When volunteers arrived at this New Jersey home, the homeowners called them a “band of angels.”
By Susan Kim
▲When volunteers arrived at this New Jersey home, the homeowners called them a “band of angels.”
March 20, 2014—A family in New Jersey was barely hanging onto a faint glimmer of hope when a “band of angels” came to their door. Before Hurricane Sandy swirled through, the father, an ironworker, became disabled when he hurt his back at work. Then, the family was devastated when they lost one of the children, 6 years old, to cancer.
“In taking care of the medical and funeral bills, they had no money left to help themselves,” said Norm Hardin, disaster response coordinator for the California-Nevada Annual (regional) Conference of The United Methodist Church. “Then Sandy hit.”
The superstorm was a kind of final blow to the house, though the family continued to live there, Hardin said. “With all of this happening all at once, the husband went into a depression,” he said. “There was this patio chair, and he told us that he used to just sit there staring at the house, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beer.”
That was before the angels came and turned this into a story of resurrection.
Twenty-Eight Volunteers, One Home
The “angels” are 28 volunteers from California and Nevada who flew across the country to New Jersey. Most of them have worked together for several years, and they are trained and experienced in traveling to disaster sites.
But when they got to New Jersey, their task list was a lot shorter than usual: it was one house. For a group used to splitting into smaller teams and tackling multiple repair jobs, this was surprising—and, to be honest, worrisome at first. Would there be enough work? Even if there was, would there be enough room to tackle the job?
It was challenging and it required the volunteers to be flexible, admitted Diane Jackson, a volunteer from First United Methodist Church of Santa Rosa in California. In the end, the group became closer than ever. “A lot of the people liked the feeling of being all together in one place,” she said. “We're from seven churches. This gave people a chance to get to know each other much better.”
Extended Family
The volunteers were also able to sit down and have meals with the family, who often worked alongside them, said Bill Walker, a volunteer from the Presbyterian Church of Novato, Nevada. “We learned their family story. They were down. They had almost given up.”
The volunteers saw the family as not just hurricane survivors but as “real people,” said Kay Walker, Bill's wife. “It was just great to be able to sit on the ground and have a bag lunch with them and talk about so-called normal things.”
What started out as a questionable experience for the volunteers turned into, by the time the work was completed, an unprecedented time of closeness with each other and with the family, she said.
“They called us their band of angels. When they answered the door the first day we came, they believed the angels had come.”
The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) trains “angels” in waiting like the volunteers convened by the California-Nevada Annual Conference. Your gift to UMCOR US Disaster Response, Advance #901670, ensures conference training in early response, long-term response, disaster case management, and spiritual and emotional care.
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