Being ‘the hands and feet’

You could smell the mold, the open sewers, the damp.

Stepping off the bus at the first neighborhood they were sent to, the six members of the Hoosiers Help team who traveled from Salem to Hamsted, North Carolina, near Wilmington, were met with a street lined with heaps of people’s lives. The neighborhood looked fairly affluent. If it weren’t for the smell, the piles of ruined furniture and belongings and the odd blue tarp over a damaged roof, you might not have noticed it had just been flooded. The region hit by Hurricane Florence is full of neighborhoods and communities just like that one, with people, numb from shock and grief, venturing out as flood waters recede to salvage what, if anything, is left of their homes. Nearly 50 people were killed either in the storm or during the clean-up after. Billions of dollars worth of damage stretch across the affected region — communities flooded, trees down, roofs ripped off from the wind, mold climbing up the walls, utility poles, sewers, and waterworks and dams destroyed.

In a word, the areas affected by Florence were a mess.

The Hoosiers Help crew — Daniel and Kristine Shetler, Rhonda Johnson, Beth Nicholson, Deia Brown and Kate Wehlann — left from Salem with a trailer full of donations gathered by Washington, Lawrence and Orange County citizens Friday afternoon, Sept. 21. They also brought enough meals to feed 1,400 people.

“We started to take 800 meals, which was probably adequate for what we cooked, but something kept telling us to take more,” said Johnson. “We felt there was a need.”

“We didn’t know what to expect with how much food we brought, but all along, we knew we were to take as much food as we could,” said Kristine Shetler. She talked with John Trinkle, from Mt. Tabor Christian Church, as the trip was planned. “I told him we could purchase more supplies or we could purchase food and John was like, ‘You’re to purchase food. Honey, people need to eat. You need to take them food.’”

While on the road, they received a call from some familiar faces. Frank and Marie Gottbrath, formerly of Pekin, had moved to Leland, North Carolina, to be near family after the March 2, 2012, tornado destroyed their home. They found out the team was coming and asked if there was anything they could do to help.

“I think the way things worked out so well really stuck with me, right down to Frank and Marie calling us and asking to be a part of things,” said Johnson. “They said they wanted to meet with us at some point … Every time, something like that happens.”

Not only were the Gottbraths willing to help the team serve, but they offered a place to sleep and shower. Before leaving, Shetler had secured a place for the team to stay in a secure warehouse, likely in sleeping bags or air mattresses on the floor, with a shuttle that would take volunteers to a nearby gym for showers. The Gottbraths offered real beds and a much more luxurious shower experience than a gym. By that evening, it felt like a little slice of heaven.

“Doors close and doors open, but when you witness it over and over and over again, you know there’s a higher power,” said Nicholson.

The group arrived in Wilmington at 8:30 a.m. Saturday after a short nap in a hotel room (yes, six people in one room) and met up with the Gottbraths in front of the warehouse that was hosting Crisis Response International, a non-profit crisis relief organization.

“We pulled up and they walked out and met me — I thought he was [Sean Malone, founder of CRI],” said Johnson. “[Marie] said, ‘Indiana!’ and I said, ‘Yeah, we’re Indiana; where do you need us?’ She said, ‘I don’t know! We’re the Gottbraths!’ We didn’t know they were coming to help us.”

The team eventually met Malone, who explained how his organization was working in the area and suggested places for the Hoosiers Help team to go.

“We respond to stuff all over the world and floods are among my least favorite thing to respond to,” said Malone. “It’s got a slow-burn effect to it. As these places open up, then we get those resources in, but it’s also timing it right. [The Hamsted neighborhood] has just opened up.”

Due to the mold and open sewage, the Hoosiers Help team set up the grill at their first stop in a field near an affected neighborhood, grilling hot dogs and setting up bags of chips, cookies and applesauce cups. Some from that neighborhood came for supplies and grabbed a meal or two, some volunteer groups came to eat and another organization brought meals they brought, along with the Hoosiers Help food, into the neighborhood for workers there.

“Going through that neighborhood was devastating, but there were so many people there helping and all kinds of different organizations,” said Brown.

“Not to take away from their loss, but I’ve never seen it that nice on a mission trip,” said Nicholson. “We’ve always seen dirt floors and demolished areas. That really got me. Hopefully, they had insurance.”

After a while there, the crew packed up and, after hearing from a local pastor about a woman gathering supplies for people in another area, decided to meet up with her along the Cape Fear River near a town called Burgaw.

They found Rae Riley at the home of her sister, Tracy Potter. Most of Potter’s belongings were out on her front lawn, being meticulously inventoried for insurance purposes. Her home of about 20 years had been flooded with more than a foot of water. Between the dams breaking and water invading her home, mold had crept much further up the walls when she returned to her home. Her in-laws, who live next door, both 79, had six feet of water in their home. Her neighborhood was given orders for a mandatory evacuation and they had left the Thursday before the storm, after nailing plywood over the windows and securing all other entrances the best they could, partly because of the storm and partly because of looters. They were busy “mucking out,” emptying the home of it furniture and furnishings and ripping out insulation and drywall.

“It was very overwhelming. I tried to come in and get as much out as I could,” she said, reaching over to touch a few pictures stacked on bins on her porch. “I got some of my kids’ baby pictures and things like that. I got my great-grandfather’s table that he made and was handed down to me. It’s on the back porch, but broken. The base broke, but it may be fixable if we get a new pedestal for it. All the clothes we had were on the floor. My 12-year-old boy lost a lot of his stuff. Going through the clothes and stuff, I found pictures of my grandfather and mementos. Next time, if I have this happen, or just rebuilding, I’ll put all the pictures in one spot.”

Several of Potter’s family members were there, including her younger son, Cole, 12, and older son, Wyatt, whose 17th birthday was that day, and his girlfriend, but she said there were people there helping she had never met before.

“It’s overwhelming,” said Potter. “God has brought them all to this area to help and it’s just so nice to see the community come together, work together and be a shoulder to cry on. It’s humbling.”

She said the mucking out process has actually helped her sons come to terms with what’s happened. “It was so hard not knowing for two weeks what was left,” said Potter. “They’re already talking about what color they want to paint their walls.”

The flood and the mold weren’t the only concerns for the “river folk,” along Cape Fear. Potter said looters were coming in boats through the swamp that formed between the river and her neighborhood. When her family arrived back at their house, they found evidence looters had tried to get in their front door.

“Now, you have people riding by, looking when the houses are empty and creating wake and pushing more water in[to the houses that are still underwater],” she said. “… Now, they’re just going to take my trash if they come.”

She said homes further down the road were built on stilts and the people stayed on second floors, afraid to leave due to looters, even as water flooded the second floors of their raised homes. They were so fearful their homes would be looted, they were willing to risk drowning in the flood waters.

Potter said another concern is wildlife. Some people have found snakes in their homes and floating rafts of fire ants move into homes as waters recede. Potter said she found some fire ants in her drawers, but for the most part, has avoided issues with pests.

“People were going through their pots and pans and pouring them out and one lady got bit by a water moccasin,” she said.

Now comes the arduous task of itemizing everything they could find that was damaged for the insurance adjusters, and the knowledge that insurance checks can take time to arrive. Many, she said, came back to flooded homes and knew they would get no help from insurance as they didn’t have flood insurance. Her yard was lined with rows of clothing and other items that were identifiable, but not salvageable.

“I kind of just want to burn everything right now because it’s so much work,” she said.

Her eyes and hands drifted over the piles of items she managed to salvage from her home, including several pieces of taxidermy and bins of photographs, baby clothes and other keepsakes, including a kindergarten-sized graduation gown. She said someone was going to let them store everything they could salvage in their barn for free.

“We just really appreciate everyone coming together and helping us,” she said. “… The amount of cleaning supplies and food we’ve received … The Red Cross came earlier and fed us, all the people coming and helping us is just overwhelming. There are way more good people than there are bad.”

While at Potter’s home, Hoosiers Help team member Beth Nicholson was going down Potter’s front steps with her when she looked down and found a cross-shaped puzzle piece on the steps. She showed it to Potter.

“The look on our faces when we saw that — we both looked down at the same time and went, ‘Do you see that?’” said Nicholson. “She said, ‘That had to come from a higher power.’ I said, ‘Should we pick it up?’ and she said, ‘Oh yeah, I’m keeping that in my pocket.’ Then she said, ‘It’s a puzzle piece. I don’t know where it came from.’ …She said, ‘Do you know how many times we’ve been out this door? Why didn’t it get on someone’s shoe or scatter?’”

After leaving Riley with some food and other supplies to distribute the Hoosiers Help team made their way to a seafood restaurant, where employees were mucking out. The homes near the restaurant, which was located on a creek, had been heavily flooded.

“They’ll try to refuse the supplies, but tell them to take them,” Riley said. “They’ll make sure what they don’t need gets to those who need it.”

“How she talked — we knew we placed the stuff in the right hands,” said Shetler. “She was so excited we brought what we did, but she only took what she needed. She was very sincere and honest.”

“She said if those guys [at the restaurant] had to take things by boat to people who needed it, they would,” said Brown.

The smell of the damp and the mold and a rotting mix of flour, cream and corn meal hit the Hoosiers Help team as they left the bus. The yellow flour-meal-cream goop was being shovelled up and dumped outside by the wheelbarrow load. Buckets of various kinds of alcohol from the bar sat, waiting for disposal after being contaminated by flood waters that lifted an outside refrigerator up on top of the roof, along with a few chairs. The cabins downriver were just as damaged.

All the supplies the team had left, aside from what remained of the food they planned to cook during the trip for hurricane victims, were moved into a dry part of the restaurant, ready for distribution to those in need.

From there, the team went to the parking lot of a Food Lion grocery store and got permission to set up their grill, serving hot dogs, chips, cookies and applesauce for a few hours. People came for themselves, for their families, for neighbors who couldn’t get out to the store. The store employees put the word out on social media and members of the team held signs by the road to tell people to come and eat.

A group of men who were helping with a shelter set up in a nearby high school came to see what was going on and offered to take meals to people living in the shelter. As the team wasn’t able to cook and serve all the rest of the food at the parking lot before dark, they brought what was left of the supplies they came with to the school for the group of men to cook. They were told refugees from the storm had been living on MREs and Vienna sausages for days and were thrilled at the chance for something different.

“They saw these people — those men lived off the MRE meals, so they didn’t bother them — but they know that in a time like that, food can be a comfort,” said Shetler. “For them to take it upon themselves to get creative and find a way to get this for them [was really touching].”

Shetler said it was a challenge during the day to find a way to distribute all the meals. They had been focusing on setting up multiple times to help smaller communities that hadn’t been able to receive help yet because they had lower populations. However, that would take time the team didn’t have for this short trip.

“Here, lo and behold, at the last place we set up, these men come up and said, ‘We’ve got 100 people at a school and they need to eat,’” said Shetler. “… I think our 1,400 meals showed a lot of hope and love.”

“I was talking to one of the guys and he said, ‘All of this was donated?’ He couldn’t believe that a small community like ours had that many donations,” said Brown. “I told him about the trip to Texas where Hoosiers Help took a semi-full.”

“People ask us why we travel so far with supplies and food when you could just give to the Red Cross or Samaritan’s Purse or things like that,” said Shetler. “By doing it the way that we do it, it gets our own community involved, it shows to our children in our community how to be the hands and feet and then they can see it on social media. They can see where the stuff goes. We make sure that everything goes in the right hands.”

“I’m just so glad I went,” said Brown.

“The only thing more rewarding than this is taking a bunch of kids out to do this sort of thing,” said Johnson. “When you see that lightbulb go on in their head, it’s amazing … Everyone should go at least once.”

You can read Staff Writer Kate Wehlann's personal account of the trip and her thoughts here.