It’s been almost a month since Hurricane Helene made landfall and battered the Southeast with winds and floods. In some places, there’s still much to be done.
But Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers are among those still hard at work helping people get back on their feet.
“A lot of our teams are coming back for the second time now,” said Debbie Reese, deputy white hat leader for the ABDR command center in Clearwater, South Carolina.
She and her husband, Al, who is currently serving as the white hat leader there, are among those on their second round of work since Helene hit.
Thousands of volunteer hours
“Our teams here are still staying steadily busy,” she said. “We have six teams in right now, and they have full work loads. The trees are big, and some are very technical to cut.”
The ABDR command center in Clearwater has received 725 total job requests and completed 268 so far.
Mark Wakefield, state disaster relief strategist, said he expects teams will continue working there up until the week before Thanksgiving. He said so far, Alabama Baptist volunteers in the Clearwater area have logged 14,000 volunteer hours serving in a variety of roles — assessors, chainsaw and cleanup workers, chaplains, feeding teams and the laundry and shower unit.
ABDR’s mass feeding unit also recently closed in Alma, Georgia, after putting out about 150,000 meals and logging around 3,700 volunteer hours. Another feeding team will be sent to Wrens, Georgia, this weekend to start helping out as Georgia Baptists do chainsaw work there.
A shower unit is also currently operating in Forest City, North Carolina.
Volunteers still responding
Wakefield said volunteers are continuing to respond. Registration has “overflowed” for volunteer training sessions this month, with people on a waiting list, he said.
A training at Vaughn Forest Church in Montgomery on Nov. 2 still has room, but it’s filling up fast, he said. That training will cover the basics of chainsaw work and flood recovery.
In addition to turning out for volunteer trainings, Wakefield said Alabama Baptists have shown up with financial support in a big way in the aftermath of Helene.
“We’ve been able to have three different distributions of funding to the five states most heavily affected by the storms,” he said, referring to Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. “Volunteers and Alabama Baptists in general have been very responsive and very concerned about helping.”
A spiritual and emotional fresh start too
Reese said as volunteers serve, they’re not only taking away the physical damage of the storm, they’re working to help people get a fresh start emotionally and spiritually as well.
Four people in the Clearwater area have professed faith in Christ, and teams there have given out more than 250 Bibles and 150 tracts.
One homeowner came into the command center and gave a handmade cross to the volunteers to thank them for what they had done to help him.
“People have been very receptive to hearing the gospel and letting us pray over them,” Reese said.
For more information about how to help with Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief work, visit sbdr.org.
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