By Paul Henry
At 4:30 a.m. Thursday, Eileen Anderson (above), our shower/laundry Blue Cap, awoke from a restful night’s sleep energized and ready to dive into the day.
Without hesitation, she got up and headed straight for the shower and laundry unit. Eileen quickly began running the used towels through the washer and dryer, ensuring fresh towels would be ready for the teams that evening.
As daylight broke, she and the rest of the shower/laundry team gathered for breakfast with the rest of our Texans on Mission Disaster Relief teams staying at Temple Baptist Church in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.
Following breakfast, Eileen and her team focused on scrubbing down the shower stalls while the laundry machines hummed away in the background. Towels were folded and organized in preparation for the teams arriving later in the day.
It was a constant back-and-forth — cleaning stalls, starting new laundry loads, moving towels from washer to dryer, folding and cleaning. Once the towels were fresh and neatly folded, the shower team shifted focus to washing the team's dirty clothes, keeping the rhythm fast and seamless.
They started by heading into the church building, hauling out dozens of bags of dirty clothing, each carefully labeled with the volunteer's name. Without pause, the shower/laundry team dove into washing, drying and folding the clothes. The chainsaw cutters' protective pants, which should not go through dryers, were carefully hung to air dry.
Load after load, they washed, folded, stacked and bagged laundry, then returned everything to the church and placed it on the designated laundry pick-up table.
Finally, they had a brief moment of respite, a time to sit and relax in the warm sunshine as the machines cycled through their work. However, there was little time to rest as they quickly jumped up to fold, stack and bag again each load as it finished the cycle. They started new loads and kept the fast-paced cycle going until every piece of laundry was finished.
It makes me tired just trying to write an account of their day.
As the TXM teams began arriving late in the afternoon, the volunteers bagged their dirty clothes and headed straight for the clean showers and clean towels. Meanwhile, the shower and laundry team shifted their focus to serving the volunteers, ensuring they have everything they needed for their showers.
Each day, 60 volunteers come in from the job site with clothes covered in dirt. They've been asked by the laundry team to sort their laundry into two days' worth and then place them in a small garbage bag with their name clearly marked on it. This reduces 60 loads of laundry down to 30 loads.
The time and effort required to process 30 bags of laundry is no small task — each load takes 15 minutes to wash and 45 minutes to dry.
We are thankful the laundry unit is equipped with four washing machines and 4 dryers, allowing the team to complete the volunteer laundry in about eight hours. But, that doesn’t include the additional 10 hours spent on towels.
The reality is the shower and laundry team works tirelessly behind the scenes, faithfully ministering to their brothers and sisters on the front lines of the disaster.
Paul Henry was the first incident commander (White Cap) for the TXM Disaster Relief deployment in Poplar Bluff. He noted later this was Eileen’s first time as Blue Cap and that long-time volunteer Monica McDougal “was right there with her” providing training. Henry lives in Horseshoe Bay and is a member of First Baptist Church in Marble Falls.
Photo by Monica McDougal