Anne was the little old lady who we were there to help. Anne was very old, but still moved around pretty well for a lady of her age. She was also suffering from some dementia and seemed to be feeling some mental and physical effects of living alone for a long time. When I first walked into the house, things didn't look too bad on the first floor, in fact it looked liked what you would see Hollywood imagine if a lady lived by herself; a little messy, but nothing disgusting or crazy. The basement was a different story. Tara and company (they had also recruited their two friends, Troy and Robin with their two amazing daughters, I believe whose names were Lauren and Tiffany Natalie, 14 and 8 respectively I believe) had hooked up the sump pump to the neighbor's generator and had drained most of the water. This basement was filled with everything from old clothes to junk mail addressed to an address in Florida to newspapers from the 1950s to old birdcages to furniture and it was all ruined. Everything was soaked in water, covered in mud and sewage and was just disgusting. My heart sank as I almost fell down the stairs because they were slick with the revolting mixture that covered everything. This was going to be impossible.
We dug in, put on some gloves and got dirty, really dirty. Troy was shoveling everything and trying to divert as much water as he could to the drain. Everyone else was loading up trash bags, giant storage bins and armfuls and taking it out of the basement to the curbside. I almost vomited several times. To add to the work we had to keep an eye on Anne. She didn't seem to realize the disaster that she had suffered. She spent the night before at the Red Cross shelter but insisted on coming back home. To be honest, she should still have been at the shelter. She also didn't seem to know how lucky she was. Her neighbors back wall and back yard had completely collapsed into the basement and the bottom half of the back wall of the house was gone. Every house in her block had a tremendous amount of damage.
While we were dumping Anne's old possessions, things she probably had touched or seen in thirty years, she would stop you and say, "Oh, I can save that." She continued to rummage through the trash, looking for things to save. We tried to explain to her that these things were ruined and really unsafe to keep. They were all destroyed and completely unsalvageable. There was no telling what kind of disease they were contaminated with. Anne couldn't be persuaded, so we finally let her do what she needed while we continued to work.
After hours of work, we had made a pretty significant dent, there was still a lot to do and we were starting to show signs of the depressing works we had been doing. All of us except for the young girls helping out. They were amazing, true testaments to their parents. They never complained and never really stopped working. They were so kind to Anne, asking her questions about her life and trying to distract her from going through the trash with her bare hands. The rest of us were tired and feeling like it was hopeless. We had some hope earlier when a son of Anne's old boss who hadn't seen her in thirty years showed up and said his son with a crew would be back in the morning to hose everything down and clean up what we couldn't get. After that we continued to work, but as Jim said, "My fun meter is about tapped out." The pile in the front yard was giant and disgusting.
Just then, a large group of volunteers from the Church of Latter Day Saints showed up. Fresh faced boys with nametags, there to help out. We gave them the details of the situation and they went to work. The adult leaders of the group obviously seeing the exhaustion on our face said, "You guys were great, we got it from here." We packed our stuff up, went to the Troy and Robin's house to hose down and shower. (Although, I can still smell whatever we were in today.) When we came back to get our cars, the church group had cleaned out the rest of the basement, including the washer and dryer and a back corner of the basement that we tried not to think about because it made us more depressed. Anne was still sifting through the garbage with others trying to convince her not to, the same way we were hours earlier. Later that night we sat around with a feast from Taco Bell and beers just trying to recharge our batteries and get our mental states back to normal. It was amazing how much our time together then was enhanced by the shared experience we had earlier in the day.
I don't think Anne really knew who we were or why we were helping. When Tara and Jim showed up initially, she said, "Oh good. You're here." She did say thank you as Tara was leaving and I'm sure in her state she won't really remember us; but in the end it doesn't really matter, I felt good for doing it, but it was hard. I'm not telling this story to earn praise or sympathy because all I did was carry ruined things out of a basement, but I am telling it for one reason; I never realized how much initial effort it takes to start helping people who are suffering. If it wasn't for Tara, who worked in the Peace Corps, taking a huge amount of initiative none of us would have helped. Add that with the fact that the neighbors questioned Jim and Tara when they first showed up, with good intentions I'm sure, and we got some weird stares from others looking for any ulterior motives for helping out this lady and the fact that none of these people were helping us, it can be very frustrating and make you want to throw your hands up and quit. Just know that helping others in these kind of situations can be hard and difficult and the reward might not be very tangible or evident; but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Once you suck it up and start working, things start to take care of themselves, but in the end it probably took more energy to start helping, than the helping itself.
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