Barre, VT – June 2-8, 2024

The base for the project really started off on Tuesday May 27 as a group of 4 men from the NY Unit started building single bed frames.  They later assisted in hooking up the 3 long term volunteers RVs, the shower trailer, and then built a platform for the entrances to the 5 doors of the shower trailer.  Wednesday long-term arrivals were Leon & Carol Brubaker from Akron PA and Roland & Linda Stutzman from Birmingham AL.  Dan Coyne, the project director from Evanston IL arrived Friday evening.  Two year long volunteers, Eric Douglas from Shuqualak, MS and Jack Odhiambo from Kisumu, Kenya arrived on Saturday.

Our first group of 15 Amish volunteers from southern Lancaster County arrived on Saturday. By Monday morning they were ready to go to work.  Some stayed back at the base and helped Leon with projects.  Even though the shower trailer was not up and running the four showers (2 men’s and 2 ladies) were enough to get by.

The survivors who were helped this week were Judith, Charles and Georgina, Monica, Maurice & Piper, Trevor, John, and Thomas.  The volunteers also helped unload 2 tractor trailer loads of donated items from IKEA and sort the items at the Hope Coalition warehouse.  Some of them made the local evening news.  Hope Coalition is the Long-Term Recovery Group (LTRG) we are working with. Projects include lots of drywalling, flooring, and mitigation for future flood events.  Lots of stories from the survivors came back to our evening report time.  Wednesday evening Dan Molind, LTRG chair spoke to the group about how this community is attempting to recover from a 100-year flood.  Some areas got 17inches of rain in 24 hours.  The terrain is in the Green Mountains so some houses were affected by hillside streams and run-off.  Next week we will be doing pretty much the same thing with a new group.

There is an interesting story regarding the shower trailer.  After multiple things that needed to be done just to get it functional, we finally had hot water on Friday.  But then on Saturday no more hot water and an error message on the on-demand water heater stating that there was an issue with the ventilation.  Eric decided to take the cover off the unit and found 6 dead birds, 5 of which were huddled together in one of the two vents.  Once they were disposed of we had hot water again.  Thank you, Thank you Eric.

Respectfully submitted by Roland Stutzman for Dan, Leon, Carol, Linda, Eric, and Jack.