Dedicated Teams of Volunteers

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

The main focus of our work was in Baton Rouge, providing medical relief and compassionate counseling for trauma and stress in the shelters, cleaning up homes damaged by the hurricane, and helping move evacuees from shelters to trailer camps set up by FEMA.

Living/Welcome Kits

AMURT and AMURTEL, along with other voluntary organizations, helped FEMA move evacuees from the shelters in Baton Rouge to 100,000 mobile homes. They greeted new arrivals at the Groom Road trailer site, showing them to their trailers and presented them with their living/welcome kits that contain bedding, toiletries and other basic necessities. Our volunteers were also busy preparing the kits.

Clean Up Operation

A dedicated AMURT and AMURTEL team helped the elderly in Vermillion Parish, a coastal area two hours from Baton Rouge, clean out their homes. It took 6-person team up to two days to throw out damaged items and make a house habitable. Sometimes they had to evict unwelcome guests: in one house they ran into a couple of small alligators and water moccasins.

One elderly woman was so grateful when our volunteers showed up. She said she had been trying to clean her house for weeks, but didn’t have the strength. She also said the following words, which touched our volunteers deeply: “This is the first day since the disaster that I have not cried all day.”

After this incident one of our volunteers commented that her experience helping the disaster survivors is both humbling and empowering, and she is learned more about herself than she could imagine.

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 fill the role of case manager for the evacuees. They work with individuals and families to make them feel as comfortable and as cared for as possible.

One of our volunteers told this story about an evacuee she helped in Houston: “I found an elderly man on his cot crying. He was really disoriented – he had not been on his seizure or blood pressure meditation for a week because he had lost it. He was repeating he did not know where to go, what to do. I spent four hours with him going through the whole medical process to get his prescriptions filled. He could hardly complete any of his tests because he could not stop crying. Finally he found his brother and mother, and they got housing. My concern was that if I had not shown up what would have happened. He had not been eating and was vulnerable to others in the shelter.”


Medical Assistance

Our medical volunteers worked in the Houston shelters for the first two weeks of the response, and then focused in some of the 250 shelters in the Baton Rouge area. They assisted 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 she became stable and calm."