ATLAS Informative Writing: Surviving a Crisis

Source 1: "from Deep Survival"

Informational Writing by Laurence Gonzales

1. Juliane Koepcke was flying with her mother and ninety other passengers on Christmas Eve, 1971, when lightning struck, causing an extensive structural failure of the Lockheed Electra. Juliane fell out of the broken airplane into the Peruvian jungle. She was seventeen years old, wearing her Catholic confirmation dress and white high heels. Miraculously, she suffered only cuts and a broken collarbone from the crash. Later, she reported feeling “a hefty concussion.” Then she was falling toward the jungle.
2. As she recalled, “I remember thinking that the jungle trees below looked just like cauliflowers.” To someone who knows about survival, that statement is telling. She wasn’t screaming; she wasn’t in a panic. She was in wonder at the world in which she found herself. She was taking it all in, touching her new reality. Checking out her environment while falling. Amazing cool.
3. Amazing and also characteristic of a true survivor. Bill Garleb, an American GI who survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, found his senses increasingly sharp as he experienced a deep wonder at the birds and colors and smells of the jungle.
4. A dozen other passengers survived the midair disintegration of Juliane’s plane, and their attitude, and hence their behavior and fate, were quite different from hers.
5. Juliane awoke alone on the floor of the jungle, still strapped into her seat. There was no sign of her mother, who’d been beside her in the plane. She spent the night trying to keep out of the rain under her seat. The next day, she deduced that even the helicopters and airplanes she could hear wouldn’t be able to see her through the jungle canopy. She’d have to get herself out. It was another important moment: She didn’t spend time bemoaning her fate. She looked to herself, took responsibility, made a plan.
6. Her parents were researchers who worked in the jungle, and she was familiar with that environment. But Juliane had had no survival training. She didn’t know where she was or which way she ought to go, but her father had told her that if she went downhill, she’d find water. He’d said that rivers usually led to civilization. And while that strategy can just as easily lead into a swamp, at least she had a plan that she believed in. She had a task.
7. Meanwhile, the others who had lived through the fall decided to await rescue, which is not necessarily a bad idea either. But expecting someone else to take responsibility for your well-being can be fatal. In Alive, Piers Paul Read tells the story of the survivors of another airplane crash, this one in the Andes. Everyone who survived the crash stayed put, assuming that they’d be rescued. Many died; the others wound up eating each other to keep from starving before someone finally walked out and found help.
8. Juliane had nothing except a few pieces of candy and some small cakes. She had no survival equipment, no tools, no compass or map—none of the things I’d been taught to use in survival school. But she very deliberately set up a program for herself. She set off, resting through the heat of the day and traveling during the cooler periods. She walked for eleven days through dense jungle while being literally eaten alive by leeches and strange tropical insects, which bored into her, laid their eggs, and produced worms that hatched and tunneled out through her skin.
9. Eventually, she came to a hut along the banks of the river she’d been following. She staggered and collapsed inside. There is always a lot of chance involved in a survival situation, both good luck and bad. It was Juliane’s good fortune that three hunters turned up the next day and delivered her to a local doctor. But, as Louis Pasteur said, “Luck favors the prepared mind.”
10. Tough and clearheaded, this teenage girl, who had lost her shoes (not to mention her mother) on the first day, saved herself; the other survivors took the same eleven days to sit down and die.
11. The forces that put them there were beyond their control. But the course of events for those who found themselves alive on the ground were the result of deep and personal individual reactions to a new environment.
12. The knottiest mystery of survival is how one unequipped, ill-prepared seventeen-year-old girl gets out alive and a dozen adults in similar circumstances, better equipped, do not. But the deeper I’ve gone into the study of survival, the more sense such outcomes make. Making fire, building shelter, finding food, signaling, navigation—none of that mattered to Juliane’s survival. Although we cannot know what the others who survived the fall were thinking and deciding, it’s possible that they knew they were supposed to stay put and await rescue. They were rule followers, and it killed them.
13. In thinking for herself, Juliane wasn’t even particularly brave. Survival is not about bravery and heroics. Heroes can be perfect heroes and wind up dead. By definition, survivors must live. Juliane was afraid most of the time (of everything from piranhas when she had to wade in the water to the worms that were crawling around under her skin to the real or imagined creatures of the forest). Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear: they turn it into anger and focus.
14. Conversely, searchers are always amazed to find people who have died while in possession of everything they needed to survive. John Leach writes that “Victims have been recovered from life rafts with a survival box (containing flares, rations, first-aid kit and so on) unopened and the necessary contents unused.”
15. “Some people just give up,” Ken Hill told me, referring to his search and rescue operations in Nova Scotia. “Fifteen years I’ve been studying this, and I can’t figure out why.”
16. What saved Juliane was an inner resource, a state of mind. She certainly didn’t have any physical equipment. But she’d been prepared mentally, somehow. A lifetime of experience shapes us to meet or be crushed by such challenges as a bad divorce, the shattering of a career, a terrible illness or accident, a collapsing economy, a war, prison camp, the death of a loved one, or being stranded in the jungle. . . .

Source 2: "from An Ordinary Man"

Memoir by Paul Rusesabagina

Background: In 1994, a mass genocide took place in the East African state of Rwanda when Hutus killed 800,000 men, women, and children over a period of 100 days. Although tensions existed between the Hutus and Tutsis (the two main ethnic groups in Rwanda) for hundreds of years, things came to a head on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying the President of Rwanda, a Hutu, was shot down. Many perceived this as an attack by Tutsis, and the tensions between the two groups escalated into full-blown violence. Paul Rusesabagina (b. 1954) lived through the genocide and wrote about the horrors in his memoir An Ordinary Man (from which this excerpt comes), which later became the film Hotel Rwanda.

1. My name is Paul Rusesabagina. I am a hotel manager. In April 1994, when a wave of mass murder broke out in my country, I was able to hide 1,268 people inside the hotel where I worked.
2. When the militia and the Army came with orders to kill my guests, I took them into my office, treated them like friends, offered them beer and cognac, and then persuaded them to neglect their task that day. And when they came back, I poured more drinks and kept telling them they should leave in peace once again. It went on like this for seventy-six days. I was not particularly eloquent in these conversations. They were no different from the words I would have used in saner times to order a shipment of pillow-cases, for example, or tell the shuttle van driver to pick up a guest at the airport. I still don’t understand why those men in the militias didn’t just put a bullet in my head and execute every last person in the rooms upstairs but they didn’t. None of the refugees in my hotel were killed. Nobody was beaten. Nobody was taken away and made to disappear. People were being hacked to death with machetes all over Rwanda, but that five-story building became a refuge for anyone who could make it to our doors. The hotel could offer only an illusion of safety, but for whatever reason, the illusion prevailed and I survived to tell the story, along with those I sheltered. There was nothing particularly heroic about it. My only pride in the matter is that I stayed at my post and continued to do my job as manager when all other aspects of decent life vanished. I kept the Hotel Mille Collines open, even as the nation descended into chaos and eight hundred thousand people were butchered by their friends, neighbors, and countrymen.
3. It happened because of racial hatred. Most of the people hiding in my hotel were Tutsis, descendants of what had once been the ruling class of Rwanda. The people who wanted to kill them were mostly Hutus, who were traditionally farmers. The usual stereotype is that Tutsis are tall and thin with delicate noses, and Hutus are short and stocky with wider noses, but most people in Rwanda fit neither description. This divide is mostly artificial, a leftover from history, but people take it very seriously, and the two groups have been living uneasily alongside each other for more than five hundred years.
4. What did I have to work with? I had a five-story building. I had a cooler full of drinks. I had a small stack of cash in the safe. And I had a working telephone and I had my tongue. It wasn't much. Anybody with a gun or a machete could have taken these things away from me quite easily. My disappearance—and that of my family—would have barely been noticed in the torrents of blood coursing through Rwanda in those months. Our bodies would have joined the thousands in the east-running rivers floating toward Lake Victoria, their skins turning white with water rot.
5. There were a few things in my favor, but they do not explain everything.
6. Let me tell you what I think was the most important thing of all.
7. I will never forget walking out of my house the first day of the killings. There were people in the streets who I had known for seven years, neighbors of mine who had come over to our place for our regular Sunday cookouts. These people were wearing military uniforms that had been handed out by the militia. They were holding machetes and were trying to get inside the houses of those they knew to be Tutsi, those who had Tutsi relatives, or those who refused to go along with the murders.
8. There was one man in particular whom I will call Peter, though that is not his real name. He was a truck driver, about thirty years old, with a young wife. The best word I can use to describe him is an American word: cool. Peter was just a cool guy; so nice to children, very gentle, kind of a kidder, but never mean with his humor. I saw him that morning wearing a military uniform and holding a machete dripping in blood. Watching this happen in my own neighborhood was like looking up at a blue summer sky and seeing it suddenly turning to purple. The entire world had gone mad around me.
9. What had caused this to happen? Very simple: words.
10. The parents of these people had been told over and over again that they were uglier and stupider than the Tutsis. They were told they would never be as physically attractive or as capable of running the affairs of the country. It was a poisonous stream of rhetoric designed to reinforce the power of the elite. When the Hutus came to power they spoke evil words of their own, fanning the old resentments, exciting the hysterical dark places in the heart.
11. The words put out by radio station announcers were a major cause of the violence. There were explicit exhortations for ordinary citizens to break into the homes of their neighbors and kill them where they stood. Those commands that weren’t direct were phrased in code language that everybody understood: “Cut the tall trees. Clean your neighborhood. Do your duty.” The names and addresses of targets were read over the air. If a person was able to run away his position and direction of travel were broadcast and the crowd followed the chase over the radio like a sports event.
12. The avalanche of words celebrating racial supremacy and encouraging people to do their duty created an alternate reality in Rwanda for those three months. It was an atmosphere where the insane was made to seem normal and disagreement with the mob was fatal.
13. Rwanda was a failure on so many levels. It started as a failure of the European colonists who exploited trivial differences for the sake of a divide-and-rule strategy. It was the failure of Africa to get beyond its ethnic divisions and form true coalition governments. It was a failure of Western democracies to step in and avert the catastrophe when abundant evidence was available. It was a failure of the United States for not calling a genocide by its right name. It was the failure of the United Nations to live up to its commitments as a peacemaking body.
14. All of these come down to a failure of words. And this is what I want to tell you: Words are the most effective weapons of death in man’s arsenal. But they can also be powerful tools of life. They may be the only ones.
15. Today I am convinced that the only thing that saved those 1,268 people in my hotel was words. Not the liquor, not money, not the UN. Just ordinary words directed against the darkness. They are so important. I used words in many ways during the genocide—to plead, intimidate, coax, cajole, and negotiate. I was slippery and evasive when l needed to be. I acted friendly toward despicable people. I put cartons of champagne into their car trunks. I flattered them shamelessly. I said whatever I thought it would take to keep the people in my hotel from being killed. I had no cause to advance, no ideology to promote beyond that one simple goal. Those words were my connection to a saner world, to life as it ought to be lived.
16. I am not a politician or a poet. I built my career on words that are plain and ordinary and concerned with everyday details. I am nothing more or less than a hotel manager, trained to negotiate contracts and charged to give shelter to those who need it. My job did not change in the genocide, even though I was thrust into a sea of fire. I only spoke the words that seemed normal and sane to me. I did what I believed to be the ordinary things that an ordinary man would do. I said no to outrageous actions the way I thought that anybody would, and it still mystifies me that so many others could say yes.

Source 3: "Who Understands Me But Me"

Poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Background: Jimmy Santiago Baca (b. 1952) has said, "I don't know if I would have lived had I not found poetry." He was born in New Mexico, of Apache and Chicano ancestry. Raised at first by a grandmother, he was a runaway at the age of 13. Convicted of drug charges, he was sentenced to a maximum security prison, where he began to turn his life around. He learned to read and write, and discovered his love of poetry. Since his release, he has published poetry, memoirs, and a screenplay.

1. They turn the water off, so I live without water,

2. they build walls higher, so I live without treetops,

3. they paint the windows black, so I live without sunshine,

4. they lock my cage, so I live without going anywhere,

5. they take each last tear I have, I live without tears,

6. they take my heart and rip it open, I live without heart,

7. they take my life and crush it, so I live without a future,

8. they say I am beastly and fiendish, so I have no friends,

9. they stop up each hope, so I have no passage out of hell,

10. they give me pain, so I live with pain,

11. they give me hate, so I live with my hate,

12. they have changed me, and I am not the same man,

13. they give me no shower, so I live with my smell,

14. they separate me from my brothers, so I live without brothers,

15. who understands me when I say this is beautiful?

16. who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms?

17. I cannot fly or make something appear in my hand,

18. I cannot make the heavens open or the earth tremble,

19. I can live with myself, and I am amazed at myself, my love,

20. my beauty,

21. I am taken by my failures, astounded by my fears,

22. I am stubborn and childish,

23. in the midst of this wreckage of life they incurred,

24. I practice being myself,

25. and I have found parts of myself never dreamed of by me,

26. they were goaded out from under the rocks in my heart

27. when the walls were built higher,

28. when the water was turned off and the windows painted black.

29. I followed these signs

30. like an old tracker and followed the tracks deep into myself,

31. followed the blood-spotted path,

32. deeper into dangerous regions, and found so many parts of myself,

33. who taught me water is not everything,

34. and gave me new eyes to see through walls,

35. and when they spoke, sunlight came out of their mouths,

36. and I was laughing at me with them,

37. we laughed like children and made pacts to always be loyal,

38. who understands me when I say this is beautiful?