How to Muck and Gut | Volunteering with All Hands and Hearts

Have you ever had your breath taken away?  I mean, literally, you walk into a room and you are so shocked that you cannot breathe?  That is what my first day volunteering with All Hands in Hearts in the U.S. Virgin Islands was like.  For the first week of our time there, we worked on what is referred to as a muck and gut.  We walked into someone's home with shovels and carried their belongings to a dumpster waiting in the street.  Their home had sat open for a year after losing the roof during the hurricanes in 2017.  Every single item they owned was rotten, molded, and ruined.  Clothes had been ripped from hangers and were tangled into the wall boards.  Dishes lay shattered below the china cabinet.  Toys, books, CDs, and the family bible lay abandoned.  Imagine your home in this condition.  Imagine throwing away every single thing you own.  And imagine that you just want it gone.  Done.  Over.  But you are so overwhelmed that you can't even imagine where to begin.  You want a fresh start, but you can't just run to Target to replace things.  You can't just buy a "roof in a box kit" at Home Depot.  Belongings accumulate over time.  With money.  And this community has neither of those.  Yet they are optimistic.  They are smiling and laughing.  They are grateful to God to have been left alive, because many were not so lucky.  And they are grateful to the people in the purple shirts,  the ones who come holding the shovels when they are too heartbroken to do it themselves. It took three days for a team of 5-9 people to empty the house.  On the second day, the homeowner stopped by and asked for a few things to be salvaged.  Overnight before the third day, it poured down rain and we were greeted with a few inches of standing water inside the house.  We emptied the muck and we salvaged what could potentially be recovered, including a few personal photos which remained relatively unharmed, considering the conditions.  I was there for the response phase.  A future team will work on the recovery phase and hopefully find a way to get this homeowner to the third stage of the All Hands and Hearts Smart Response program... resilience.  But from where I stand, this island is strong.  It is resilient.  And with the help of volunteers, it is rebuilding.

All Hands and Hearts is a volunteer-powered disaster relief organization that addresses the immediate and long-term needs of communities impacted by natural disasters.  This collection of images is non-traditional for my blog, but hopefully will serve to bring awareness to so many still in need.  All images were created using the iPhone X.