From the crew
Five days in western Kentucky
In December 2021 eleven of us drove to western Kentucky with Mennonite Disaster Service, a week after the tornado. Elmer wrote this for the church newsletter when we got back.
Elmer Schrock · Work crew coordinator
We left the church lot at five on a Sunday morning in two vans and a pickup full of generators. Nobody talked much past Indianapolis. We had seen the pictures, and the pictures turned out to be the easy part.
Mennonite Disaster Service had a base camp in a church gym. We slept on cots, ate what the Ohio volunteers cooked, and every morning got a slip of paper with a family's name and an address.
Mrs. Puckett's kitchen
Our address on Tuesday was a kitchen with no roof. The woman who lived there was eighty-one and had been sleeping at her daughter's. She stood in the yard all day and told us which drawer every spoon used to live in.
Nobody asked what church we were from. They asked if we could stay till Friday.
By Thursday the roof was dried in and the kitchen had walls. We didn't finish. Another crew from Pennsylvania came the next week, and another after that.
What we brought home was mostly the knowledge that there is always a next crew. That is why the Saturday crew in Goshen exists. It is the same work, nearer home, every second and fourth Saturday.