Expert on coping
with tragedy has experience

When author Laurie Long talks about recovering emotionally and financially after death, natural disaster or other emergency strikes, she begins with her own experience of coping with 12 deaths in the family over a five-year period.

She will share her advice at four Oahu churches this month in the annual Alec & Belle Waterhouse Lecture Series. The lectures are free but $7 workbooks can be purchased.

Long, the author of "The Next 48 Hours" and "My Life in a Box," has presented emergency management workshops for eight years. She was program director of the Waikiki Beach Chaplaincy and was on the Kamehameha Schools Christian education staff during the 1970s.

She will describe ways to "Be Prepared, Get Organized and Stop Procrastinating" in workshops at the following locations:

» Next Saturday, 4:30 p.m., Cornerstone Fellowship Christian Church, 95-1080 Ukuwai St., Mililani.

» Oct. 21, 6 p.m., Kailua Community Church, 250 Oneawa St., Kailua.

» Oct. 24, 9 a.m. Moanalua Gardens Missionary Church, 1401 Mahiole St.

» Oct. 28, 6:30 p.m. Waialae Baptist Church, 1047 21st St., Kaimuki.

The lecture series was endowed by the trust of the late Alexander Cooke Waterhouse, a longtime member of the Waialae Baptist Church. This is the first year that the program has been extended to other churches.