The City that Care Forgot

In 2005, four-year-old Michael Baquet III, BSPA26M, had just visited his new pre-k and was excited for the start of school. But the following Sunday, with nothing but a few Elmo tee-shirts, he and his mother evacuated New Orleans. They bounced around Baton Rouge and Jackson, Mississippi, for a couple of weeks until, one night, Baquet overheard his mother, who worked at a shrimp-peeling factory, repeat to herself: “Don’t worry—God never sleeps.” He realizes now: This is the moment that Hurricane Katrina broke through the levees.

They relocated to Atlanta, where they lived first  in a hotel, then a temporary rental. School would have to wait another year—the local district didn’t offer pre-k. While Baquet and his mother did find their way back to New Orleans after 18 months, “housing was never again stable,” he says. “I can’t count how many times I moved.”

Today, the Blue Hen is channeling that trauma into his UD master’s program, for which he’s studying disasters and transportation. “We couldn’t swim. If we hadn’t gotten out, we could have died,” he says. “I want to ensure people have that mobility.”

Underwater

Life in the Pakistani city of Quetta isn’t easy. It sits within an arid, largely desert province that borders Iran and Afghanistan, and militant insurgencies are common. Adding to the danger, natural hazards are a constant threat.

In 2008, Gulrukh Kakar, BSPA26PhD, and her family were inside their Quetta home when they heard a “horrific noise that sounded like it was coming from the land itself.” A 6.5-magnitude earthquake killed hundreds of people, leveled much infrastructure and led to contaminated water supplies.

“I remember shivering and praying: ‘Please, God, help us,’” says Kakar. “It was such a helpless moment.” The city is also prone to flash flooding that displaces families—in 2022, Kakar witnessed victims living on the roadside: “It definitely takes an emotional toll.”

Now, the Blue Hen is working toward her doctoral degree in Disaster Science and Management at UD, with the aim of improving emergency response in Pakistan and other vulnerable areas. Along with her husband, she's already established the Institute for International Disaster Diplomacy to encourage more collaboration between countries.

Knocked Conscious

In 2015, Allen Gula, AS09, had just reached Mount Everest base camp during a 30-day hike through Nepal when the ground shook. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed nearly 90,000 people in 90 seconds. Days later, once he could finally communicate with the outside world, Gula called off the U.S. Embassy (they’d been searching for him), and he went to work. 

The Blue Hen stayed in Nepal for two years in order to establish a non-profit that would help the Nepalese rebuild. He slept in a tent, blew through his life savings and contracted dysentery—twice. But he succeeded in launching Conscious Impact, which to date has built 80 structures (houses, schools, orphanages) as well as full-scale water systems that service 200 homes.

“People have the ability to make things better in a disaster simply by being present and doing the best they can,” he says, adding that his 15 study abroad trips with UD (he started at age 8, thanks to a professor mom) helped immensely: “They empowered me.”

Back-to-Back Trauma

Rats the size of puppies. This is what Kendall Daughtry, EHD14 17M 21PhD, remembers about his experience post Irma, the category-5 hurricane that decimated his St. Thomas home in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was September of 2017, and all around him were uprooted coconut trees and displaced rooftops. Then, about two weeks later, a compounding disaster: Category-5 Hurricane Maria touched down.

Daughtry, his wife and their toddler went 122 days with no electricity, save for a generator they used sparingly. They lived mostly by candlelight and showered out of buckets. “The experience raised new research questions,” the Blue Hen says. He’d already completed two degrees from UD, and he decided to go back for his PhD to study the effects of academic disruptions on Virgin Island youth. 

Today, he works as a professor and researcher committed to mentoring “brown and Black children like myself, who've faced persistent structural violence, such as underresourced schooling. We're using education as a form of resistence.”

Daughtry trusted UD for this third degree, he adds, because of the immense support he’s felt from faculty within the Department of Human Development and Family Services: “They’re my family.”