Challenges await tsunami relief workers

DALLAS (BP) - State Baptist convention disaster relief directors are working with the International Mission Board to coordinate the volunteer response for the tsunami crisis. The North American Mission Board helps field requests for assistance based on their experience in coordinating state volunteers responding to national disasters. The two boards will coordinate the work of volunteers in two-week stints over the next three to four months.

Jim Richardson, disaster relief director for the Georgia Baptist Convention, left for the area on Feb. 7 for a two-week stint. He was accompanied by a doctor and two emergency medical technicians.

"This is just the unknown - not knowing what you're going to have when you get there," he said just prior to his departure. Richardson has been part of relief efforts in Kosovo, Iran, Guatemala and France, but said he expected the trip to South Asia to be worse than anything he had ever seen.

"We've been getting indications that no one has been into the area we're going into. These guys have encountered a lot of different things and they're very well equipped," he said of his team. Living in tents amidst a trauma area, Richardson said, "The teams need to be spiritually aware of opportunities and emotionally prepared for what they're going to encounter." "I've got my bags packed," stated Doug Baxley of Blackshear, a paramedic who will be a part of the first relief team from the state to leave. He knows that his medical training provides an open door to get into areas where others cannot go. "God's blessed me with multiple talents. I can fix about anything - and that has proven to be valuable," Baxley acknowledged.

Baxley knew as a child that God had called him to serve others through missions. "Ever since I was a Sunbeam I felt the Lord calling me to be a missionary. I never dreamed it would be on a volunteer basis," he added, expressing appreciation for his employer - "a Christian boss who is behind me 100 percent. He'd be mad if I didn't volunteer and provides me the time off when he can."

The Georgia layman is asking fellow Christians to pray that volunteers will not be overwhelmed by what they see. "It's going to be so graphic, so violent that I pray the Lord will just give me patience like never before to keep a good spirit, keep smiling and keep my eyes on Him." Baxley said he knows that sounds like a pat answer when asked about his concerns, adding, "That's going to be my biggest need - keeping me in tune with Him and not overcome by the situation."

Baxley prays that God will remove spiritual blindness among those he will serve who do not share his faith. "I want them to see the reason we're coming. We're not condemning their religion, practices or belief. We don't think we're better than them. They need our help and we're able to do that."

While volunteering in Iran last year, Baxley missed the birth of his grandson and now he's likely to miss the boy's first birthday while serving in South Asia. And yet he's confident of God's call to help people living in such desperate conditions. "Every day to the next day is survival for them," he said. "I've seen some of that and I know how I was able to help in the past."

Among efforts underway in various other states:

• Arkansas Baptists are recruiting trained medical personnel and crisis chaplains for immediate needs and rebuilding teams for later work. They are also receiving funds to provide supplies and support volunteer costs.
• Teams of Baptist Men from Texas and North Carolina left the first week of January to provide water purification and meal preparation, with more teams from those states following in the coming weeks.
• Disaster relief volunteers from the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention stand ready for medical and water purification assignments. "I've had unsolicited calls with five individuals who are packed and ready to go," said Bill Davenport, SBTC consultant for disaster relief. "Their passports and shots are in order and they're ready." He's contacting local Baptist associations to recruit additional volunteers who will join him in the effort within the next few months.

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A barefoot tsunami survivor pushes a wheelbarrow through debris near the center of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, on Jan. 4. People across the city, desperate for help, ask for rubber gloves and masks while they help recover some of the thousands of corpses of victims of the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami.

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Looking eerily lifeless under his blanket, a worker gets some sleep amid aid supplies piled in a military warehouse at an airbase in Medan, Indonesia. Within a few days of the Dec. 26 tsunami, incoming supplies threatened to overtake the warehouse's capacity.

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A steady stream of people in Krabi, Thailand, scan photographs of victims of the Dec. 26 tsunami trying to find friends or family members. A local Chinese temple is being used as a morgue to process the hundreds of bodies being brought from Ko Phuket and other nearby islands.