PILCHER: I have heard many, many stories about volunteers just going into communities and helping. Did you find this in communities that you serve?
POST: Yeah, I think it was amazing how generous folks were.
And people came and got boats and took them out of their apartments. There was these young men who just were going again and again and again to get people and I thought that was so touching.
And once people, you know, the waters had gone down. There was people in the community who, there was this one family in Millwood who, we heard they were accepting all of the food and all of the water that was coming in and so were concerned about that. And we went to visit them and what they were actually doing was, they knew everyone who lived in the apartments and so they made a list of every single person who lived there.
So they made a list of everyone who lived there, and they were checking it off and making sure every single family got food, and that they divided it up enough so that no family was left without something, and that to me was just so amazing. You know, they had taken that in. It wasn’t that they were taking all the supplies to eat everything themselves, they were doing it to really make sure that it was this fair division of things and I thought that was amazing.
We saw, I saw Cameron Middle School teachers who were out there every day, making sure their students were okay. Just, it was amazing.
PILCHER: Well you’ve already addressed some of this, but what kind of support did you witness from the volunteers and other organizations? Did you have any NGOs that came to your assistance?
POST: Yeah, I mean, we worked really closely with a lot of different immigrant organizations. Like I mentioned, the Somali Students Association and the Somali Center that’s now the Center for Refugees and Immigrants in Tennessee, I mean, they were doing canvasses. There was different Hispanic churches that were doing canvasses over in East Nashville. There was, Connexion Americas was there, like in some of the trailer parks in Antioch, in South Nashville, in Smyrna.
And I think just seeing those non profits but also people in the community just really, like in the trailer park in Smyrna, I think it’s Maple Wood Manor, maybe, but I could have that name wrong. They were rebuilding each other’s houses together. And even when their trailer was finished, they were helping the other person to make sure theirs was also done. And I so think that collaborate, it was really beautiful to see how people, even people who had gone through so much and lost everything, were willing to volunteer and help their neighbors.
Excerpted from: Amelia Post Oral History Interview. Born-digital recording(s) converted to mp3 format for online access in 2012 from 16bit 44.1khz WAV file archival master recording.
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