LU Send Now sends team to hurricane-ravaged Antigua and Barbuda

• LU Send Now team is deploying students through Samaritan’s Purse’s DART team for the first time.
• Hurricane Irma left Caribbean islands decimated, with Hurricane Maria doing more damage.

 

LU Send Now deployed eight students to the Hurricane Irma wrecked islands of Antigua and Barbuda Sept. 22 as the pilot international trip with Samaritan’s Purse, through the nonprofit’s Disaster, Assistance and Response Team.

 

Irma, which originally started as a tropical wave off the coast of West Africa Aug. 28, grew to Category 5 strength and bulldozed the Caribbean islands and, eventually, Florida.

 

The hurricane’s wingspan stretched 600 miles, which is about a nine-hour drive.

 

In early September, LU Send Now and Samaritan’s Purse began plans to send students to Saint Martin, but Hurricane Maria quickly developed and plundered the Caribbean islands of anything that was left after Irma.

 

Puerto Rico was left completely without power. Dominica was left mind-boggled, said Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit as he addressed the media emotionally about the damage.

 

LU Send Now and Samaritan’s Purse had to think fast and come up with another relief plan. Instead of going into Saint Martin, they decided Antigua and Barbuda would be a better place to serve.

 

“Because Maria also hit Saint Martin, and the infrastructure was so decimated, if we went, they wouldn’t have enough infrastructure to support us,” Anna Claire Schellenburg, the logistics coordinator for LU Send Now, said. “So we had to find somewhere that was substantial for us to go.”

 

The Liberty team went on Samaritan’s Purse’s DC-8 plane with the DART program.

 

“Samaritan’s Purse has people all around the country who are constantly on call, so that when disaster strikes, they are the ones that get the call,” said Schellenburg.

 

This is the first time Liberty has ever worked with DART, which required much additional training on top of the training for international relief LU Send Now offers.

 

The team will stay on the island of Antigua and ferry over to Barbuda.

 

“We want to have a holistic approach,” Schellenburg said. “We are not only going in for disaster relief. We are here to help them clear their house but also to sit and mourn with them and hold their hand through it.”

 

 

One of the students going to Antigua and Barbuda is senior Logan Zehrung. Zehrung is a resident assistant on East 76, a pastoral intern at Oasis Church in Madison Heights and an LU Send Now veteran.

 

“It’s a wonderful opportunity to serve God and pull away from classes and pull away from studying the philosophy of ministry and actually implement ministry,” Zehrung said.

 

“It’s a great way to be able to serve and be able to sacrifice and show the love of Jesus to those that have lost everything,” Zehrung said.

 

On top of going to Antigua and Barbuda, LU Send Now is already planning to deploy students to a camp in a suburb of Mexico City full of people displaced by the 7.1 scale earthquake that rattled the country.