A Day in the Life of a Cambro!

I had the privilege of spending time this week with some wonderful folk from New York, Kentucky, etc. doing Disaster Relief work in Niskayuna, New York. Our task was to prepare 6500 sandwiches on Thursday evening in the fellowship hall of the Trinity Baptist Church which was kind enough to host the feeding unit from Kentucky. What a tremendous sight to see 150 volunteers form multiple assembly lines and get the job done! Many of these people were new to DR work, but proved to be fast learners and made quick work of the task. DR work is not for the fainthearted as we then awakened to start cooking hot meals at 2:30am. By 10:00am we had sent out 5200 hot meals to be trucked to Binghamton for the more than 20,000 families displaced by the flood waters dropped by tropical storm Lee.






A glossary of terms is necessary for any enterprise and DR work is no different. The Southern Baptist Disaster Relief ministry has an outstanding reputation among care giving agencies at work today. Red Cross does the delivering of the meals prepared by SBC DR. They do this delivering via a vehicle that resembles an ambulance. They are called ERV's, Emergency Relief Vehicles. When the hot meals are cooked, they are placed in a type of ice chest looking container called a cambro. These containers are lined with a specially designed plastic. Each cambro holds approximately 200 meals. These are transported to the site via Red Cross ERV's and then served to affected individuals.






My colleagues (Dr. Terry Robertson, Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of New York, and Mike Flannery, BCNY DR Director) and I left the Niskayuna feeding unit and traveled to Grace Community Church in Washingtonville, New York, where they are hosting the BCNY feeding unit. The team staffing this unit is made up of volunteers from New York, Mississippi, Tennessee, New Mexico, California, Ohio, etc. They are currently feeding approximately 1100 meals per day to affected areas as far as 2 hours away. We then traveled to Binghamton to do initial assessments as to how we could help there. Our first stop was the campus of Davis College, a strong partner with the BCNY in our kingdom challenge here in this territory. En route we had learned that approximately 150 students and faculty were stranded on campus with no electricity nor drinkable water. We asked Red Cross what we could do to help. We arrived on the Davis campus simultaneous with the ERV carrying water and other food supplies for those eager students. Among this delivery was a familiar site. One of the cambros we had assisted in preparing earlier Friday morning was now being delivered to those desperately in need. Karen Smith, Kentucky manager of the Niskayuna feeding unit, says, "we don't often get to see where the cambros go". So there you have it, a day in the life of a cambro!




We need more volunteers to man the feeding units and to do the mud-out work that will continue for the foreseeable future in all these areas, as well as, in North Jersey, where there are at least 15,000 damaged homes. For more information or to volunteer, contact Mike Flannery at 716-432-5333. Training can be done on the job.