Guadalupe Leia’s eight-year-old son, Samuel, was finishing the second grade of Rob Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, when it became the site of one of the deadliest school shootings ever.
A father rushed to his son’s school after learning of the shooting on Tuesday. Law enforcement officials were already on the scene, but that didn’t stop Leia from feeling helpless.
Samuel survived. The boy was in a different building from the one that the armed attacker entered and killed 19 children and two teachers.
Three days later, a second grader had not yet talked about what had happened that day.
Leia described Samuel as “the type of kid who wants to know everything. But as of today, he hasn’t wondered what happened or what’s going on,” he told NBC News on Thursday afternoon.
To cope with the immediate and deep sense of loss, Leia and many others in their staunch knightly, predominantly Latin American city, visit each other’s homes and attend vigils to express grief and condolences to families who have lost loved ones and support each other.
But concerns about the long-term mental health consequences of a tragedy of this magnitude could affect affected Latino families at a time when “the whole city of Uvalde is pretty heartbroken,” said Leia, a Mexican American.
Uwalde Behavioral Health, part of a network of rural health services in South Texas, is one of the city’s mental health sites that provides grief counseling services for survivors of the shooting and relatives of the victims.
‘It’s not a shame to ask for help’
“They are feeling sad at the moment, but they will soon feel anger,” Mirta Garcia, executive director of the Rural Health Service of South Texas, told NBC News. “He will feel angry about what happened.
“They will feel deprived because their child died,” Garcia said of the parents who lost a child in the shooting. “We will not be able to give them an answer because we do not know the answer, but we can teach them coping skills to better understand what happened.
Uvalde Behavioral Health is one of several centers belonging to the National Health Service Corps, a subdivision of the Department of Health and Human Services that consists of a network of health care providers working in service-deficient communities.
About 22 percent of the population in Uvalde is uninsured, which is in line with the number of Latinos nationwide without health insurance; the city of Uvalde is about 80 percent Hispanic, most of them Mexican-American.
Across the country, the rate of uninsured among Latinos (20 percent) is more than twice that of non-Hispanic whites (8 percent), according to recent data from the Ministry of Health and Human Services.
Although non-insurance can limit access to health care, community health centers such as the one run by the South Texas Rural Health Service in Uvalde often “make all kinds of concessions if the patient deserves mental health,” Garcia said.
But perhaps more important is work to destigmatize mental health services across Latin American communities that need it, especially those closely affected by the Uvalde school shooting, Garcia said.
“It is not a shame to ask for help and ask for some instruction or some therapy,” she added.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told a news conference Friday afternoon that anyone affected by the shooting will have access to free mental health services from state and private providers.
“When I say anyone, I mean the totality of anyone who lives in this community,” Abbott said. “We believe you would benefit from mental health services.
His remarks come about a month after he cut $ 211 million from the State Department, which oversees mental health programs.
According to the report on the state of mental health in the United States for 2021, Texas ranks last out of all 50 states and counties of Columbia in terms of overall approach to mental health care.
The Center for Community Health Development, another mental health site owned by the National Health Service, said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that they were “mourning the loss of many family members in the massacre.”
“We pray for as long as we set out a plan to address the need for long-term counseling regarding grief. We ask for your patience as we mourn and coordinate a united response to help our community, “the center said in a statement.
While Leia did everything in her power to keep her little son away from anything related to the shooting, the father also knows that his child will eventually come with questions.
According to Garcia, it is possible that Leia’s son and other children who survived the shooting are in a state of shock and may not be able to articulate the experience for a while.
“What they saw was not normal. What they heard was not normal,” Garcia said. “Here we have to literally hug them, pray for them, provide them with services, encourage them, love them.
Meanwhile, Leia said that he and his wife were preparing for the moment when their son will finally be able to talk about what he went through that day.
“Whenever the time comes, we will be ready for it,” Leia said. “It will be some time before everything returns to normal. … It will be a long time. “
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Mike Hikenbaugh i Corkie Siemaszko contributed.