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I had the week off of work, and so I decided to come down to Houston with three others from my church. We wanted to help in a real practical way with the relief efforts, and am glad that we came down.
We brought down a pretty big load of water, pop tarts, and granola bars. The Houston Food Bank is the central drop off location for food, and they had palettes and palettes full of donated food. There were several volunteers there working, and trucks coming in and out dropping off and picking up loads.
We intended to get plugged into the Southern Baptist Operation Rescue, which is preparing and serving the food at a lot of these shelters. In order to help with this group, there is disaster relief training that you must go through. Since we hadn't had the training yet, we went to the general volunteer entrance of the G R Brown Convention Center.
This place is unbelievable.. They are housing 8800 evacuees. They have the convention center divided up into different sections, such as a section for single men, women with children, etc. Wal-Mart donated the air mattresses that they are sleeping on.. literally wall to wall air mattresses. The convention center is HUGE, it extends several city blocks.
The group from my church worked at the information tables yesterday. The information tables serve two main purposes.. to answer any kind of question that the evacuees have (from unemployment to food stamps to fema), and also to help evacuees get in touch with loved ones and friends. There are about 10 computers set up and connected to a katrina database.. in which you can type in names and see if their location is known. It can be very rewarding if you are able to give the evacuees phone numbers of where the person they are looking for is staying.. and also very tough if you can't find that person in the system at all. The database is NOT set up very well at all, and as of yesterday, all the shelters were not connected into it. FEMA is supposed to show up today.. and everyone wants to talk to them to get information on housing. Hopefully FEMA will be able to handle the load.
Contrary to how the news media sometimes might portray the evacuees.. for the most part they are NOT hostile and are VERY grateful for any help that can be provided. They are so thankful anytime we can give them information they can use..
The volunteers are great. A lot of people of faith and people with great servant hearts.
I will hopefully be able to provide more updates throughout the week!
We brought down a pretty big load of water, pop tarts, and granola bars. The Houston Food Bank is the central drop off location for food, and they had palettes and palettes full of donated food. There were several volunteers there working, and trucks coming in and out dropping off and picking up loads.
We intended to get plugged into the Southern Baptist Operation Rescue, which is preparing and serving the food at a lot of these shelters. In order to help with this group, there is disaster relief training that you must go through. Since we hadn't had the training yet, we went to the general volunteer entrance of the G R Brown Convention Center.
This place is unbelievable.. They are housing 8800 evacuees. They have the convention center divided up into different sections, such as a section for single men, women with children, etc. Wal-Mart donated the air mattresses that they are sleeping on.. literally wall to wall air mattresses. The convention center is HUGE, it extends several city blocks.
The group from my church worked at the information tables yesterday. The information tables serve two main purposes.. to answer any kind of question that the evacuees have (from unemployment to food stamps to fema), and also to help evacuees get in touch with loved ones and friends. There are about 10 computers set up and connected to a katrina database.. in which you can type in names and see if their location is known. It can be very rewarding if you are able to give the evacuees phone numbers of where the person they are looking for is staying.. and also very tough if you can't find that person in the system at all. The database is NOT set up very well at all, and as of yesterday, all the shelters were not connected into it. FEMA is supposed to show up today.. and everyone wants to talk to them to get information on housing. Hopefully FEMA will be able to handle the load.
Contrary to how the news media sometimes might portray the evacuees.. for the most part they are NOT hostile and are VERY grateful for any help that can be provided. They are so thankful anytime we can give them information they can use..
The volunteers are great. A lot of people of faith and people with great servant hearts.
I will hopefully be able to provide more updates throughout the week!
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