hurricane katrina
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"Hurricane Katrina" Ground Report from International Director Stefan Radelich
Amazing work continues to be accomplished by local churches and thousands of Christian volunteers from around the nation. Arrived in Baton Rouge on Friday afternoon just in time to inspect one of our warehouse sites… over 3/4 of the food we had sent in the few days following Katrina had been moved out to local church shelters, they’ve been doing a great job in getting supplies right to points of need. Then checked in at the Pastors Resource Council (PRC) headquarters to see how everyone was doing… the number one need now is for volunteers to come and relieve the local workers, and the need is readily recognizable as you look into the glassy-eyed and worn faces of the organizational leadership. These men and women have really sacrificed their lives as they are following Christ in ministering to the multitudes… it is time for them to rest.
“And he said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while." For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” (Mar 6:31)
Mark Stermer, who heads up PRC operations, told of the kind of ministry that is taking place and touching lives… ‘chainsaw gangs’ clearing roads in neighborhoods; teams riding with Humvee escorts into otherwise inaccessible locations to deliver food door-to-door; and one group of volunteers even went to the Cajun Dome and asked the 1,600 evacuees staying there for their laundry. They took the laundry to their homes and spent the day and night washing, drying, and folding clothes and took it back to the Dome to hand back the next day. Mark also said that during the first week, most of the people needing help were from low-income areas, now there are increasing numbers of middle-income families coming to the shelters needing help… they’ve maxed out their credit cards and cannot stay in hotels or even buy their own food. At a distribution site yesterday in Gautier, Mississippi (pronounced Go-shay) a woman drove up in a Lexus crying and asking for food and toilet paper… may God’s saving grace be found by those who have been humbled by this disaster.
Friday ended late as we drove an hour and a half to meet up with Victory Fellowship, one of our distribution sites in Metarie (just outside of New Orleans). The two truckloads of food we had brought earlier in the week (Monday) were gone as they had served about 6,000 families living in damaged homes without electricity or running water in their area… good news was that Ben Faircloth, one of our project coordinators in Mississippi had come into the city with a 24-foot truck full of FTH supplies (two additional FTH semi-trailers arrived on Saturday afternoon). Victory has been putting gospel tracts and books in each family pack as it goes out and they were really glad to see that bibles are being included in each shipment of food now.
On Saturday six huge semi-trailers of MRE’s, milk, soup, oatmeal, pudding, snack foods, and Bibles came rolling into Baton Rouge… these trucks carried a total of over 200,000 pounds of top-notch relief supplies (I wish you could see the reaction of people when they see the milk and soup--- in Jefferson Parish we needed some ‘favor’ from the local police to continue distribution because they wanted to shut our site down so people would leave the area… we mentioned what kind of food we were bringing in and when we got to ‘milk’ one officer jumped back and said, “MILK… you mean to tell me you’ve got MILK!!”. About five minutes after we got back to the site a few squad cars pulled up and took a nice sized load of milk for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office Command Center. We were all to happy to provide a little pleasure for these men and women who are going above and beyond the call of duty (they’re living in IDP conditions while having to continue standing their post for extended hours too). Needless to say, there haven’t been any more problems keeping the distribution center in Jefferson Parish open.
The six trailers were dispatched from Baton Rouge on Saturday as follows: two to Mandeville (just north of New Orleans across Lake Ponchatrain), two to Metarie, one to Gulfport Mississippi, and one to Woolmarket Mississippi. Jamie (cameraman) and I followed the two trucks sent to Mississippi because I hadn’t yet been there to assess how the distribution sites are doing. At Gulfport we were met by 70 on-fire young volunteers from churches around the nation who unloaded a 53-foot tractor-trailer overstuffed with 50,000+ pounds of supplies… they did it in an hour-and-a-half, all by hand without forklifts, pallet jacks or loading ramps… that is simply amazing and I’ve never seen anything like it.
On Sunday we distributed some of the supplies from Woolmarket into Biloxi, Gulfport, and Waveland. In Biloxi, we found out, there are thousands of Vietnamese who work on the shrimp boats and own local businesses. They really don’t like MRE’s, so the National Guard gave us about two tons of rice which we distributed door to door in the community… boy were they happy. We’ll be sending down a thousand tracts in Vietnamese this week to go along with the food distribution so they can read the gospel message in their own language. We also found an evangelical Vietnamese church just across the street from a large (by American standards anyway) Buddhist Temple. The church was standing, and the roof looked okay, but the inside was destroyed--- the water mark was right up to the ceiling so the pews and everything inside the church must have been floating around and wound up in a heap when the water receded. There was a good two inches of muck on the floor too. Ben is going to try and locate the pastor or someone in authority to see if we can clean the church up and use it as a distribution site for the Vietnamese people. We met many great families and had the opportunity to pray with some.
Our drivers (Captain Rudy and Ken, who sacrificed a few vacation days to drive the FTH truck all the way there) finally had the chance to rest and take a nice shower, which happened to be a garden hose on a pole with some black plastic around it as a curtain… they said it was “refreshing”… and they said it with a great attitude and a smile. Capt. Rudy and Ken will be doing regional runs with the FTH truck, taking supplies from the warehouse in Baton Rouge to wherever it is needed.
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