On Thursday April 9, 2009 an EF-3 Tornado devastated downtown Mena, AR damaging over 600 homes, killing 3 people. Mena, a small town nestled in the Ouachita National Forest, suffered significant structure, tree, and roofing damage caused by the high winds and pounding rains. Two days after the event HODR’s Assessment Team was on the ground working to setup a project and we opened our doors to volunteers on April 15th.
Lean and Mean
Throughout the project we coordinated 31 volunteers who aided homeowners with tree and brush removal of 180 trees. This work provided a much-needed service to the community while we also expanded volunteers’ skill sets by training them in safe chainsaw, and in addition to our tree work we taught some of the longer-term volunteers how to tarp roofs. Combined with home demolition work and debris cleanup we were busy, and when Mother Nature didn’t cooperate with outdoor work we worked with Adventists’ Disaster Response in their warehouse sorting and organizing donations. In total, we worked on 24 homes affected by the tornado for a total of 1184 volunteer hours; that translates into $30,680 in the estimated value of donated volunteer labor.
Music for Mena
During Project Mena we received a $5,000 donation from Music for Relief, a project by the band Linkin Park. This donation helped bolster our ability to impact the lives of those affected by the tornado. HODR Development Coordinator Andrew Kerr had been corresponding with MFR over the past several months and exploring ways that our two organizations could partner. We want to thank Music for Relief for their generous donation and we look forward to partnerships on future projects.
Home Sweet Home
We based our operations out of the Mena Church of God; Pastor Mark Lyle, a veteran Hurricane Katrina relief volunteer himself, built his new worship space with the intent of housing volunteers if something should ever happen is his own “backyard.” The church allowed us to access and utilize multiple buildings on their property and we temporarily transformed several rooms to suit our needs. We want to thank Mark and his congregation for opening their doors to HODR and letting us setup shop while we worked in Mena.
We would also like to extend a big thank you to the Calvary Baptist Church in Mena who provided our volunteers with dinner for the last half of the project. Keeping our volunteers fed is no small feat—so we appreciate the home cooked meals that were prepared. It went a long way to making us feel at home.
Press
During Project Mena we had a couple of newspaper articles appear about our work and “Paying it Forward”:
The Mena Star: Hands On Touches Mena
Cedar Rapids Gazette: Helping Hands Know the Ropes
HODR’s one-month long Project Mena was our first US project of 2009. Our volunteers in Mena averaged an on-project stay of 12 days each, which enabled us to accomplish a vast amount of work in such a short time. We want to thank everyone who volunteered and donated funds that helped make Project Mena the success it was. We look forward to seeing you again in the future!
Click here to view photos of Project Mena and read past updates with details of our work here.
| -Bill Driscoll, Jr. US Operations Director |
-Jeremey Horan Volunteer Coordinator |
Music for Relief (MFR) partnered with HODR to support tornado-hit Mena, Arkansas in May, 2009. MFR contributed $5,000 to HODR’s Project Mena, helping us bring bring direct assistance to those in need as volunteers removed debris and down trees and helped the community recover.
