SAMARITAN’S PURSE CONTINUES TO GROW
When disaster strikes anywhere in North America, the Disaster Response Unit based at the Samaritan’s Purse office and warehouse — at the northeast corner of Barlow Trail and McKnight Boulevard on Hopewell Way N.E. — is ready and able to respond.
External sources are crucial to help communities affected by floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and other disasters to recover and rebuild.
The organization’s current 40,000-square-foot warehouse added to the administrative area in the 75,000-square-foot building is now too small for the prepositioning emergency response needs, as lots of tools and equipment are currently being stored in tractor trailers on the lot and are affected by the weather.
That will change as construction crews are hard at work building another 97,000-squarefoot warehouse that will butt onto the existing building.
Fred Weiss, executive director of Samaritan’s Purse and The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Canada, says the addition will allow more space in the present building for its annual Operation Christmas Child shoebox gifts, and room “to stock enough materials to fill a 747 cargo jet” in the new structure.
Weiss called upon Gibbs Gage Architects to discuss his needs and then presented its ideas to construction companies. He chose Westcor Construction that, working with Gibbs Gage, came up with a design that will allow for a large mezzanine area above an indoor garage space, bringing the total space up to 118,000 square feet.
The garage will house Samaritan’s Purse vehicles that include shower and latrine trailers, offices for co-ordinating relief efforts and volunteers, a mobile ministry unit, and equipment such as chainsaws, pumps, generators, wheelbarrows and other hand tools.
Weiss says the non-denominational Samaritan’s Purse fulfils the role of the Good Samaritan in helping those with needs, and tells the Gospel story when the opportunity arises. Teams do not hide their evangelical roots, but limitations are placed in many countries where they are not allowed to evangelize.
In Senegal, Calgary staff and volunteers have been working at the Grace Community Centre in Dohuk for the past two years helping refugees with medical care, a transition to a new life and building a safe playground for traumatized children. A team is also training intern pastors to develop sustainable gardens in areas where extreme deforesta- tion has stripped the landscape of trees. “It’s worked so well, locals are taking a look at the project and small areas are now re-covered in green,” says Weiss.
Calgary teams and volunteers are in Haiti, Iraq and Japan, and supplied food, water filtration and hygiene kits, clothing and mattresses to survivors of the volcanic eruption in Guatemala, as well as recruiting, training, equipping and deploying hundreds of volunteers in the recent devastating flooding in Fredericton, N.B., and Grand Forks, B.C.
The Calgary office houses a regular and seasonal staff of more than 80 people, and every day welcomes some 20 or more volunteers, many of whom are already working on the shoeboxes for its Operation Christmas Child.
His Calgary staff also includes engineers who have successfully redesigned the BioSand Water Filter developed by Dr. David Manz to a larger system that can provide clean water to a whole school or small community. Samaritan’s Purse has distrib- uted more than 300,000 water filter units since the mid 1990s — helping locals to build and maintain them. The number of people being provided with clean water by Samaritan’s Purse has now surpassed 1.5 million.
NOTES:
Field Law has announced the ■ winners of its annual Community Fund Program and of the $30,000 going to its six winners in southern Alberta, the grand prize of $8,000 went to The Brenda Strafford Society.
Bolivian state-run Yacimientos ■ Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos president Oscar Javier Barriga is guest speaker at the July 24 lunch hosted by the Canadian Council for the Americas in the conference centre at 205 5th Avenue S.W. Barriga will speak on resource potential, new investment and need for technological solutions.