Braving the storm

LU Send Now team sends 10 students to Texas

 

Liberty University’s LU Send Now office sent 10 students to Victoria, Texas to work as relief volunteers Saturday, Sept. 2.

 

Victoria is located 50 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico and is known as the crossroads of southeastern Texas.

 

The team is heading there due to Victoria’s proximity to Houston, San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

 

Harvey made landfall Aug. 25 and was the strongest storm to hit the continental U.S. in history in terms of rainfall and wind speed.

 

While Harvey had a relatively small diameter of 280 miles, (Katrina was 400 miles wide, Igor 920 miles and Sandy 482 miles) the category four hurricane packed a powerful punch.

 

Social media feeds abound with pictures of the disaster, from nursing home residents sitting in waist-high water, to a child holding onto his drowned mother, to neighbors pulling each other from their sinking cars.

 

The damage is astounding.

 

And that is why Liberty quickly mobilized a team of 10 LU Send Now volunteers to serve.

 

Vince Valeriano, the associate director for LU Send Now, took his team to Victoria, Texas on Sept. 2.

 

Valeriano has worked non-stop on preparations for this trip since Aug. 26.

 

“We want to be a blessing to those that we are serving, we want to help them in any way that we can (to) get (them) back on their feet after a lot of these people lost everything,” Valeriano said.

 

“To come in and be a source of comfort, showing that there are people out there that care for them, helping them to emotionally process through everything that’s happening and being a support structure for them.”

 

The team will be based out of Faith Family Church in Victoria.

Valeriano said he had difficulty trying to find a city to support because the storm destroyed so much infrastructure.

 

Most of Texas’s resources have been obliterated or are being used by local victims.

 

“Victoria, Texas was the first place to serve in that really came available for organizations like Samaritans Purse,” Valeriano said.

 

“Everything else is completely flooded and still inaccessible to volunteers to come and get into. It was basically the first place that we could get into.”

 

The office has responded to flooding before, but this experience will be completely new for the 10 first-time LU Send Now responders.

 

“This one is very unique in that it’s just such a large scale,” Valeriano said.

 

“It’s one of the worst natural disasters that has hit the United States in years.”

 

As of Sept. 1, 27 trillion gallons of water have fallen on Texas and Louisiana, at least 47 people have died and at least 30,000 are displaced, according to CNN.

 

Valeriano said he cannot remember in his lifetime a natural disaster in the United States as destructive and enormous as Hurricane Harvey.

 

“Something like Hurricane Harvey, where it’s just such a massive, wide-scale disaster, and it’s in the United States, and we have great organizations that know what they are doing and are set up to receive volunteers, that’s a no-brainer for us.

We are going to step right into that,” Valeriano said.

 

According to Valeriano, Samaritans Purse has said that other universities are looking at Liberty’s LU Send Now program to replicate it on their own campuses.

 

Seth Lunger will be one of the 10 students going to Victoria. Lunger said he has been eagerly awaiting his opportunity to do humanitarian work through Liberty.

 

“We’re here to help other people,” Lunger said.

 

“We’re not just here in Lynchburg, but we put our arms around people all over the world.”

 

Kelsey Ellis, a strategic communications major, will be doing videography and photography for the trip to Texas.

 

Ellis hopes that not only the team’s physical work, but also their emotional presence will serve people.

“A lot of times in this environment we are going into, it’s where emotions are high and a lot of damage has been done,” Ellis said.

 

“It may be that we need to go gut a house out to deal with the damage, or maybe we just need to be a listening ear for someone. So I think just being available to listen, give someone a hug or show love would be one of the greatest things I’m looking forward to.”

 

The team of 10 did not go alone.

 

Valeriano asked the thousands of Liberty students who did not go to Texas to join their classmates by praying for them and the people they encounter.

 

“We really need people praying for us,” Valeriano said.

 

“We need people praying for us all the time. A lot of things can go wrong and people can get injured. I really feel like when people pray, it really prevents and protects us from those things and also from spiritual attacks.”

 

For updates on the trip while the team is in Texas, visit the Office of Spiritual Development’s Facebook page.

 

“Pray for us, pray for the people of Texas,” Valeriano said.

 

ABBATACOLA is a news reporter.