in the family for three and four generations. Without their community of young people, pastors, and public-interest lawyers, countless elderly homeowners from the Lower 9th Ward gave up their struggles with the insurance companies for reimbursement because of a handful of missing papers and/or capitulated to Road Home without a fight, trading their homesteads for $5,000. From the vantage point of the Civil District Court, Parish of Orleans, on an almost daily basis, I see the titles to property that had been in the family for generations transferred to strangers with as little as $500 to quiet the tax lien and money enough to pay court filing costs and an attorney’s fees. Meanwhile, the original homeowner may well be depressed and stranded in Houston or Birmingham with no notice that his family plot is in danger of slipping away. Our mayor, Mitch Landrieu, has taken advantage of this five-year marker to let us know that he considers dealing with “blighted” properties one of the most important items on his agenda.

Lost is also a sense of easy optimism about the future, an intuitive expectation that a linear relationship exists between hard work and justice. Sometimes we falter in our hope that justice-loving, fair-minded people from around the world will stand with us as long as it takes to right the wrongs of an unnatural disaster.

D’Ann Penner, Ph.D., is the co-editor, with Keith C. Ferdinand, M.D., of “Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond,” which in 2009 won the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Leadership in Journalism Award. She is at work updating the counter-narratives of Overcoming Katrina to release them more directly into a public sphere visited primarily by journalists who cover trauma and racism on a daily basis. Currently the Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, Penner is a second-year law student at Loyola University New Orleans and works at the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans.

Her article, “Assault Rifles, Separated Families, and Murder in Their Eyes: Unasked Questions after Hurricane Katrina,” was recently published by Cambridge University’s Journal of American Studies.

FIRST IN A SERIES: Reflections from an Oral Historian

The mood at Jerusalem Baptist Church’s temporary meeting place in Central City was subdued this morning, August 29, 2010. It wasn’t until the final benedictory prayer that Hurricane Katrina was even acknowledged. In an understated voice, the usually ebullient Pastor Aldon Cotton began his supplication, “God, I still don’t understand. [long pause] I’m just letting you know.” His reference point was so obvious to all of us in attendance that the words “Hurricane Katrina” remained unspoken. Cotton went on to plead for God’s special presence to be felt by the mother, not a church member, of the boy who was murdered on the Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, for our members still stranded “abroad”–his euphemism for points of exile beyond New Orleans–and for all of us who lost people as a result of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath and the government’s transporting of our people to random, distant corners of the United States, from which 100,000 have still not returned.

“… in all of Baby [Sugg’s] life … men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.” – Toni Morrison

Those of us who lost people, not only through death, because of government negligence and human greed, dread this day of the year more than any other. It is the one day the media can be counted upon to remember our existence. Month after month of silent neglect is interrupted by an eruption of disturbing images and more misrepresentations about what happened — and is happening, still — to our communities, our people.

How journalists have covered “Katrina” stories, which stories they have chosen to tell, and whose side they have taken has mattered from the beginning. For example, the journalists who focused on the “looting” story helped to shape the government’s decision to focus on “crowd control” rather than on humanitarian, post-disaster relief, thereby slowing down the delivery of food, water and medical supplies to people whose own provisions had been submerged in flood waters caused by the failure of the negligently maintained levees to function properly after the hurricane.

The way disaster stories are framed, initially, lingers with people no matter how overwhelming the evidence against them or the disclaimers quietly buried in fine print weeks after the fact. Telling Katrina stories in an omniscient voice from the vantage point of Uptown or the French Quarter has had long-term consequences for African-Americans. Not only were black survivors herded into the convention center, Superdome, and other similarly under-equipped, over-crowded transfer arenas, but their journey to cities of refuge were made more traumatic by the extraordinarily hostile reactions they encountered along the way. One young Xavier student recalled how her bus of convention center survivors was met by white men with nooses at a rest stop in Arkansas. Her voice was still trembling three weeks later as she recounted their threats and derogatory language. Reverend Charles Duplessis and his extended family were prevented from buying gasoline to complete their trip to Tuskegee, Ala., by not one but three gas station owners in Mississippi. Second-hand trauma was experienced by the people I interviewed as a result of watching the ordeal on television and seeing how the people they knew and love were being slandered as violent, lazy looters. Toussaint Webster, a junior at Morehouse College in 2005, remembers trying to avoid a television set during the week after Katrina as he tried to care for his displaced parents, handle his duties as a residence hall counselor, and stay on top of his studies because all of his friends stopped him or texted him to ask if he knew how negatively the people of New Orleans were being portrayed on television. Talented individuals with impressive resumes and good people skills have reported being turned down for jobs years after the storm because, they believe, of their association with black New Orleans and what it now stands for in the popular mind.

There are several factors that have congealed to make coverage of Katrina, from a non-hegemonic position, difficult for outsiders. First, the long-standing history of racism in the Deep South has led to a reflexive distrust of outsiders, both scholars and journalists. One of the Lower 9^th Warders I interviewed started his interview with the story of his father, a veteran, who raised his boys never to talk to strangers. Channeling his father, he said: “If he were here today, he’d say: ‘I’m not going to talk to her, and I advise you boys not to talk to her either.’” In the wake of Katrina, many of the people I interviewed have developed a particular distrust for what they label as culture or disaster “vultures,” academics and journalists who swooped down on the city’s most vulnerable people for a career-making article, de-contextualized and de-socialized the quotes gleaned from rapid-paced interviews, and then disappeared, wordlessly. A third factor is the Southern Baptist tradition of stoicism that dictates one must never complain in public, but rather divert the questioner to unanticipated positive outcomes. If one reads Leatrice Roberts’s chapter in Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), one might miss entirely her deep and abiding homesickness for New Orleans. Only the last year of follow-up visits preceded by phone calls and letters from the road over three years has won me the privilege of listening to her talk about the things she misses most about New Orleans, the things she finds most oppressive about Dallas, and the way she would trade her much larger, modern house in a suburb of Dallas in a heartbeat to have back her tiny, memory-laden home in Pontchartrain Park.

I am an oral historian. In my profession, we have the luxury of time and the freedom of space to seek context and build relationships with the people who become co-authors of our collective work. Over the past five years, I have listened to over 290 black survivors, some of whom I followed up with formally as many as seven additional times. In September 2009, when I returned to New Orleans for good, I joined Jerusalem, a small community church. The service is intimate, the relationships between brothers and sisters in Christ forged over decades of faithfulness through tribulations and celebrations. Jerusalem is beyond both academia and journalism’s purview. In our makeshift sanctuary, we are at home among people who know and love us. Here we can drop our guard, articulate a portion of the inconsolable loss we feel, and shed our tears without fear or shame.

In this blog series, I will share from my work and experiences some of the things that remain profoundly traumatizing for some African-American communities and are less readily apparent to even the best-intentioned journalist. Then, I will offer some suggestions that could make (coverage of) Katrina’s aftermath less traumatizing.

My comments are drawn from the testimonios of people who were raised in the 9^th Ward or Back of Town (Central City). At the time of the storm, they were also living in the East and Pontchartrain Park. The men and women of Pontchartrain Park and the Lower Ninth Ward were most often homeowners, even though some of the latter may have only had seven to 11 years of inadequate education. The Back-of-Towners were much more likely to be renters. I choose to focus on these narrators because their stories have been least accurately re-told by outsiders and because their communities are still bearing disproportionately heavy traumatic burdens, whether they are home or, more likely, living in isolation abroad.

D‘Ann Penner, Ph.D., is the co-editor, with Keith C. Ferdinand, M.D., of “Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond,” which in 2009 won the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Leadership in Journalism Award. She is at work updating the counter-narratives of Overcoming Katrina to release them more directly into a public sphere visited primarily by journalists who cover trauma and racism on a daily basis. Currently the Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, Penner is a second-year law student at Loyola University New Orleans and works at the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans.

Her article, Assault Rifles, Separated Families, and Murder in Their Eyes: Unasked Questions after Hurricane Katrina was recently published by Cambridge University’s Journal of American Studies.

I remember my fateful call to Deirdre Stoelzle Graves from the airport in New Orleans. I mentioned off-handedly that the Dart Society’s “Target: New Orleans” effort, launched in 2007, would make a great documentary. I didn’t know that making the suggestion would make me a filmmaker.

I believe “Breaking News, Breaking Down” has done well because it’s one of those stories that anyone can appreciate and grow from seeing. It’s about overcoming adversity, and the growth that can come from the trials and tribulations of life. The film follows the Dart Society’s efforts in New Orleans , but also looks at the larger issue of how trauma impacts journalists. By showcasing this film in Sweden, Australia, the United States, Canada and France, we’ve been able to shine a light on the issue. We’ve also been able to introduce Dart to people who never would have had a chance to hear this remarkable story of trauma journalists blazing new trails in our business.

Next month the Voice of America is going to have me come and screen the film and talk about the issue of trauma with reporters for VOA. Managers at the VOA invited me to come and talk: that to me is a major milestone. In Australia the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is looking at this issue seriously and trying to help employees before difficulties arise. I’m so happy to be a part of the Dart mission, and to be spreading the word. I’m also happy that isn’t it just the journalists who are talking about this issue; slowly, but surely, some managers are coming to recognize this as an issue.

I will also show the film at the Toronto Independent Film Festival on September 11, the ninth anniversary of the attacks on New York, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon. In the film I describe the impact of witnessing the Pentagon being hit and how that trauma led me to the Dart community. After the showing I will head to Atlanta to screen part of the film and talk about the issue at the Carter Center.

So while many people look back rightly at all the problems that happened after the hurricane hit and all that still needs to be done in New Orleans five years later, I will always remember the power not of the hurricane, but the power of storytelling, of redemption, and of the human spirit. On this anniversary I will also think about the power of possibility. I will remember the Dart Society experiment of sending visiting journalists to work alongside the battered and beleaguered journalists of New Orleans. I will remember the bonds created there. I will remember how small steps can have a monumental impact. I will remember how that one phone conversation has changed the course of my life. I will remember the triumph that came as a result of the tragedy.

Penner, an award-winning scholar, and Keith Ferdinand, a New Orleans physician who lost a practice of about 7,600  patients, undertook the project to fill a hole they saw in depictions of the events around Katrina and its aftermath. Specifically, the authors noticed any depiction of heroism as involving white people, with black people primarily relegated to victim or looting roles.

The result of their labor, though, is more than a place filler.  Overcoming Katrina gives a much deeper sense to non-natives of exactly what was displaced, disrupted, of the power of faith, family and community, and of the bone-deep loyalty and love so many black New Orleanians hold for the Crescent City.

This love has been forged, cemented and maintained by generational connection, and Penner and Ferdinand structure the book accordingly. Starting with the older generation, the book has four section, each of which moves closer in time to the present and today’s youth.   This structure allows the reader to understand the transmission of values, beliefs and rituals that have taken place.  That understanding, then, provides deeper insight into both the pain long-time residents felt both at the wreckage and the government’s utterly callous and incompetent response, and the resilience, strength and courage they have brought to bear on the trials they faced at the moment of the hurricane and during the ensuing half-decade.

In Overcoming Katrina, we meet Aline St. Julien, a widow born in 1926 and raised in the Treme area.  She concludes her interview with the wish that things could go back to the way they were before Katrina, a Proustian reminiscence about the memories triggered by drinking a cup of coffee, and the simple statement, “I’ve had a good life.  I was always a proud woman.  I’ve carried myself with dignity, that’s just my way.”

We also meet co-author Ferdinand, whose family members provide the book’s spine, and youth like Le Ella Lee, a performer whose rhyming verses tell her Katrina story.

In addition to varying in age, the people in the book’s pages are diverse in many other ways, too: geography within the city, class status, profession, and political orientation, to name just a few.

Highlighting this diversity, intentionally in places, appears to be an explicit goal for the authors and, to my view, reveals the book’s radical character.  Overcoming Katrina, then, is not just an evocation of a lost world for those who do not come from there and who live in less rooted ways.  Rather it is a bringing to light and a celebration of  a community steeped in religion, tradition and place, and imbued with an unbreakable, if sorely tested, will that they brought on this most recent and formidable trial.

To my mind, this is a gift, and one for which we should be grateful to Penner, Ferdinand and the people who shared their lives and struggles.

I plan to share these thoughts in person when I meet Penner in a couple of months.  For now, though, I recommend that you read this worthwhile work.

The conference Saturday at the Howlin’ Wolf intends to bring bloggers together to “dispel myths, promote facts, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels.”

The conference agenda is here.

The keynote speaker is Mother Jones’ human rights reporter Mac McClelland, who’s been covering the BP spill in the Gulf.

Conference organizer Sharon Barnhart said earlier this week she’d working on a live feed, but certainly the conference Twitter and Facebook sites are actively reporting on the event.

Rising Tide NOLA, Inc. is a non-profit organization formed by New Orleans bloggers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federally-built levees.  After the disaster, the Internet became a vital connection among dispersed New Orleanians, former New Orleanians, and friends of the city and of the Gulf Coast region. A surge of new blogs erupted and, combined with those that were already online, a community of bloggers with a shared interest in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast developed. In the summer of 2006, to mark the anniversary of the fl ood, the bloggers of NewOrleans organized the first Rising Tide Conference, taking their shared interest in technology, the arts, the internet and social media and turning advocacy for the city into action.

Robins was producer/director of the Tavis Smiley Show,  Talk of the Nation, and News and Notes. She also worked on a 15-month-long series, “The Changing Face of America.” Most recently she’s been working on a CPB-funded project called “Radio Bilingue” – helping a multiplatform English-language news service get up and running.  It’s scheduled to launch its website in early August.

“The prosecutor hit street curbs, turned off a street where no other street intersected, failed field-sobriety tests, and told a police officer that he had drunk ‘too much,” Projo reports. “Eight people were charged that weekend with refusing a chemical breath test. The prosecutor was the only one not also charged with driving under the influence — until a Journal review of the case prompted the police to reverse that decision and charge him with the additional criminal misdemeanor.”

The stories also won the Rhode Island Press Association’s first place for investigative/analytical news story or series and second place for investigative reporting from NEAPNEA, which gave the Sevellon Brown Award.

Merco Press

Hollman Morris, the 2009 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow whose intensive reporting on the drug wars in his native Colombia marked him an ally to terrorism by political enemies, is now participating in the Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard. Here’s an interview in the Boston Globe in which he talks about the difficult journey from Bogota to Cambridge, particularly the efforts by Nieman and other groups, including Dart, to ask the U.S. State Department to reverse its decision to deny him a visa. Morris says his wife and two children now have a chance to have normalcy in their lives.

“I want to study the role of the press in processes of reconstruction of the memory of history, reparation and truth, and how in the midst of humanitarian dramas the press gives us a voice and gives visibility to the victims,” Morris says in the Globe interview. “But without a doubt, it will be a time for living a normal family life that [my wife, children and I] have lost out on over the last 10 years.”