At Karen Dougherty’s home in Broad Channel, workers from the Mennonite Disaster Service were putting in a new ground floor. Ms. Dougherty waited out Hurricane Sandy two years ago in an attic crawl space. Ángel Franco/The New York Times
It’s a rainy, late October day in Far Rockaway, nearly two years to the day since Hurricane Sandy devastated the area. Some of the streets are flooded, giving residents flashbacks to that awful time in their lives — not just to the flooding itself, but also to the construction swindles, insurance nightmares and disasters that followed. But for a few residents in the Broad Channel neighborhood, help has finally arrived.
Karen Dougherty, who climbed into her attic crawl space two years ago to survive, said she still remembered the itchy feel of the fiberglass insulation that surrounded her while she waited out the flood. Today, she is watching a small group of volunteers lay down a new wooden floor in her two-story home. And she can’t really believe it is happening.
“People came and said they would help, took my money and then never came back,” Ms. Dougherty says. “But these people, they didn’t ask for anything. These are strangers. And they’re like lifesavers. I want to go home with them.” She laughs.
The strangers hammering in her house are members of the Mennonite Disaster Service, a religious organization of volunteers who help homeowners across the United States and Canada rebuild their houses, and their lives as well.
When Bill and Esther McCoy, M.D.S. project coordinators, knocked on the door of Ann Marie Esposito’s home in Broad Channel last February, they found her huddled upstairs in bed, the blankets pulled around her on a seven-degree day. There was still a giant hole in the roof from Sandy, the blue sky peeking through. Because her floor was gone, opossums were crawling into the house and eating her food, so she had resorted to hanging her groceries from the rafters.
Now, the work is nearly complete. She has no opossums. Instead, she has new walls with insulation, a new roof, siding, replacement windows, a new kitchen — and faith in humanity again.
“From the time I met Esther, I could feel the love,” Ms. Esposito said. She stops because she is starting to cry. “They are such good people. You can’t imagine.” She was told again and again that help was on the way. But then no one came through.
“When Esther said they’d be back, I knew they would,” Ms. Esposito said, choking up again. “I just felt it.” She puts her hands over her heart and taps a few times.
In 2013, the Mennonite service sent 4,277 volunteers across the United States and Canada. They went to the Rockaway area and Staten Island. They went to Bastrop, Tex., where 1,700 homes were destroyed by fire. In High River, Alberta, volunteers cleaned out 45 homes after a flood devastated the town. They were in Circle, Alaska, where an ice breakup led to a flood.
Plumbers, roofers, cooks, youth groups and university students, farmers and retirees, and just regular people wanting to donate time and energy are organized out of the group’s Pennsylvania and Winnipeg offices. M.D.S. accepts skilled and nonskilled laborers, and many are repeat volunteers. The service keeps a database and will call upon people with certain skills.
The service is a Christian group, but it does not discriminate in the people it helps or in who can volunteer, and it does not proselytize.
The Mennonite Disaster Service grew out of the service Mennonites provided as conscientious objectors during World War II. Because of their pacifist philosophy, thousands of young Mennonites served in alternative assignments, such as mental hospitals, filling community needs. When the war ended, the desire to fill those needs continued, and resulted in a huge volunteer work force.
Bill McCoy, originally from Oregon, explained that it was not just the people in need who benefit. “I’m not a big-city person,” Mr. McCoy said. “And when they told me I had to go to New York, I said, ‘God is going to have to bring me up in the belly of a whale.’ But it’s not that big, scary place I thought it was. I’m the one that’s been blessed.” Some of the people he has met here, he says, will be friends for a lifetime.
Volunteering often brings together members of a family who do not usually get to spend such long quality time together. For instance, Wanda Yoder of Belleville, Pa., traveled to Jamestown, Colo., in June because of the floods there, and helped cook for the volunteers. She was joined by her granddaughter Tayler, 21, who has now caught the volunteer bug.
“It was so nice,” Ms. Yoder said, “to hear her say, ‘Grandma, it smells so good in here.’ ”
Correction: November 7, 2014
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the location of Karen Dougherty’s home. It is in Broad Channel, not “the Broad Channel neighborhood of Far Rockaway.”
God bless these people, they are doing His work.
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