In the heart of Biloxi, Miss., a team of Alabama Baptist chain saw volunteers dabbed the sweat from their foreheads and rested their sore muscles during a much-needed water break.
Piles of wreckage lined the street in all directions. A teddy bear lying among the rubble served as a solemn reminder of the individual lives affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Comments flew as these men tried their best to adequately describe the scene.
“I’ve lived through a lot of tornadoes, but I’ve never seen anything this enormous.”
“The stench is overwhelming.”
“Imagine coming home — or to what’s left of home — and seeing this.”
“This is simply catastrophic.”
“I’m either in a different country or in a movie.”
It’s indescribable damage — damage Southern Baptists are working hard to remedy.
“This is the worst disaster I’ve ever seen,” said Jerry Brownlee of Anniston, who serves as a chaplain in some of the hardest-hit areas of the Mississippi coast. “It spans more than 900 square miles. Every volunteer counts.”
Serving the servants
And someone has to account for all those volunteers — this is where Bobby and Sarah Helms enter the scene.
The Helmses, once Alabama residents, serve disaster relief crews in Biloxi through the work of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM).
The couple arrived at First Baptist Church, Biloxi, Sept. 9 to organize the volunteers coming into the area to remove fallen trees as well as prioritize which homes needed immediate assistance.
“It’s a teamwork project,” Sarah Helms said. “We couldn’t do this without volunteers pouring in.
“We couldn’t do it without the shelter of First, Biloxi, or the shower units or the food being provided from the Mississippi convention,” she said.
Alabama was called on to provide the shower units for the disaster relief workers as well as head up the chain saw efforts in the community.
There are currently five chain saw teams, typically consisting of 10 to 12 individuals, working in the Biloxi area.
“Most volunteers work three of four days, and then we rotate them out to rest,” she said. “They know how to pace themselves. If they get overheated, they’re not good to help anybody.”
All teams are trained to meet a certain standard for safety purposes, Bobby Helms added.
The Helmses first trained in disaster relief through SBOM while living in Huntsville in 1995.
Actively responding
Since their training, they have served actively with the SBOM’s disaster relief efforts — even though they now live in Tennessee.
Their first couple of assignments had them working on the feeding team. Since then, Bobby Helms has served on nearly 15 disaster relief trips, doing everything from water purification to distributing thousands of meals a day.
“We’re not sure how we got into the chain saw work,” Sarah Helms said with a laugh. “We’re not actually out there doing all the work, but somebody has to be on the administrative side and organize the volunteers.”
Robin Keels, missions consultant with the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, said the couple sits outside all day long working with the chain saw teams.
“They run a crazy schedule, but it is neat to watch how God is using them to organize the work being done on the coast,” Keels said.
The Helmses’ primary task is to organize books of information and a computerized spreadsheet of the chain saw work being done along the coast.
In addition, they prepare a job sheet with a map for each location as requests come in for chain saw teams and decipher which requests are top priority.
Of the 100 volunteers currently working on chain saw teams in Mississippi, 85 are from Alabama. “They are here to cut trees, but their main purpose is to share Jesus,” Sarah Helms said.
Bobby Helms, retired from the Army, and Sarah Helms, who is in the Army Reserve, anticipate staying in Biloxi until early October.
They recall their two-month stay in El Salvador following the earthquake in 2002, as well as their work in New York City following the 9/11 attacks as some of the highlights of their disaster relief experiences.
But they agree that Katrina is “massive” compared to what they’ve seen. “We’ve had over 400 work orders in a week,” she said. “We’ve had to stop taking requests unless there is a tree actually on the house.”
But Bobby Helms added that the response of Southern Baptists has been massive to match the massive devastation. “Whether it’s a small disaster or a catastrophic one like this, the work is still the same,” he said. “Southern Baptists have done a great job preparing in advance to respond to them all.”
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