Day 3 Joplin 211

Today we had a late start to our day due to the rain! I truly have never seen so much rain. Since we are a smaller group of seven, the Americore sent us to the salvation army distribution center. We folded and sorted the many clothes donations that the Salvation Army received. The Salvation Army was preparing for a clothes give away they would be having the week of April 9-15. The man in charge of the clothes give away said they were preparing to see any where from 10,000- 15,000 people that had suffered from the tornado and are now homeless. He said they had a clothes give away a couple of weeks after the storm hit for just one day and they say 8,000 people go through and take clothes. We were lucky to work there because it was dry and worked the whole day. Around noon, a group of younger middle school aged volunteers came to help. We were all very thankful for the help, but when 20 younger children are running around the building, the help was almost counter-productive. However, we went on with a positive attitude about it, and found the younger volunteers easy jobs to do, like collecting and removing all stained clothes. We were the last group in the building, and when 3:00 hit, we decided to do a "power hour", where we pumped up the music and tried to get as much as possible done. It was fun to do that in a hurry and we finished off a whole other palette of donations. After we were finished, we talked to the man in charge about the day of the tornado. He lived outside of Joplin, and said after he had heard about the tornado, he and his wife rushed in to help. He was an EMT and his wife worked at triage helping people. He worked with search and rescue, and said that he pulled 200-300 people out of the rebel and debris of the city. He said he worked for three days strait helping to find people and never slept. He also shared very heartbreaking stories, like going to rescue a mother and her child who were pleading for help, but a whole entire 2 X 4 was pierced through the both of them. Another one was he found a baby in a tree, completely unscratched and perfectly fine, but her house, where the baby was in her mothers arms was 12 blocks away! The wind and the tornado had picked the baby up from the mother's arms and tossed it. One other thing he had mentioned was that he was so thankful for us to be here, but they were definitely seeing a huge decline in volunteers until Spring Break season had started.