Although emergency officials have cautioned people to not simply show up with trucks or cars filled with donations, Elisabeth Omilami, executive director of the Hosea Feed The Hungry and Homeless program in Atlanta, already had a couple of truckloads of water and toiletries ready to take to churches in Alabama.
“Why would you say don’t send stuff?” she asked. “How much can you hurt another family by giving them clothes when they don’t have any?”
Other people are doing what they can. Grocery stores set up trucks in parking lots to hand out free water. Amy Audette, a special effects makeup artist in Los Angeles who grew up in Alabama, started soliciting donations of food and clothing via her Twitter account. She said she would send whatever she gets to family in the state to distribute.
I suspect the emergency officials that said that are having trouble distinguishing between those who arrive in pickups to loot and those who arrive in pickups to help.
But even so, one can drive there and turn the donations over to a recognized charity, such as the Salvation Army or Red Cross, that may be having difficulty obtaining such things as water, clothing,
food, soap, toothpaste, and other necessities locally.
1. Marie makes an excellent point. I would add to that that what emergency officials to NOT need are pick-up trucks flooding the area and creating chaos by their presence. You already have the homeless trying to get home and check out what they can salvage. You have emergency crews searching, clean up crews cleaning, and so on. The last thing a devastated area needs are out of state people who just show up and create confusion, especially early on in a crisis when it’s all in a state of flux anyway.
It might help to do what we did when Katrina hit, even though we were ~ 1000 miles away from New Orleans. If/when you can get phone lines, call up local churches and ask them what they need. I personally would call anybody(ie, any denomination or person who could talk to me), but if you don’t know where to start, DioAlabama and/or DioMississippi would probably take your call. Church contact info can be found through websites online and/or the Red Book(Church Annual), and ACNA has its listing of all its churches online, too. Per past experience, we always found that shipments of toiletries(soap, toothpaste, shampoo, etc.) were always welcome. If unsure, donations to the Red Cross or Salvation Army were also appreciated. That’s a beginning, anyway, not to mention many prayers.