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South Cariboo residents prepare themselves for the future at Community Resilience Celebration

Adding tools to toolkits to deal with anxiety and stress in the aftermath of wildfires
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Kristin Buhr doing her presentation for the Community Resilience Celebration at the 100 Mile Community Hall. Brendan Kyle Jure photo.

The 100 Community Hall hosted a community resilience celebration on March 11 with a presentation from Kristin Buhr, a registered psychologist and the director of the North Shore Stress and Anxiety Clinic.

“I thought the presentation was amazing. She covered off a lot of really good tools on how to deal with the stress level,” said Corrine Stark, one of the attendees.

Bhur’s presentation was about how to deal with anxiety, panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illness in relation to events, such as the 2017 wildfires.

Stark moved to Forest Grove from Aldergrove in May 2017, just a month before the Gustafsen Fire started and according to her, it got pretty close to her home. The Starks weren’t even fully unpacked in their new home. The area wasn’t under evacuation and her family decided to stay.

“I remember one night the ashes that were really coming down were really big on our property. We started loading up the horse trailer with everything we just finished unloading,” she said. “Something broke overnight, that thought process in both my husband and I, we just went ‘No, we are not going to live in fear.’”

A member of the CCLF (Cariboo Christian Life Fellowship), Stark said the thoughts, prayers and calls from her former church on the coast helped her and her husband get through the ordeal. She also housed two evacuees from 108 Mile Ranch, that they had just met, for roughly seven days before the couple moved on to Kamloops. Their shared Christian faith made it easier to deal with the anxiety the fire had brought.

She said not knowing what to do with her animals, where they were going to go in case of evacuation were triggers for stress and anxiety. Stark was hoping that from the presentation she would be able to “add more tools to her toolkit” to prepare for the future, should something like the wildfires happen again.

Nolan Robillard, another attendee who suffers from panic attacks, came for the same reason.

“I liked [Buhr’s] techniques on how to calm people down when they’re having a panic attack because myself I have panic attacks all the time,” said Robillard. “Overall, I think it was very powerful and a very good message and should help people.”

Recent Peter Skene Ogden (PSO) Secondary School graduate, Jacob Bryan, said he came to the presentation to better understand anxiety and how to cope with it as well as helping others with it.

“I think its just so cool that anxiety is so simple, that’s it’s really just a way to protect ourselves and our bodies naturally react with and if we understand that we can work with it. It used to be something that wasn’t really understood to me, I had friends who go into wild panic attacks and I just try to calm them down but inside I’m just going what on earth are they doing, rather than simply understanding their body is trying to protect them,” he said. “I can calmly explain that to them now and I think that’s really cool.”