Thursday afternoon, seven men — some as young as 17 — were on top of a Columbus resident’s roof repairing damage from the Feb. 23 tornado.
The workers made up a handful of the 32 volunteers from Townline Mennonite Church in Shipshewana, Indiana affiliated with Mennonite Disaster Services. They arrived in Mississippi Saturday evening to coordinate with volunteer organizations like Community Recovery of Lowndes County and United Methodist Committee on Relief to aid property owners and renters both in and out of Lowndes County.
“They have been here all week,” said MDS coordinator Larry Miller, who hosted the volunteers in Noxubee County. “Our focus has been two roofs for tornado-stricken Columbus, plus we have also done home repairs in Noxubee County.”
The volunteers arrived Oct. 19 and spent the entirety of the next week working on the two houses. Miller said more, bigger groups — including Amish volunteers — will be in town next week, from Nov. 4-9, another week in late November and the week of Christmas. They are rebuilding one Seventh Street North home next month, and doing roofing and sheet rock work for 13 others.
He added they all paid their own way to come from northern Indiana and southern Michigan. Adam Stutzman, from Bronson, Michigan, said he’s worked with MDS before in South Dakota, but that this was his first time volunteering in Mississippi.
“A few of the other guys in the group had been here with (Miller) before, so that’s kind of how we found out about this,” he said, gesturing to his fellow volunteers on the roof of a 17th Street house belonging to a Mississippi State University employee.
Stutzman and the rest of the team met with homeowners and did some sightseeing — that is, when they weren’t on top of roofs repairing shingles under the sun, though Stutzman promised he wasn’t hot.
For 17-year-old Caleb Schwartz, whose father runs a constructions company, Miller said, it was his first time volunteering with MDS out of state.
“I like helping people,” he said, adding he has a cousin who has also volunteered.
Miller said his team is just one “niche” in the clean-up still ongoing in northeast Columbus months after the tornado. CRLC is using a $250,000 Mississippi Emergency Management Agency grant for supplies, along with thousands of dollars of donations, to help make repairs on the so far 75 homes which have been approved by case workers affiliated with CRLC and UMCOR — and with the possibility of more on the way, said UMCOR case worker Vanessa Walker.
“We’re working together as a team to make sure we do our best to service the people in this community,” Walker said. “…(There is) still a great need, but hopefully we can get some more volunteers and people who would like to fund our projects, because we do have funds from MEMA. But this is our community so we need to have the buy-in from the organizations and individuals in our community to really reach out to the people who really need our help.”
She and Miller encouraged area residents to donate food — Miller said his volunteers like “Gatorade, granola bars and honey buns” — or open their homes to volunteers from out-of-state, in addition to helping with construction and “beautification,” even after MDS has finished its final project in December. Many area residents whose homes were damaged are senior citizens or others who don’t have the funds to pay for much of the repairs.
MDS’ first crop of volunteers headed back to the Midwest over the weekend — though not before playing tourist and visiting the Bogue Chitto cotton gin in Brooksville and some other sights, Miller said.
“We’re actually going to show them some of the sights,” he said. “They deserve to get some sight-seeing done for their free labor.”
But for him and the other volunteers, he said, meeting those they are helping is the best part of volunteering.
“This is the fun part, meeting with homeowners, because they really do say thank you for all that we do,” he said. “I guess you and I would, too, if we waited (since) February to try and have something done.
“We want to restore 14 families to their lives,” he said.
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