'U.N.' of faith groups aids disaster victims

RALEIGH, N.C. -- For every hurricane, earthquake or flood, there is help: food, bottled water, crews of volunteers nailing shingles to brand new roofs.

What even grateful recipients of that aid may not realize is that much of it comes from an unlikely hodgepodge of religious groups who put aside their doctrinal differences and coordinate their efforts as soon as the wind starts blowing.

Southern Baptists cook meals from Texas to Massachusetts. Seventh-day Adventists dispense aid from makeshift warehouses that can be running within eight hours. Mennonites haul away debris, Buddhists provide financial aid and chaplains with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team counsel the traumatized and grieving.

This "juice and cookies fellowship," as one organizer calls it, is mostly invisible to the public, but it provides interfaith infrastructure for disaster response around the country that state and federal officials could scarcely live without.

"Think of us as the United Nations of disaster relief," said Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, the main umbrella group for coordinating emergency response from private agencies.

Although "Vo-ad," as it's usually called, includes groups with no religious affiliation, the bulk of its 50 or so members are relief arms of churches and other faith-based organizations. The organization, which formed in 1970, has grown from seven founding members and this spring signed a memorandum of understanding with the Federal Emergency Management Agency that will help its members respond quicker to disasters.

"There's a tendency when disasters happen to look at government, but there's an inherent risk in taking a government-centric approach to disaster response," said FEMA administrator Craig Fugate.

The national group, which also works through state-level versions of the coalition, provides essential on-the-ground knowledge that government responders don't have time to develop on their own, Fugate said.

Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, for instance, is famous for its ability to prepare tens of thousands of hot meals at disasters from Hurricane Ike to flooding in New England.

"The Red Cross distributes the meals, but it's Southern Baptists doing the cooking," said Lin Honeycutt, a volunteer with the North Carolina group for more than 20 years.

The denomination apparently developed its affinity for mass meals after a hurricane hit Texas in the early 1960s.

Deciding who does what has been a delicate process of building confidence in the capacity of groups as different as Jews and Scientologists, according to Bill Adams, director of Disaster Response Services for the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee and a former NVOAD president.

"Just getting all those people at the same table is a miracle, when you think about it," Adams said.

Theology may not play a role in how the specialties develop, but it can present a thorny question for religious believers who don't agree on much beyond the need to help victims of disasters.

Last month, a FEMA videographer was rebuked after telling volunteers not to wear church T-shirts in a video about tornado cleanup to avoid any religious message.

"There may be separation of church and state in government, but in a disaster we all work together," Fugate said.

For the people who benefit from the groups' service, the result is all that matters.

Moses Jones, 54, had to evacuate his home in Lake Charles, La., along with his parents, children and sister when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. When they returned a month later, the house that had seen three generations of his family was uninhabitable.

"The wind blew off the the siding, the shingles," he said. "I couldn't live there."

Eight teams of volunteers from the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee arrived shortly after, and today Jones said his house is in better shape than it was before Katrina. The particular denominations of his volunteers means little to him compared to the work they did.

"It was like angels came to help me," he said. "I'm Yahweh-blessed, godly blessed. I really feel that way."