Travel to UMCOR - Sager Brown Depot with Bob & Wilma

UMCOR is the United Methodist Committee on Relief. The Sager Brown Depot is where hundreds of thousand of kits of various kinds are verified, assembled and stored till needed in some disaster either in this country or overseas.

There are school kits in sturdy sewn school bags for children to stabilize and return to school. There are birthing kits though these are being phased out as people are being encouraged to go to more sanitary facilities but are still sent if requested.

Tooth paste is used by the pallet full to assemble the health kits, where as the "flood buckets" are possibly the kit most in demand for most disasters.

The warehouse is 48,000 square feet, very well organized and ready to snap into action when disaster strikes or there is a call for them.

The Sager Brown campus is located in the small town of Baldwin, LA on the beautiful Bayou Teche. The campus is 28-acres and dates back to the years just following the Civil War when it was a school and orphanage for African-American boys orphaned by that war. Now it is populated by thousands of volunteers who come to work in the warehouse/depot and in the surrounding communities.

In the communities, the volunteers work on homes of the elderly, in the Head Start program, with and for survivors of domestic violence along with distributing food to the low-income.

Volunteers come for one or two weeks and stay in plain but comfortable dormitory rooms while wonderful meals are prepared for them and evenings are free. An alligator is said to live in the bayou so volunteers are advised to beware but enjoy.

Photos and story courtesy of Bob & Wilma.

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