TERRA HAUTE, Ind. – We started the week off strong with 27 volunteers on Monday. We ran 3 work crews cleaning and gutting homes. (Gutting is a term we use in disaster relief to describe the process of removing the sheetrock and insulation one foot above the water level in the flooded homes.) What a great week it has been, and it’s only Tuesday.

The volunteers showed up ready to make a difference. The staff and I gave them a quick orientation and told them about the residents they would be helping throughout the next couple of days.

As I went around the circle of volunteers asking where they were from, one couple surprised us all as they shared their story. Bob and Nancy came to Indiana from Alexandria, VA. The duo decided to help OBI and our cleanup efforts instead of going on their anniversary vacation.

Nancy saw the call for volunteers on TV and learned about OBI’s efforts in Indiana. She immediately called her husband, and he agreed to make the trip. So the couple is celebrating 35 years of marriage by serving as OBI volunteers helping hurting people pick up the pieces of their lives.

All the volunteers worked with so much determination as they sifted through the muck, water, and debris.

The majority of the homes that were flooded had basements, which made the work even more difficult. This meant the volunteers had to climb stairs with heavy buckets of sheetrock and debris.

One crew got even more creative and began passing buckets through basement windows to make the job a little easier.

By the end of the night, we all gathered to hear stories from various work crews.

One crew worked on an elderly couple’s home. They were in their 90s and the woman has a broken hip and is wheelchair-bound. They had flood insurance, but it did not cover all of the labor. They hired a contractor but he did not come back to finish the job.

We sent a volunteer team in yesterday, and they gutted their basement. The elderly couple would not have been able to do the work at all without the help of Operation Blessing. Carl, one of our foreman, struggled through his tears to tell us how heart-wrenching it was to see this 90-year-old man standing on his front porch sobbing and saying, “Thank you, we do not know what we would have done without the help of Operation Blessing.”

Another staff member shared about a different elderly couple OBI helped. The staff member said the wife told how her husband was overcome with emotion as he looked at the mess. He was feeling they were facing the situation alone, until OBI showed up.

He broke down and said, “I don’t think I can make it through this one.”

Things quickly changed when the OBI volunteers showed up. The couple, once again, could smile, and they said they were grateful because people do care about them.

As a disaster relief team we work long hours, are away from family, and see a lot of pain, but touching the lives of people who otherwise could not help themselves keeps us going. Operation Blessing is truly delivering hope in a sea of suffering and hopelessness.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Disaster, Jody Herrington, North America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.