“She said, ‘My mother always told me to thank people when they do something kind for you,’” Suddith said Tuesday. “’Not to wait until their funeral for them to get their flowers, so I want to give you your flowers now to thank you for being so kind to me and helping me get through this.’”
Suddith, a 44-year-old Hagerstown resident, arrived at the rural shelter on Oct. 6, just one day before Hurricane Matthew hit the region, leveling homes and leaving thousands stranded in its wake.
As the volunteers and residents huddled in the Lee Central High School gymnasium that next night, Suddith did her best to help the woman take her mind off the 67 mph winds battering the building.
Before returning home Friday to continue pursuing dual master’s degrees in social work and emergency management at Shippensburg University, Suddith had plenty more opportunities to lend a hand. Still, those brief, kind words of appreciation from an embattled woman stood out in her mind.
“I’ve never heard anybody say anything so sweet to me,” Suddith said.
Even as late as Tuesday, more than 1,500 people in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida remained in approximately 31 Red Cross and community shelters, according to the nonprofit’s website.
Plenty of volunteers remained in the harder-hit areas of the South, including Frederick resident Stephanie Kimble, who drove down to North Carolina on Oct. 11 as part of a Red Cross team operating an emergency response vehicle.
Kimble and her fellow drivers meet each morning at 9:30 at the Oakmont Baptist Church in Greenville for a briefing on road conditions and safety advisories. By 11:30 a.m., the teams are usually heading out to deliver lunch to different shelters in the area, said Kimble, 30.
“We also do what’s called seek and serve, where they give you a neighborhood and you drive around and we can actually serve food directly out of the truck, almost like a food truck,” she added.
Teams keep a surplus of military-style ready-to-eat pouch meals to hand out, especially now that more and more residents are leaving the shelters to return to their homes and try to rebuild, Kimble said.
“We give them what they ask for, we don’t say no. If they ask for extra meals? We give them extra meals. If they ask for a case of water, we’ll give them a case of water,” she said. “Whatever the kitchen gives us.”
Kimble deployed to Louisiana as a damage assessor for the Red Cross after widespread flooding there in August. While similar in many ways, her role distributing meals and driving an emergency response vehicle to devastated neighborhoods in North Carolina gave her a different view of the people she was helping.
“I did have some people who, the second I handed them a meal, they just started bawling,” she said. “It does put things into perspective, you know? We’re stressed about our everyday things, but these people, some of them have 3 feet of water in their houses.”
Like Suddith, Kimble initially volunteered with the Red Cross to complete an internship requirement for her studies — she plans to graduate from Towson University with a bachelor’s degree in community health education in December — but opportunities to help exist for almost anyone interested.
Recent estimates placed the cost of damage left by Hurricane Matthew at about $6 billion, making donations a high priority for the nonprofit’s outreach efforts. Blood and platelet donations are also sorely needed as the storm disrupted blood drives and donations across the region.
For those who can spare a bit more, Suddith and Kimble recommended looking into volunteering, citing the appreciation they have received as more than enough to justify the long trip and difficult hours on deployment.
“People would say, ‘Oh, I hope they’re paying you enough for this!’ and I would say, you know, sir or madam, I’m here for free. I’m here to help you. And they were just shocked,” Suddith said.
“I think everybody should do something to help another community outside your own and meet people from outside your immediate area,” she said. “... You never know when it’s going to be you who needs help.”
———
©2016 The Frederick News-Post (Frederick, Md.)
Visit The Frederick News-Post (Frederick, Md.) at www.fredericknewspost.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
