Dedicated Teams of Volunteers

AMURT & AMURTEL volunteers were active in Baton Rouge, Louisiana about 80 miles from New Orleans as well as Houston, Austin and San Antonio Texas.

Our volunteers work in refugee centers providing medical assistance, administering compassionate counseling for trauma and stress, locating housing, and sorting and distributing in-kind donations. Our dedicated volunteer teams were appreciated wherever they go. One AMURTEL volunteer in Baton Rouge reported: “The shelters are full of people overwhelmed with despair, and we bring so much energy, a sense of something brighter. The shelter staff told us the whole atmosphere of the shelter was transformed when we came.”

Our volunteers are multicultural and multiracial, professional and lay, men and women, and range in age from their early twenties to their fifties. They are bound by a common desire to strengthen the human family.

Case Managers

Often our volunteers filled the role of case manager for the evacuees. They worked with individuals and families to make them feel as comfortable and as cared for as possible. Verna, an elderly woman in a wheelchair, spent 4 days on the roof of her New Orleans home without food and water. She was deeply traumatized when she arrived at the Houston Convention Center. Our volunteers comforted her and met all her immediate needs, helping to ease the pain of her struggles.

Our volunteers were vigilant for people who are falling through the cracks of the shelter system. They worked one on one with mothers with children and the elderly who did’t know where to go or what to do. Not only did they steer them through the system, helping them find and use the shelter’s services, they took everything a step further than the system offers.

One of the tragedies of this disaster is the separation of loved ones. An AMURT volunteer worked most of the day in the Port Allen shelter to help a family locate their 14 year-old who was hospitalized somewhere. Toward the end of the day our volunteer located the teenager and informed the extremely relieved family.

Medical Assistance

Our medical volunteers worked in the Houston shelters for the first two weeks of the response, and are now focusing in some of the 250 shelters in the Baton Rouge area. They assist with the medical needs of the evacuees, ranging from calming distraught patients to stabilizing patients having heart attacks.

Our medical volunteers met many emergency needs. Here is a report from one of our medical doctors at the George Brown Convention Center in Houston: “I was called to help a ten year old girl with cerebral palsy who was having a seizure. We raced her to the medical clinic where the staff already knew that the girl’s parents were deaf. A volunteer ran to the booth providing services for the deaf, and within minutes we were in direct communication with the parents. The mother advised us to place a cold cloth on her head the instant she awoke. With our prompt intervention she became stable and calm.”