The hurricane had come through Galveston, flooding Houston with almost 4 feet of water and leaving people without food, water, and clothing. The water stands everywhere. The smell is horrible, and there is trash all over the street. They have nothing left. Everyone stays with friends and family, they all need help.

Our church meets every Saturday night to discuss how we can help people in our community, but this time it was different. We discussed the disaster that had happened in houston the week before, and how we could help. We decided to for five mission teams of seven to go to different locations of Houston. We called all of the churches in Houston and all got our locations and time to go. Our team went out and bought supplies for the trip, we’ll leave monday.

We arrive monday night to the church a little outside of Houston. They welcome us in and show us our rooms and the kitchen. After we all settle in, we meet in the kitchen and plan how the next few days will go. We load everything in the trucks then everyone goes to sleep. After everyone wakes up, we get into three different trucks with life vests, and 2 people per team leaving room for anyone in need of rescuing.

We headed to our assigned routes, searching for anyone in the water, or stranded on their roofs. There’s a family, a mom, and 2 children, by the looks of it 4 and 7. I get out of the truck and make way to them, asking, “Hello ma’am, my name’s Riggin, can I help ya’ll get to safe grounds?” She nods and motions for her two children to come with me, I help them get the life jackets on and we make way to the truck. Their mom follows shortly behind, carrying a suitcase above her head, saving it from getting wet. I help them get into the bed of the truck along with their belongings, and we start to head down to find others. After eleven long hours from seven am to six pm we helped four families back to the church. It was a lot more challenging than we anticipated. After we all got back to the church, we showed the families where they could stay till the shelters were able to take more people in, then we had another meeting to talk about where we would have to put the other families, and how we would be able to provide food for them.

We went home or two days to let the water go down. Then we headed back up there to clear hout houses to get them ready to be redone. We helped five different people with their houses in three days. He tore all the sheet rock and baseboards op to about three or four feet were the water had reached. We carried it out by the streets were it was covered in a tremendous amount of trash. These giant crane like trash trucks are coming by every five mins to get more and more trash. It is just so amazing to us how nice and grateful these people are mad they want to pray with us before and after i'll never forget one person we helped.

After the long 3 days that followed, we all head back to our homes. Houston is slowly getting back to normal, and every family that we came across made it to a church or shelter safely. Although it was tough and a little exhausting, I’m glad we went and helped those in need.