Outside, gaping houses, trees lying with their roots exposed. Inside, stretchers lined up in front of tables overflowing with food. In Rolling Fork, Mississippi, where a tornado has sown chaos and death, help is being organized and volunteers are pouring in from surrounding towns.
Less than 24 hours after the tornado hit Friday night, the American Red Cross raided a National Guard building. A room is used as an infirmary, an ambulance is parked at the entrance and through the rear access, boxes full of cereal bars or baby diapers keep arriving.
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“We’re trying to provide people with a place to stay overnight with food and medical support, so they can just have a place to lay their heads because they’ve lost everything,” says John Brown, a manager of the Red Cross for Alabama and Mississippi. Because the city “looks like a war zone”, he continues. “It looks like a bomb has exploded” in this locality of 2,000 people – at least 25 people have died in this southern state. Whether or not they choose to stay in the center, the inhabitants will have at least been able to get information, feed themselves and regain a minimum of strength, he adds.
“I thought I was going to die”
This is the case of Anna Krisuta, 43, and her son Alvaro Llecha, 16, sitting one on a stretcher, the other on a chair, electric blue energy drinks placed in front of them. Their house is “in pieces,” says Anna Krisuta with a brave smile. Both take out their mobile phones to show the extent of the damage, captured on video.
Will they spend the night in this center? They are not sure. Maybe they’ll prefer to sleep “in the car,” said Alvaro, giving his mother a hesitant look. The teenager says he owes his salvation only to the fact that he hid in the bathroom, a room he deemed to be the safest in the house. “I thought I was going to die”, he says, remembering more than anything the violent wind “which rushed through the bottom of the door”.
Coming from Vicksburg, some 70 km from Rolling Fork, Lauren Hoda cannot hide the mixture of “sadness”, “sorrow” and “anger” she feels at the “injustice” inflicted on the inhabitants. “When I woke up this morning I felt like crying for the people of this town because I don’t think they had much time before (the tornado) happened. There were people eating in the restaurant, families in their beds,” says the 28-year-old young woman, who says she herself experienced a natural disaster: Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. This is why she s is mobilized and spent her Saturday evening at Rolling Fork to bring the collected donations: water, food, canned goods, diapers, wipes, medicines, deodorant, toothpaste, she lists.
Generosity and unity
Jon Gebhardt, an assistant professor of military science at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, about three hours from Rolling Fork, says he arrived in the middle of the night after the tornado hit to help set up the center. Faced with the “pain and anguish” of the inhabitants, “I cried a lot today,” he admits. “But this morning when I woke up and saw the generosity and ability of this community to come together at such a difficult time,” he says he felt “lucky to be in Mississippi.” .
Will the reconstruction, physical and moral, be done in a few weeks? “No”. “But will this population build back better and become a better version of themselves over the next few years? Yes, I think so,” he says, confident in the “resilience” of the Mississippi Delta.