to benefit relief efforts
By Daily Press staff
A local woman is transforming her experience with tsunami victims into art.
Santa Monica artist Amanda H. Reyne is hosting an art exhibit in May to raise money for the Scientology Disaster Response (SDR).
For two weeks last month she and her three friends, and other SDR teams in Indonesia helped more than 5,000 people.
Her memories of the Indonesian people and an urgent need to continue her link with them prompted the exhibit.
“Each and every person had lost their families and homes,” Reyne said. “The stories were heart breaking. This culture was one of the most beautiful cultures that I had ever seen. They were so honest and were so open to being helped.”
Reyne and her friends were flown by military helicopter to Banda Ache, which was one of the worst hit. Heru —dubbed “Hero” by Reyne and her team, because he was a survivor of the Tsunami — showed where his house used to be and described how he had escaped, running away from the Tsunami. It was their first view of nothing but brown for miles the length of the coast, still waterlogged a month after the hit.
“Our only thought was how could we help the people confront and overcome the impact of the tsunami using the ‘assist’ procedures we were trained in,” Reyne said.
Assists, one of the earliest developments of L. Ron Hubbard, are non-medical techniques taught to all SDR teams. For the past 25 years, they have been used to dispel severe physical and emotional trauma and stress in incidents such as the Oklahoma bombing, the Sept. 11 attacks, the California fire storm of 2003 and dozens of floods, earthquakes and volcano eruptions worldwide, including the Northridge Earthquake in 1994.
“He was completely dead in his eyes,” Reyne said of Heru. “His parents did not know what to do with him. He was not confronting anyone or anything. My friend, Alexis, took him outside into an overgrown field behind the tents. She got his hand and steered his attention outwards to touch a wall, a tree and eventually he was touching stuff on his own and was laughing.”
Another woman helped by the team had suffered a mild stroke and could barely walk into the tent where they were working.
A “touch assist” brought the woman’s attention to the affected areas by repetitively touching her body and putting her into communication with the injury. Reyne explained that assists help restore communication with the affected area.
“When trauma occurs, we naturally shut down,” she said. “And when attention is withdrawn from injured or ill body areas, so are circulation, nerve flows and energy.”
Throughout their stay, the team was escorted to various hospitals, schools used as temporary shelters and refugee camps of Indonesia.
“I helped mothers who had just given birth, a child who had inhaled the tsunami water and could not breathe and the mid-wives who had grieved so much for lives not even yet born,” Reyne said. “I taught many Indonesians the ‘nerve assist.’ It was the big favorite, because it meant reprieve from endless sleepless nights.”
Barbara Dakin, SDR coordinator in Los Angeles — which is part of a world-wide network — said funding for the SDR teams has come from many sources, including from many businessmen who have donated thousands of dollars to enable volunteers like Reyne to equip and travel to Southeast Asia.
“SDR has maintained a steady presence in all the affected areas of Southeast Asia from the onset, particularly in Islamic Indonesia,” Dakin said. “It is an attest that real help is an international acknowledgment of faith. We are proud of every one of our volunteers and welcome the additional monetary support that Amanda hopes to generate with her exhibit.”
For more information on Scientology Disaster Response efforts, or to book a slide show presentation of the work being done for your organization, contact SDR Los Angeles at (213) 413-4221. For more information about the Amanda H. Reyne Art Exhibit, contact )
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 19, 2005. Read the original PDF.