Giving to Georgia
LU Send Now builds a team bound for Georgia to aid storm victims
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Angharad Hatt, Liberty University senior psychology student, was planning to travel with an LU Send Now team to provide relief for a severe storm.
However, it was another storm that provided her the opportunity to go.
In the first week of January, a powerful storm system ripped through several southern states resulting in multiple tornadoes that caused severe damage and six deaths, according to the Weather Channel.
In response to this, Morgan Ulmer, the Send Now logistics coordinator, said a trip was assembled to contribute aid to the people in the areas impacted.
The roster had been finalized, and the bags were packed when weather interrupted yet again.
“We had to tell the students that weekend that we couldn’t go because one of the really bad snowstorms was coming through, and it was completely over our exact route to Georgia,” Ulmer said.
After cancelling the first trip to ensure student safety, LU Send Now began to organize a second trip to go to Albany, Georgia during the first week of the semester.
This change of dates resulted in a shuffling of the roster, Ulmer said, allowing some students, such as Hatt, to serve after not being on the team initially.
During the original dates, Hatt was in the process of getting her passport renewed to allow her to come back from Canada to the United States, so she was not able to join.
However, the trip delay provided Hatt just enough time to receive her new passport and be in America when the trip was departing.
“Even now, when looking back, I am still so amazed by God — at how he managed to work it all out,” Hatt said.
Once the final team was assembled and the group arrived in Albany, Jacob
Vanderbleek, a sophomore biblical studies student, said there was less visible damage than he expected.
Vanderbleek said he anticipated homes knocked down and cars flipped over due to the devastation depicted in humanitarian videos he had seen responding to more catastrophic crises.
The work primarily included cleaning up leaves in messed-up yards, which Vanderbleek said provided them enough work to give them a reason to be there while also allowing time for conversation.
“God placed us in the right place at the right time for the people that had much more going on in their lives than just that storm,” Vanderbleek said.
“The main purpose I found for being there was to talk to the people that owned the homes and sharing truth and love with them.”
Another reason Vanderbleek said Albany looked different than he expected was because there was not much media coverage of the storm to help the team build an idea of what awaited them.
This lack of national awareness was part of what compelled Hatt to serve.
“Because I had not heard anything about the storms until I received the email, I felt a greater call to go to Georgia,” Hatt said.
“I so desperately wanted the community to know that there are people who are aware of what happened there and are wanting to help them.”
After working for and staying in Albany from Jan. 18-21, Ulmer concluded that this was indeed a community that was curious if they had been forgotten.
“We had it affirmed by homeowners, people in Walmart parking lots and church members,” Ulmer said.
“They were saying, ‘We weren’t really sure if people cared about us because nobody knew what was happening.’”
This feeling of being forgotten was erased, Ulmer said, when the army of red T-shirts, comprised of the LU Send Now team and Samaritan’s Purse volunteers, began to attack the messes in their yards.
Ulmer said what took their team of 14 people a few hours to accomplish may have taken these families a few days to complete.
Others needed the help even more, as they never would have been able to do the work themselves due to physical limitations.
The trip was cut a day short as the team left before a second round of storms hit the South.
The storms resulted in even more damage and death than the original storms.
Vanderbleek said it was difficult to leave the people they went to help knowing more storms were coming, but he and Hatt both said that much was accomplished with the time the team was given.
“I saw a community come together and love one another,” Hatt said.
“I saw strangers helping strangers. I saw unconditional love being poured out to person after person, no matter their race, religion, or sexuality.”
LU Send Now is currently putting together another response team that will be in Hattiesburg, Mississippi from Feb. 4-11.