September 1944, France. French children sample their first doughnuts at American Red Cross Clubmobile. Photo by Margaret Karch Zaimes
In World War II, at a time when women made up only .033 percent of the military and almost all but nurses were stationed far from the front, the American Red Cross sent hundreds of young women tasked to boost military morale to the European frontlines in “clubmobiles,” 2.5-ton trucks and buses repurposed as mobile social clubs.
The American Red Cross was the sole nonmilitary agency designated to provide welfare and recreation services for the US expeditionary forces in World War II. With the official job description of “club services worker,” clubmobile crews, usually three young women, were tasked to prepare and serve coffee and doughnuts, and other reminders of “home” that might allow the soldiers to momentarily forget the stresses of war.
As an American Red Cross volunteer since 2010, Roxanne Anderson has deployed to more than 35 disasters across the continental United States and several island deployments including the islands of Guam in June 2023 and the American Virgin Islands in 2017. She is one of those special volunteers who has, “been there, done that.”
Roxanne has held a wide variety of jobs in her 35+ deployments, including in Georgia following a tornado in May 2011. Photo courtesy Roxanne Anderson
Roxanne, who lives in San Jose, joined the Red Cross after spending 30 years as a California Highway Patrol officer. She’s done a wide array of Red Cross roles, including disaster response feeding, sheltering, managing logistics, driving an emergency response vehicle (ERV), supply and transportation.
States she has been sent to, in addition to her home state of California, include Illinois, Georgia, Missouri, Connecticut, Colorado, Arizona, New Jersey, Washington, North Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, US Virgin Island, Oklahoma, Florida and Guam. She has responded to floods, hurricanes, wildfires, a gas pipeline explosion and multi-structure fires, tornadoes and mass shootings.
Even before an American Red Cross emergency response vehicle dropped off 100 meals at the Mission Farm RV Park in San Juan Bautista on March 21, eager residents lined up for lunch, happy to get some fuel for the difficult job of trying to clean up the damage done by flooding to their community 11 days earlier.
Mission Farm RV Park homeowner, Kerry Dickie, thanks American Red Cross volunteers for the cleanup kits and food delivered to his neighbors. Photo by Jaka Vinsek/American Red Cross
Kerry Dickie was among them. Dickie said he lost his mobile home and about 70 percent of his possessions to the flooding and mud that followed. Dickie said that even before waters from several adjacent creeks and a nearby subdivision’s retention pond started pouring into the park, he and his son found their way out was blocked by flooded streets strewn with large underwater rocks.
As water started to come in, the two tried to move his collections from an enclosed porch into his 1986 Avion mobile home. By the time they got everything into the mobile home, water was knee high.
The two took one of their vehicles to dry land but by the time they came back to move the other, water had already crept inside the mobile home.
While the water receded within about 24 hours, when Dickie returned home, he found 1.5 feet of standing water inside. The enclosed porch was totaled as is his mobile home.
“It’s just a horrible muddy mess,” Dickie said.
Red Cross volunteer Roberta Jones and Leslie Jordan, mayor of San Juan Bautista, unload meals for residents of the Mission Farm RV Park. Photo by Barbara Wood/American Red Cross
“I’m kind of wondering what my next house is going to look like because this one’s not habitable any more,” Dickie said. He said he will probably look for a used mobile home to replace the one destroyed by the water.
He’s not one to take handouts, Dickie said, but “when you need help, you need help.”
Residents of the park have been helping each other recover from the flooding, which affected some of the recreational vehicles more than others. Kurt Kurasaki, whose father built the park in the 70s, says he tried to come out to assess the storm damage on March 10th, but couldn’t get through the flooded roads. When he trudged in through the water he saw the berm he had built to raise the heights of a nearby creek bed by a foot was about to be overtopped. Kurasaki started going door to door telling residents of the 70 recreational vehicles and mobile homes on the property to evacuate.
Kerry Dickie thanks Red Cross volunteers Mary Marcus and Hideaki Yamazaki for the cleanup kits. Photo by Jaka Vinsek/American Red Cross
Not everyone left. Some people were at work, Kurasaki says, some “opted to ride it out” and some didn’t have a vehicle to get out with.
Kurasaki said the park had flooded once before, but it was two decades ago.
Now, those who had less damage are helping those with more damage to remove their trashed belongings.
Leslie Jordan, the mayor of San Juan Bautista, and other volunteers came in Tuesday and Wednesday to help serve the food and promised to come back as long as the deliveries lasted. Earlier in the week, more San Juan Bautista residents came out for a work party to help their flooded neighbors.
Volunteers from all over the country are working together, providing food, shelter and relief supplies to those affected by severe weather across California. Many are experienced volunteers and have deployed several times. But some joined the Red Cross not so long ago and are on their first deployment. This experience can be both challenging and life-changing, and it’s a great opportunity to find mentorship and build camaraderie.
Here are some of their stories:
Photo by Barbara Wood / American Red Cross
Kevin Wiramihardja: “I want to make the world better”
Kevin Wiramihardja started volunteering for the American Red Cross in Boston in January, but by mid-March he had already found himself in California, ready to go to work in a shelter for those displaced by the series of storms that have been slamming the state.
As he waited to be assigned to a shelter Kevin, who is in his 30’s, explained his real passion is to try to figure out how organizations and businesses can improve their communications. To that end, he has taken a year off work to research and volunteer for the Red Cross. He is signed up as a “volunteer services feedback specialist,” trying to help the Boston chapter with things like volunteer surveys and what is done with the information gathered.
To help him in that work, Kevin said he wants to learn as much about the Red Cross as he can, taking classes and working as a local responder to home fires, as well as volunteering to work 12-hour shifts in a shelter. “I want to make the world better,” he said.
On Wednesday, Kevin was hard at work on his second day of working in the Seven Trees Community Center shelter in San Jose. He said he appreciated that shelter manager Patrick McKenna is a good supervisor and “answers all my questions. I am grateful for that.”
So far, Kevin said, he found the work a “very life-changing experience.”
Aidin, Juana and Cody: Help comes from the heart
Photo by Barbara Wood / American Red Cross
Aidin Shahi is a true believer in the mission of the Red Cross. He isn’t yet 40, but he’s been a Red Cross volunteer for 19 years, at first as part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent in his native Iran and for the past 10 years as part of the American Red Cross.
Aidin, a resident of the Winnetka neighborhood of Los Angeles, is one of over a dozen Red Cross volunteers helping Monterey County in the evacuation shelter at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville. That number of volunteers has swelled since Aidin arrived because he’s signed up at least four new Red Cross volunteers in less than four days at the shelter.
Aiden helped those who told him they’d like to join the Red Cross by shepherding them through the process online. “I cannot help everyone in the entire world, but I can help the people in need,” Aidin says. “The best organization for helping people in need is the Red Cross. And it’s free and it comes heart to heart.”
At least two of the volunteers Aiden helped sign up are already hard at work helping the residents of the shelter. Juana Uribe, a Watsonville resident who speaks fluent Spanish as well as English, helped serve food, clean up and whatever else was needed until the Shelter Resident Transition team asked her to help translate for Spanish speaking shelter residents the team is helping to figure out what they’ll do once they leave the shelter.
Juana, a former office manager for a church who is currently looking for a new job, says she asked Aiden about joining the Red Cross because “I like the labor the Red Cross does.”
“I love customer service,” she said. “I love to help people and bring hope to someone, even with a friendly face. Sometimes a child needs someone to approach them and smile at them. I just like to help those in need.”
A second new volunteer, Cody Mortensen, has a unique perspective because he is staying in the evacuation shelter after the tent he had been living in was destroyed in the storm. The bar/restaurant he works at has also been shut down because of storm damage. Cody has helped with everything in the shelter from emptying garbage to setting up cots and serving food to the residents.
Lucy Aita, a new volunteer that is ‘all in’
Photo by Barbara Wood / American Red Cross
American Red Cross volunteer Lucy Aita says she will never forget helping the family of a 93-year-old Florida woman who hadn’t been heard from for two weeks following Hurricane Ian last year. Lucy, a resident of Monroe, New Jersey, and fellow members of the Red Cross reunification team found the woman at her home, but without electricity or a working phone. The Red Crossers lent her a phone and helped her make calls. “We stayed with her for three hours while she called people,” Lucy said. The woman’s friends and relatives “were in tears on the phone. They thought she was gone,” Lucy said. “That was very touching.”
Lucy, who has been a Red Cross volunteer for only 11 months, is currently on her fifth national deployment, working in an evacuation shelter in California helping those affected by the current series of storms slamming the state. She is trained to help with sheltering, feeding, and driving a Red Cross emergency response vehicle as well as reunification. At home, Lucy heads up the local teams who respond to home fires, and in her region, she oversees feeding.
“I wanted to join the Red Cross since I was a teenager,” Lucy said. But busy with life, school and as an only child with older parents who needed her help, Lucy put it off until after her mother passed away at the age of 97. Covid and health problems delayed Lucy for a bit longer, but last year she was finally able to realize her teen dream. “That was it – I was in there full time,” she said.
American Red Crosser Jeff Roediger has some tips for coping with the anxiety and other effects of stress caused by the series of severe atmospheric river storms (currently 11 and counting) that have slammed California this winter.
Roediger says that events such as disasters and evacuations, especially those that occur more than once, “are mentally, physically and spiritually draining.” Such events can create a sense of loss or grief over things already lost, fear for life or safety, even hopelessness, he says.
Among the thoughts and behaviors that can appear, Roediger says, are anger, cognitive difficulties such as not being able to think clearly, racing thoughts, the desire to isolate ones self, or bad coping skills such as using drugs or alcohol or risky behavior.
Here are some of Roediger’s tips:
1 – Keep in touch with family and friends. “Talk to somebody about the event. Don’t bottle it up,” Roediger, a professional counselor from South Carolina on his 30th disaster response assignment, says.
“The more we talk about it, the more we normalize it,” he says. “It becomes part of our life and it no longer it has power over us.”
2 -If you know someone who has suffered from a disaster Listen to what the person has to say. ”Just let them talk,” Roediger says. “People want to be heard.”
3 – Distract yourself If you find yourself unable to stop thinking about the disaster, find something else to do Roediger says. Listen to music, draw, write, go for a walk, make a gratitude list.
4 – If you have suffered a loss in a disaster, make a list of things you must do to recover. “Let the list sit for a time and then prioritize each item. Lists help move focus to the future, not the past,” he says.
5 – Anyone stressed by a disaster can ask to speak to a Red Cross counselor, free of charge. The Red Cross also partners with the free SAMHSA Disaster Distress helpline, where a trained counselor is available 24 hours a day at (800) 985-5990.
Photos and reporting by Barbara Wood/Red Cross volunteer
Red Cross volunteer Debbie Torres of San Mateo, California, talks to Jose Galvan Alvarez and his grandson Kingston in a Red Cross shelter. Photo by Barbara Wood/Red Cross volunteer
The Galvan Alvarez family was sound asleep in their South San Francisco apartment in the early hours of January 10 when they were jolted awake as the entire roof blew off their apartment building.
“At first we thought it was an earthquake,” Jose Galvan Alvarez said, holding his nine-month-old grandson, Kingston, in a Red Cross shelter at the San Mateo County Event Center. Water from one of the series of major storms that have been pounding California started pouring in through ceiling light fixtures, he said.
The family called the fire department, which quickly responded and referred them to the nearby Red Cross shelter that had been opened to provide refuge from the storm for all who needed it. The family arrived at about 4 a.m. and were provided supplies, such as diapers, food and toiletries, as well as a portable cot for Kingston and warm beds for the rest of the family. In the morning they had warm showers and breakfast.
“The Red Cross has been excellent,” Jose said. “I’ve got nothing but nice things to say about the Red Cross.” Jose said he had also been helped by the Red Cross years ago, when he had a fire in his apartment. Jose then excused himself to grab a broom and dustpan and clean up around his family’s cots. “The Red Cross is helping, so I can help, too,” he said.
The atmospheric rivers that pounded California for weeks, with floodwaters and damage remaining long after the storms have subsided. At one point there were as many as 100,000 people in California under evacuation orders or warnings.
Now that the skies have cleared, individuals and families are returning home to evaluate their path back towards recovery. Hundreds of Red Cross disaster workers are continuing to safely shelter those in need, deliver hot food and relief supplies to impacted neighborhoods, and provide much-needed emotional support.
For many, the road to recovery will be long – and the Red Cross will stand with survivors in the weeks and months ahead as they begin to rebuild their lives. You can help people by:
Making a financial gift to California Storms and Floods. Donations for Disaster Relief enable the Red Cross to prepare for, respond to and help people recover from disasters big and small. Visit redcross.org, call 1-800-RED CROSS, or text the word REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation.
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