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Organization Helps Northeast Texas Tornado Victims

Mercy Chefs is a non-profit faith-based organization that receives private funding to operate.

Texas2
(TNS) - After a series of tornadoes touched down in northeast Texas carving out a path of destruction killing more than several people on April 29, a nationwide organization with a mobile kitchen branded for its food and deployment to disasters stepped up to help.

Lisa Saylor, managing chef for Mercy Chefs, was deployed April 30 to Canton, Texas where she and other volunteer chefs from all over the U.S. teamed up serving approximately 10,000 restaurant quality meals from a mobile commercial kitchen.

Mercy Chefs is a non-profit faith-based organization that receives private funding to operate.

Destiny Life Church in Claremore adopted their mobile kitchen by keeping it disaster-ready for the next deployment.

Saylor became the managing chef for Mercy Chefs last year after volunteering in Moore serving food to tornado victims there four years ago.

More than 27 deployments later – 11 of which were last year – she takes a deep breath in between while working her private catering business. Then, within a moment’s notice, she is back on the road to another disaster.

Each type of disaster has their own class of destruction and emotions that go along with them, Saylor emphasized.

She listens and sees what flood victims experience emotionally since not everything is gone. “It is just ruined. They have to see it ruined. When you have a tornado, it is just gone.”

“When you deal with a flood, things come in stages. Oftentimes, when we get there at the beginning of the flood, we only see the beginning of the victims. As the rivers crest, there will be more victims.”

A tornado, she said, is utter destruction, which is shocking and difficult to process. “But, you do not always have to physically throw anything away with a tornado. With a flood, it leaves everything gray. You have to go through everything that is left and throw it away. Each day is a new day,” she added.

Seeing tornado devastation is a rip-off, she said. “The level of destruction is so much more fierce and gruesome. There is definitely an element that hits you and the scarring it creates, not to mention the greatest devastation for any disaster is loss of lives.”

Deployment to places where wildfires burn homes to the ground, she said, there is nothing to go through. She personally experienced that, losing everything with very little to salvage. “There is a different element of destruction even there.”

The food Mercy Chefs serves is prepared with love, she said. When victims and emergency responders open the white to-go box, they expect chips and a wrap --not baked ziti and fresh vegetables and salad with homemade dressing, she said.

The organization even partnered with a local farm-to-market organization and had a farm-to-table meal while there.

“The feedback we get, they not only appreciate we came or that we stayed but that we served them food that was obviously made with care and love.”

Post-deployment is hard for Mercy Chefs volunteers. “We cannot just turn it all off. Destruction did not just stop. It was not magically gone just because we left the state.”

Hinging on the minds of volunteers are the lower-economically displaced individuals they left behind. “When we get there, we are a bright light in their dark world. When we leave, the light gets dim for them and we are troubled by it knowing they still need help.”

Most of the time, within a week’s time, she said, people find alternative housing and can get back to some level of survival. “But that is not always true for those financially challenged. That is what always echoes in my mind.”

She said the organization reaches a lot of people who literally do not know where their next meal is coming from. Those are the people that drive them to work five more hours.

“Even with all of the destruction, in the end, we see the same thing. We see a fellow man turn out to help their neighbor and a huge influx of people who want to continue to help. That is the same no matter where we go. We could not do Mercy Chefs without volunteers,” Saylor added.

To make donations to Mercy Chefs, please visit their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pg/MercyChefs/photos/?ref=page_internal and select “Donate,” or visit their website at www.mercychefs.com.

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©2017 the Claremore Daily Progress (Claremore, Okla.)

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