Tending to the garden of the needy

Social activist. Volunteer. Mother. Professor. Just don’t ask her how her garden’s doing. She hasn’t had much time to tend it.

Instead, Minna Barrett, a psychology professor and UUP member at SUNY Old Westbury, has been tending to the needy of New York. The role of Red Cross volunteer burgeoned into a 40-hour-a-week commitment when terrorists attacked the nation. From her home on a canal in Oceanside on Long Island, Barrett has been driving into Old Westbury to teach psychology classes and then into New York City to be of service.

She took the first ride in Sept. 12, when the first of many 12-hour shifts began. An evening assisting officer, she sent other volunteers out on location and supervised different sites rapidly being set up. Then she began coordinating memorial services and debriefing people who saw the attacks.

Barrett’s next stop was providing mental health support to people affected by the disaster and to rescuers and caregivers. She spent several weeks working out of the Family Assistance Center (FAC) which, until recently, was just one of a row of hulking piers along the West Side Highway in Manhattan. It is outfitted with city, state and federal agencies and offers services ranging from DNA testing, mental health counseling, human resources, financial assistance and issuance of death certificates.

Outside FAC, rows of posters with pictures of those who died in the World Trade Center attack are tucked under plastic, snug against each other. Originally tacked up by people searching for missing relatives, the pictures and words are now pieces of their broken story, left for others to read and tell: the woman who went to work for the first time at the Trade Center on Sept. 11; the man whose wife had their baby on his birthday, right after he died; the twin brothers, one in the building when it was hit.

Since leaving FAC, Barrett has been teaching disaster mental health to other licensed psychologists who want to join the Red Cross. Most nights, you can still find her in New York, adding her drops of healing as elixir for a wounded city.

It is not the first time she has been on the scene of a disaster. Her first call to action was to Los Angeles after the 1994 earthquake.

“I was very nervous; it’s very intensive,” she said. “We’re taught to listen and intervene. It’s not psychotherapy. We listen, support and find services.”

She was also called to help after TWA Flight 800 went down in 1996.

But of all her assignments, the one in New York quite literally hit closest to home.

“This is the most intensive and it’s the thing that has affected me personally the most,” she said. “I wake up with a feeling of deep sadness. I feel responsible to it — to the city I grew up around and to the (Red Cross) organization, which has taught me a lot about community and community responsibility.”

Barrett said it is important for each of us to respond to others who are suffering, not just in major catastrophes like this. Yet, it is catastrophes like this that open us up to the pain of others. It is as if they are so thick we have to stop and wade our way through. And look. And feel. “All loss is deep,” she said. “This was so sudden, so intense and there’s so much of it. It’s so concentrated.”

What takes her from activism to volunteerism to teacher? “In Judaism, there’s a rule: ‘To save one person is to save the world,’” she said. Then she added, “In the Talmud, it says, ‘If I am only for myself, who am I? If I’m not for myself, who will be?’”

She also said the Talmud expresses her vision at the Red Cross: “‘It is not incumbent on thee to complete the task, but neither may thee desist from thou part in it.’”

Her volunteer work, she said, is like a prayer. She has been active for years in environmental and social justice issues on Long Island, as well as workers’ rights and breast cancer awareness. For about a decade, she said, she was a single mom and dropped her outside activities, but picked them up again once her daughter graduated and moved out on her own. The Red Cross has since become her primary volunteer channel.

“I feel that my skills — what I have learned in school, what the students teach me — are all brought to fullness in moments of this work.”

Barrett now lives in the home where she grew up. Her parents are deceased. Her mother, a former teacher, had a garden. But that will have to wait.

— Liza Frenette