Volunteer sees signs of mercy
Published: September 22, 2005
First-time national disaster relief volunteer Harvey Lorenz expected scenes of mass confusion when he arrived at his Gulf Coast destination, but said instead he witnessed compassion on a grand scale.
At the BancorpSouth Center in Tupelo, Miss., the American Red Cross had converted the coliseum into a shelter for Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Lorenz said church groups and restaurants fed between 200 and 300 people three warm meals a day, anything from grilled cheese to prime rib.
“This was a community north of the hurricane impact and evacuees were coming in … fairly steadily,” said Lorenz, who returned home to Neenah late Tuesday evening from an assignment that began Aug. 31, when he prepared to leave Wisconsin for a Red Cross operations staging area in Mississippi.
“I was surprised at how many people from the Gulf shores had relatives in the community of Tupelo,” he added. “Many (Tupelo residents) were hosting as many as 15 or so, just to give them temporary shelter until they got organized.”
Lorenz is one of the handfuls of Red Cross volunteers on national assignment who soon will be returning from Gulf Coast municipalities neighboring the communities that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina and now may be threatened by Hurricane Rita.
The local volunteers — including four from the Neenah-Menasha chapter and 15 from the Outagamie County chapter — have been sent to the Gulf Coast and to Red Cross call centers in Virginia and Washington, D.C., as assignments come in through a Midwest office in Des Moines, said Rebecca Bergin, executive director of the Neenah-Menasha Chapter of the American Red Cross.
“It takes a lot of commitment and compassion,” Bergin said, who added that most of the Neenah-Menasha chapter’s volunteers are expected to trickle back in early October. “There’s a lot of emotional stress that they’re going to be faced with. With this disaster we’re not going to send people out to do damage assessment because we know the place has experienced complete devastation.”
The volunteers, she said, focus first on meeting people’s basic needs of adequate shelter, palatable food and safe drinking water.
“Once their basic needs have been met, we can help them start to rebuild their lives and point them in the direction of agencies that can assist them in long-term recovery,” Bergin said.
Lorenz, a retired banker, and nine other volunteers set up a makeshift office in the Tupelo coliseum’s hallways to interview families. Over two and a half weeks, he said, his team assisted close to 3,000 individuals from 1,000 families.
“I heard all sorts of stories, from people putting infants or young kids into coolers and floating them across deep waters while they either swam or walked across ditches and got to high land,” Lorenz said. “Very few of the people I talked to really knew what was ahead of them because they had very little to begin with and it was taken away from them.”
If the call comes for volunteers to assist in the aftermath of Hurricane Rita over the coming months, Lorenz said he’ll answer it.
“It gives you a lot of faith in your fellow humanity to see a lot of people being able to respond,” Lorenz said. “It’s remarkable that so many people come in from all over the country and function so well together.”
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