For this project, Samaritan's Purse was headquartered at Northside Christian Church, a mammoth complex in New Albany, a northern suburb of Lousiville, KY. As with previous missions with Samaritan's Purse (see nashville), volunteers were responsible for their own transportation to the SP home base and for their own meals until Monday morning. They were also responsible for providing their own bedding and toilet articles. SP provided everything else, including all tools needed at the work sites.

At Northside Church, we were were housed in a large fieldhouse at the church complex, where we assembled and ate at tables in one section of the fieldhouse. Two other sections were walled off with temporary screening to provide living areas for men and for women. As the photo on the right indicates, we slept on air mattresses on the floor. Showers were available in washrooms off the fieldhouse floor, where clean towels, shampoo and other toilet articles were also provided. A well-equipped kitchen down the hall from the fieldhouse provided facilities for the daily preparation of breakfast and dinner by volunteers from the church.

Every morning, lights went on in the fieldhouse at 6 am and breakfast was at 6:30. After breakfast every morning, there was a time for devotions. On the first day, this was followed by an orientation emphasizing the special safety requirements in the kind of work we would be doing. Each day, at 7:30, local volunteers arrived and they went through the same orientation. As we would be eating our lunches in the field, materials to make bag lunches were available in the fieldhouse. However, as it turned out, we seldom needed them because platoons of ladies from local churches roamed the areas where we were working, passing out lunches they had made for us.

When the local volunteers were ready, we were divided into work crews and transported to locations where tornado cleanup was still going on. In our case, only three of us from Christ Church were assigned to those crews. Bernie was qualified to operate one of the track loaders (or skids) so we seldom saw him except when he happened to be working his skid on one of our sites. During this week, the crews we were on worked at three different sites. Wherever we worked, the duties were the same......cleanup. All of our work sites were in the vicinity of New Pepin and Borden, a few miles to the west of Henryville, which had received the most press after the tornado--but not necessarily the worst destruction.

The first site we worked on was owned by an elderly couple whom we never saw during the day and a half we were there. It had been a densely wooded lot on a steep hill running from the road several hundred feet down to a small lake. When we arrived, however, few trees were standing and the lot was littered with uprooted and and broken trees. The photo on the right shows what the site looked like when we arrived.

The photo on the left shows what was left of the house after the tornado came through, and the crew beginning to take on the task of cleaning up the site. As can be seen, the site was on a steep hill, which made the project more difficult and more hazardous. We did not have to demolish the house as the couple's insurance company had already arranged for that to be done.

The next photo indicates the massive task facing the crew as we attempted to make some order out of the dozens of fallen trees (some of them over two feet in diameter). Three chain saws were going almost constantly for the day and a half we were on the site--and, as can be seen below, one skid followed up and down and across the site arranging logs and debris into orderly piles.

One sad task in disaster relief work is having to discard family memorabilia destroyed by the storm. Here our crew cleans out a storage shed that was demolished by the wind, its contents left exposed to the elements. The volunteers did their best to preserve any keepsakes that could be salvaged. Also shown is a wood-burning water heater that took a direct hit from a falling tree.

One significant difference we noted between the volunteers in the kind disaster relief work we were doing here and in the recovery work we had done in Nashville was the presence of chaplains...in force. In fact, for most of this week there were no fewer than six chaplains staying with us at Northside Church, visiting us in the field and ministering to people in the area that had been affected by the tornado. We managed to get a picture of two of them when they visited us as we were working at this site.

By noon on the second day, the cleanup job on this site was completed, leaving the property in more manageable shape for the homeowners. There was still a lot of debris on the site, but it was now reduced to pieces of reasonable size and organized into piles of similar-type material. The photo on the right shows the property as we left it.

The next job for our team was on a home site a mile or two to the west of the one we were leaving. The home on this site was a sixty-foot trailer house that had been occupied by a single mother and her 13-year-old son. The mother had ridden out the storm in a ditch near the trailer. Below is a photo of what remained of the trailer after the storm, which was obviously beyond recovery.
Her insurance company required that the damaged trainer be completely removed before any other living space could be placed on the site. So our job was to remove the trailer and clean up the site. For the next day and a half, that's what we did. Below is a picture taken as that process was getting underway.

One highlight of our work at this site was a surprise at lunchtime on our second day there. The lunch ladies, instead of bringing us bags with sandwiches and chips, brought us a catered meal from a local restaurant--complete with fried chicken, dumplings, two vegetables, Waldorf salad, hush puppies......and fresh cherry cobbler.

Another highlight was the opportunity to work with our Christ Church team member, Bernie, and his skid. They are shown in the photo on the left. By the end of the day after we arrived at this site, the trailer had been demolished. Its remains were piled by the road at the head of the driveway and the site was cleaned up for further occupation.

On the fourth day, our work crew traveled a winding road to a rural acreage that had been the site of two houses and a house trailer. The house trailer didn't need to be demolished. Its remains were "spread over 65 acres." The larger of the two houses had been blown off its foundation and, the day before we arrived, the SP demo crew had demolished it. Its debris can be seen as the background for the graphic at the top of the page. The photo below shows the remains of the house trailer and, beyond it, what was left of a large storage shed. Our job on this site was to clean up debris from the property and to move salvagable items from the storage shed area to a large cargo container that had been moved onto the property.

Although a typical commitment on an SP mission is five working days, this third and last week of the Indiana tornado relief mission was completed by the end of the fourth day. So workers began arriving from North Carolina to prepare the vehicles and equipment for transport back to SP headquarters and resident volunteers began to pack up to leave for home the next morning.

As we left, one experience in particular stuck with us. Every homeowner we worked with received a bible from Samaritan's Purse, each one signed by all the volunteers that worked on the property. We were only present for the presentation of the bible to the last homeowner, a recent widow who was very angry and not inclinced to be confronted with matters of faith. So, when we gathered to make the presentation, Dave held the bible out of sight as Dennis, our crew chief, introduced the subject to her, emphasizing the well wishes and autographs of the workers. Initially resistant, she relented and accepted the bible when she saw the signatures. Hopefully, as she reviews the comments of those that worked joyfully in her behalf, she will begin to look at the pages beyond those with the signatures.

It was a hard, but rewarding, experience. We remain impressed with the facility with which Samaritan's Purse can mobilize for disaster relief and we continue to recommend their missions for volunteers.

For more information on SP disaster relief missions, see the SP site.

*This mission effort was an outreach ministry of the Local Mission Team, Christ Church of Oak Brook, Oak Brook, Illinois.