Before I call it a night, I want to share just a few of the best and hardest moments from the last few days. The Red Cross Disaster Team members who have responded have been amazing—handing out water as fast as they could to keep first responders hydrated and responding, comforting families suffering a devastating loss, opening a shelter and keeping it staffed 24/7, working cases, and helping people take the first really hard steps in recovery. Many have worked 14 hour (or longer) shifts, several days in a row now. Even now, 3 volunteers are at the shelter, and 2 will stay all night until a team relieves them Monday at 6 AM. We need more volunteers for tomorrow, Monday night, and Tuesday. You may be the one we need, or you may know the ones we need. Please help spread the word by forwarding this message to your contacts.
This has been a tragic, awesome, heartbreaking, challenging, tender, touching, exhausting, and inspiring weekend.
- Tragic: More than 40 people have lost a place they considered home, a place that for many was the thin line before homelessness.
- Awesome: At least 30 volunteers traded their weekends off, sleep, leisure, and family time to face heat and hard work—and found joy in serving others.
- Heartbreaking: Hard working people lost hard-earned money, clothing, tools, toys, and irreplaceable keepsakes and photos;
- Challenging: In a community with limited resources, weekends and nights are even harder as almost no agencies provide services outside normal business hours—thankfully, Red Cross volunteers and partners do! (Special thanks go out to the A-Trans Team, McDonald’s of Alexandria, First Responders, Law Enforcement, Grace Christian, and Animal Control Teams for all their hard work over the weekend!)
- Tender: Moments where two young men facing their own tragic loss help another man confined to a wheel chair and times when volunteers and shelter residents cried together, neither able to talk, will remain vivid pictures in my heart.
- Touching: Volunteers sat in the floor with children to assemble puzzles; caseworkers spent time working to provide people clothes to wear and to provide other emergency needs; friendships were forged as cots were set up and meals were served..
- Exhausting: Since the call for Red Cross help from the Alexandria Fire Department on Friday around 2 PM and continuing through tonight, the Red Cross has been providing shelter, food, water, financial and emotional support even while we work hard to raise money to support this major disaster response at a time when we are already facing significant financial challenges forcing us to decrease our employees—again.
- Inspiring: Late this evening, my son Patrick (who volunteered to stay at the shelter all night with a few of other Grace Christian Church members so that I could go home) summed it up in his post on Facebook: “Please pray for the people who were involved in the fire. Sitting and talking with them, they’re just like you and me. Be thankful.”
Tomorrow and Tuesday, we need financial donors, shelter staff to fill shifts, caseworkers to help a way for the families still in the shelter to find a more permanent home, people to answer phones, volunteers to process invoices and paperwork, drivers to transport supplies, teams to sanitize and store cots, writers to help us tell the Red Cross story, cleaning crews, health services team members to work in the shelter, and office support to help complete reports and to prepare for our state-wide meeting on Wednesday.
Come join the tragic, awesome, heartbreaking, challenging, tender, touching, exhausting, and inspiring work of the Red Cross. We need you, and maybe you know someone else we need—please share this message. www.cenlaredcross.org
