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Transcript |
MURDOCK: What happened that first day was that about 30 people showed up. And so we were working with those people and going, “Okay, here are the homes that we have, let’s go clean out some basements, get some stuff out of some of the basements, let’s just assess.” So we canvassed and started canvassing neighborhoods. Towards the end of the day, and nobody had wanted to say anything because they didn’t want to be selfish, it became clear that all 30 of these people had damage themselves and nobody had said anything. And so toward the end of the day, people started going, “You know, I hate to say this, because I want to help other people, but I’ve got damage too”; there was a consensus and everybody was saying, “Yes, we all have damage,” and so it became a thing where we started helping each other get cleaned up and worked pretty late into the evening in the process.
And then the second day, sixty people showed up and then the third day, it was like 300 people showed up. All in all, we had 1600 people that came through in the Garden Center. We had the Vanderbilt University basketball team, we had Jack White from the White Stripes, we had the 101st Airborne came in, and off-duty volunteers. We had (and Catherine may have to give you this gentleman’s name) a 9/11 survivor, firefighter that was real vital during 9/11, had heard about what had happened and had contacted us, came down and participated in the volunteer efforts, leading a crew as well. We had just amazing response and volunteers, people in the community, people that if they couldn’t physically help us, if they had to work, or just physically they were not allowed to do any kind of hard labor, they were doing bake sales, raising money for supplies, for bleach, for food items, for just whatever we would ask for, I mean, to be interpreters. We needed somebody who could speak Portuguese, we needed somebody who could speak Indian, we needed someone that could speak Spanish; we had all these families who were scared to come out of the woodwork, or didn’t know what was going on, and so we had to say “Look, we’re not here to harm you, we’re here to help you.” |
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Rights |
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