A beat-up tractor-trailer with a 45-foot-long mobile kitchen was a modest start to the N.C. Baptist Men's disaster relief efforts when it hit the road in 1982. In another modest beginning, Richard Brunson had just started as a counselor at Camp Caraway, run by the Baptist Men.
Now the group's longtime director, Brunson oversees a massive volunteer operation whose most visible face is the 12,000 trained volunteers in yellow shirts who descend upon communities that have been ripped apart by tornadoes, swept away by hurricanes or flattened by earthquakes.
Last week after Hurricane Irene struck, the group deployed to the North Carolina coast three mobile kitchens that can serve 70,000 meals a day. Church-based disaster recovery units equipped with tarps, chain saws, generators and other supplies fanned out across the region to remove trees and debris and start rebuilding homes.
In all, the N.C. Baptist Men, an arm of the N.C. Baptist Convention, has 270 mobile disaster recovery units in churches across the state. The organization has mobile showers and laundry units, rolling dormitories and an aviation unit. It set up at the World Trade Center and Pentagon sites after 9/11, and was among the first groups to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.
And that's just the booming disaster relief arm. The group, with about a dozen employees, also runs several camps, circulates dental vans across the state and funds projects internationally - from helping Cuban pastors retire to digging wells in India.
Brunson takes little credit for this growth, even as he admits that the North Carolina disaster relief effort is larger and more comprehensive than any other of its kind in the nation. Instead, he says the kindness and generosity of his volunteers has simply snowballed.
"Each disaster, you have new people who come in and want to help and want to get involved," he said. "We have a lot of volunteers with a lot of gifts. Ministry happens where the gifts meet the needs."
A broader effort
Brunson spent the morning of Aug. 27 huddled with other emergency management officials from across the state as Hurricane Irene hit the coast, tracking the storm and trying to predict where the most damage would be.
The Baptist Men volunteers, many of whom are actually women, hit the ground that Saturday afternoon to assess the damage firsthand. Last Sunday, plans were made to establish four hubs, in Williamston, Manteo, Greenville and New Bern. Those central spots were running full tilt by Monday, with food, supplies and volunteers fanning out across the region.
Joy Branham, director of the American Red Cross chapters for Onslow and several other coastal counties, had worked with the N.C. Baptists in New Orleans after Katrina, and saw them again on her home turf this week. She said the group has become a staple in relief efforts, partnering with organizations such as hers to maximize their response.
"The Baptists show up with their kitchens and their tents and all of their people, and they make large amounts of food" that is packaged and loaded onto Red Cross trucks, Branham said. "It's just a wonderful partnership."
In his Cary office, Brunson keeps a map with the sites circled in blue marker, their leaders' names written next to them, and other potential sites in red. Reports of damage stream in to his staff from churches and other sources, helping the group determine its next move.
In his nearly 20 years leading the Baptist Men, Brunson has overseen a growing focus on disaster relief and an expanded role in rebuilding communities well after natural disasters have passed.
"In the beginning, we were just there to feed," Brunson said.
Brunson traces this change back to one of his first storms as director: Hurricane Andrew, which pummeled south Florida in 1992.
The Baptist Men set up a kitchen at Richmond Heights Middle School, south of Miami, where they met people who had lost their homes and, in some cases, family members. Feeding them just didn't seem like enough, Brunson said.
"It was just heartbreaking," he said. "And I think that all of a sudden, our volunteers had a big heart for the people of south Florida, and they ended up wanting to go back and put roofs on those houses of the people they had met."
Those early rebuilding efforts in south Florida continued after Hurricanes Fran and Floyd hit North Carolina in the late 1990s.
After Katrina, Baptist Men volunteers rebuilt 700 Mississippi homes in one of the group's largest projects to date.
The disaster relief effort has expanded worldwide, spawning long-range projects in Honduras, where the group went after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and in Haiti, where they landed after the earthquake in 2010.
Moving up quickly
For a man who has seen the worst of human misery firsthand, Brunson, 54, is surprisingly upbeat, with bright blue eyes that seem to always be laughing at some sort of inside joke.
He has a slew of mementos from the countries he's visited, and the people his group has helped, each with a different story. One is a spoon mounted in a wooden box that was once the only utensil shared by a family of 13. A recent family photo shows him, his wife and three children at a Gypsy camp in the Ukraine.
Brunson grew up the son of missionaries, spending much of his young life in Malaysia. The family moved to North Carolina when he was about 10 and his father became a pastor in Concord.
Clearly his parents' faith was strong, but Brunson said he wasn't interested in religion until he had finished high school, when a friend broke his neck diving off a pier into shallow water.
"It made me realize that your time here on Earth is short," he said. "It motivated me to change my life and my relationship with Christ."
His faith assured, he still had no great plans on where it might take him. He earned a degree in education and taught for a few years, then went to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest.
His experience as a counselor at Camp Caraway during the summer put him in touch with the Baptist Men. After he graduated, the group hired him full time to oversee disaster relief, the camps and other programs. Five years later, he was hired as director. He takes little credit for this quick ascent to the top job.
"God opened different doors to me at different times," he said.
Early critics
His hire wasn't without its critics, said Lynn Tharrington, who has served as administrative assistant to several directors in her 40 years with the Baptist Men. Some thought he was too young to be in charge, she said, but he's turned out to be a strong, hands-on leader.
"The main thing about him is his compassion for people," Tharrington said. "I've seen him in tears so many times. He really, really cares."
Part of his job is choosing which projects fit the organization's talents and budgets, which means, inevitably, he says "no" a lot. He said he focuses on building strong relationships with trustworthy partners, particularly for overseas projects, and he makes sure they're held accountable for how donations are spent. Projects should also be self-sustaining in the long-term, rather than dependent on more help.
The Baptist Men don't perform disaster relief to earn converts to their religion, Brunson said. Their goal is to heed God's call to ease suffering.
The sheer number of projects the group has going at any moment leaves a lot of choices for potential helpers - building houses in Appalachian coal country, sending eyeglasses to Kenya - in what Brunson calls it the "cafeteria approach" to volunteerism.
He's also quick to point out that helping others also reaps powerful rewards for the volunteers, whether they're face to face with tragedy in their home state or in far-flung lands that differ completely from the experience of the average American.
"All of a sudden their whole perspective has changed," he said. "That's not why we go, but it happens."
