Arcadia, Florida, was Candace McIntosh’s home for nine years after college, the place where she experienced her first sense of community as an adult and where she felt the call to ministry.
So it’s especially hard for her to see the community under water since Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida Sept. 28 and made the Peace River overflow its banks.
“I still have many dear friends in this area,” McIntosh, executive director of Alabama Woman’s Missionary Union, wrote in a Facebook post. “They are resilient, but it is tough. I appreciate you praying with me for them.”
As many Alabama Baptists pray and send help in the form of financial assistance, around 70 Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers are hard at work in Arcadia.
Tremendous response
David Hendon, the white hat leader on site, said he’s “never seen a response like this” from residents in need of help.
“We have been inundated with requests,” said Hendon, a member of Northside Baptist Church in Jasper. “We’ve received 308 requests already, and four teams of assessors are working hard to determine if they are jobs we can do.”
The teams assembled in Arcadia — which include volunteers from Tennessee, Alaska and South Carolina in addition to Alabama — are doing chainsaw, cleanup and roof tarping work. One area just two miles from the operations center requires either an hourlong drive or a boat ride to access.
“The admin crew is working around the clock it seems to keep everything going to meet needs,” Hendon said.
Alabama Baptist shower units are also in place, and a large number of volunteers are preparing meals at the state’s mass feeding kitchen, which is set up at Calvary Baptist Church in Arcadia.
On Oct. 5, they were planning to prepare 2,500 meals, but they were hoping to ramp that number up soon to 15,000 meals served daily as more trucks of supplies come in, Hendon said.
‘God is at work’
He noted their host churches — Calvary Baptist and First Baptist Church of Arcadia — were “just doing all they can to help us.”
“The locals here are telling us that right now we are the only ones they know of doing any kind of work like this,” Hendon said. “There are amazing stories of how God is at work, of Him putting the ideal person in place to help these people. We’re establishing relationships and making contacts and have been able to pray with people and talk with them about the Lord.”
Linda Lowe, one of McIntosh’s friends in Arcadia, said she was so thankful to see Alabama Baptist volunteers setting up in her city.
“The Alabama folks were the first to arrive,” she said. “They were pulling into Calvary, and I made Tom go around the block and pull in behind them. I got out of the car yelling, ‘I don’t want anything but to say thank you, thank you!’ The guy said to me, ‘We haven’t done anything yet.’ I told him it didn’t matter, because I knew when I saw them it was all going to be OK.”
Lowe said she cried when she left them “because it was such a relief to see someone who was going to make a difference.”
As of Oct. 4, Ian’s death toll in the U.S. had risen to 109 people, with 105 of those in Florida and the other four in North Carolina after the hurricane made another landfall there.
Southern Baptist Disaster Relief teams are currently spread out all over the state helping to meet needs. Click here to read more.
For more information or to give to Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief efforts in Florida, click here.
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