 It's a horrible thing, but you certainly learn a lot from the process. River came up over the road for quite some time. We had eight inches on the main floor of our house. The north wall and the south wall were off and it looked like a dollhouse. The water level on the main floor had reached about two and a half to three feet. Do we walk away from the house? Can we afford to even rebuild? View what's in front of you in the case of a marathon, not a sprint. The University of Minnesota Extension and North Dakota State University Extension Service have developed Recovery After Disaster, the family financial toolkit to assist in financial recovery from disaster. The toolkit is free and available at this website. These tools will help you think through the situation that you're in to establish priorities and decide what needs to be done and help you to act with purpose in moving forward after the disaster. It's not one big step, we'd like it to be, but it's really a bunch of small steps going on. It is okay to ask for help, it is okay to look for the helps and to recognize that people in voluntary organizations are reaching out to say, let's do this together. In a perfect world, we would be prepared for a disaster, but we know that this is not always the case. We were two years removed and there are a lot of people that have still had a difficult time making decisions on what to do as you see a lot of empty houses still around here. There's a couple of houses that have never been touched since the flood. When a disaster happens, case managers are sometimes available to assist survivors. Recovery from disaster is difficult and complicated, and a case manager can guide you on this journey. The role of case management as a system is to be the backbone of recovery. Helping them to understand what resources they have is a huge part of that and how to make do with those resources. There's a lot of services that are available and out there after a natural disaster, and you'd be surprised at how just talking it out with somebody else can take a whole big weight off your shoulders. After a disaster, some communities may organize a long-term recovery committee. This committee is made up of community, government and faith-based agency representatives, and community leaders who address the unmet needs of individuals and families, as well as the community as a whole following a disaster. Long-term recovery will not only help them, you know, put some 2x4s back up and put sheet rock and put new carpet in, but help them think through, how are they going to deal with this financially? What do they need to do psychologically? It is important to recognize that your life will never be exactly the same as it was. Consider what you want your new reality to look like. A community arises out of a disaster, stronger, more deeply connected, and great believers in themselves that whatever we face, we can face it together.