LU Send Now teams return from the Caribbean and Mexico

• LU Send Now sends teams to Antigua and Barbuda and Mexico to assist local churches to help with disaster relief.
• Team members witnessed fortitude and devastation in the disaster-stricken areas they traveled to.

In the midst of a month of hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires, LU Send Now has been sending teams of students around the world to provide disaster relief to victims of natural disasters.

A team of 10 students and two leaders returned from Morelos, Mexico Saturday, Oct. 7 where they served those affected by the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that hit central Mexico in September. One week earlier, eight students and two leaders came back from the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda where they served victims of Hurricane Irma.

LU Send Now Associate Director Vincent Valeriano said that, although Send Now cannot respond to every natural disaster, he and Anna Claire Schellenberg, the logistics coordinator for LU Send Now, work to plan the best use of the organization’s resources.

“We have a certain amount of resources and a certain amount of bandwidth,” Valeriano said. “We want to be very strategic and discerning in what the Lord wants us to do with the resources that we have to make the maximum amount of impact.”

Antigua and Barbuda

After Hurricane Irma blew through the Caribbean, Valeriano led a team of eight students to the islands of Antigua and Barbuda to work with a Samaritan’s Purse Disaster Assistance Response Team. Although Valeriano said Antigua was barely affected by the hurricane, Barbuda was ravaged by the winds and rain.

Liberty graduate student Josiah Hale said Barbuda, which had been evacuated by the time the team arrived, looked like a war zone when they first landed on the island.

“There was debris all around,” Hale said. “You’d see the roof of a house 40 feet away on the ground. You’d see a cell phone tower 50 feet high smashed in half.”

While the team served in Barbuda, they focused on cleaning out three churches and setting them up as distribution centers to provide clean water, tarps, food and other necessities to locals as they arrived back on the island. The team also cleaned water tanks at a fishery and tarped individual homes, according to Valeriano.

“One of our goals was by cleaning and clearing out the churches, … we were positioning the churches to help local people,” Hale said.

The team stayed on the island of Antigua and flew to Barbuda each day with the DART team, which Valeriano described as the “tip of the spear” in disaster relief. Valeriano said one of Samaritan’s Purse’s main goals was to empower churches to serve locals once they came back to their homes.

“We’re just there a short period of time,” Valeriano said. “We’re not going to be the heroes—we’re just there to help them and assist them.”

Although Valeriano said it was difficult to process the scale of the devastation at times, the team saw God’s providence.

“It’s hard to believe when you’re there how only one person lost their life,” Valeriano said. “But (God) protected those people. Even though it was initially hard, we all left very encouraged and knowing that God is definitely at work on this island to bring people to himself and restore hope.”

Morelos, Mexico

The same week the team from the Caribbean came back to Liberty, Send Now deployed another team of 12 to Morelos, Mexico to help those affected by the earthquake.

The team served with workers from Tierra Alta, the Impact Youth Worldwide camp started by the Rawlings Foundation, to bring supplies to earthquake victims and rebuild local churches in Jojutla, Morelos.

Team leader and LU Shepherd Carla Nava had traveled with Send Now on several disaster relief trips previously. But for Nava, this trip was particularly meaningful because she grew up in Morelos and Mexico City.

“Every time I stopped, I looked around and felt like I needed to keep going—not in a sense of guilt, but more of a sense of empathy,” Nava said. “I knew they had been working for days, and if I was able to give them rest to get the job done, then I wanted to do that.”

Liberty senior Robbie Tallent, who is in the teaching English as a second language program and is fluent in Spanish, had always wanted to travel to Mexico but never expected to come in the context of a massive disaster.

“As soon as I heard about the earthquakes in Mexico, I kind of understood what that meant for the country,” Tallent said. “There’s a lot of violence and hardship and corruption and people frustrated with situations. I started praying as soon as I heard about that first earthquake.”

Senior Samantha Valentine said it was easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of work to do, but she chose to focus on how the team was impacting individual victims.

“I had to step back and look at the individual people who we were helping and the individual families,” Valentine said. “It was more about them being encouraged than it was us checking off a list of how many projects we finished.”

As the team rebuilt homes and passed out supplies, Nava said the locals were constantly joining in to help with the work and offer the team water and food throughout the week.

“Mexico is a communal culture, so it’s all for all,” Nava said. “We had random people helping when we were working, and in America I haven’t seen that. In Mexico, they’re suffering as a town, and because of that, the town is going to come together.”

Nava said the team mainly focused on supporting the local churches so they could serve the communities around them. As they worked with the Mexicans, Nava said she was humbled by the faith of local Christians despite the circumstances around them.

“We were at a church service, and this lady behind me was in tears and praying, ‘Lord teach me how to worship you in the midst of devastation,’” Nava said. “Just to hear that prayer … it’s humbling.”

Mexico team member Lillian Smoak, a senior who also went to Peru with Send Now, said these trips give Liberty students the opportunity to actively practice the values they are taught at a Christian university.

“You always hear of the disasters around the world, and you wish you could go do something, but it’s so hard to get up and go—especially when you’re in college,” Smoak said. “But this was something that gave me that opportunity.”