Faith guides Butler man as Red Cross volunteer
No distance is too far when it comes to volunteering, said Paul Garcia.
“I put my name in and said if they need, I'm willing to go,” said Garcia, 71, of Butler, who is an American Red Cross volunteer.
This year, Garcia traveled to the Louisiana town of Baldwin, to help at a small shelter after Hurricane Barry made landfall in July. After the shelter closed, he traveled to Baton Rouge as part of a disaster damage assessment team.
He saw mobile homes that were on 10-foot stilts, he said. Although they were protected from the rising waters, the storm ripped off their roofs.
“The storm just rolled it up like a can of sardines,” he said.
Garcia, who is a two-year American Red Cross volunteer and founding member of the Pennsylvania Volunteers Inc. Butler Chapter, recently returned from Louisiana.
He is the director of mass care and sheltering for the Butler County chapter, the first in the state.
Garcia is no stranger to volunteering. Last year, he assisted at four natural disaster sites.
Garcia served in the Marine Corps from 1966 to 1969. In 2007, he underwent triple bypass surgery and decided to move closer to the part of his family that lives in Butler.
He made Butler his home in 2008 after he retired from a career in accounting in Ohio.
In 2015, Garcia was one of the founding members of the Butler chapter of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, a volunteer group of about 50 members who are deployed in Butler County to open shelters and assist first responders.
Two years ago, he started work with the Red Cross because of his involvement with the Butler volunteer organization.
During the first week Hurricane Florence landed in March, Garcia was in South Carolina. From there, he went to North Carolina to assist people whose homes had been flooded.
“Many people had floodwaters up to the bottom floor of their homes,” he said.
A month later, he traveled to Florida for two weeks to work with the Red Cross to distribute emergency supplies after Hurricane Michael ripped through the area.
“Everything smelt like sea water,” he recalled.Following Florida, he went to Paradise and Orville, Calif., to help run the shelter for people made homeless by the Camp Fire, one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history, for a two-week period.Garcia was inspired to act by the Great Flood of 1993, which was a flood that occurred in the Midwestern United States, along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and their tributaries.At the time, he worked 50-60 hours a week and could not help.“I always wanted to do that,” he said. “My affiliation with the Pennsylvania Volunteers and the Red Cross allows me to pay back to America the work that all the predecessors have done in the last 100 years — answering floods, hurricanes, tornadoes. It allows me to pay some of that back.”His faith also plays a role in why he volunteers, said Garcia, who is a member of St. Luke Lutheran Church in Cabot.“We're all called in Matthew 28 to go out and tell the world about Jesus Christ,” he said. “One of the ways that you can open people's eyes is to go out and live this through service to people that need help. We are the feet and face of Christ in the community, in the world.”Since retiring, he has also been part of the rebuilding trips with the Fuller Center for Disaster Rebuilders with Samaritan's Purse. In 2017, he traveled to Rockport, Texas, after Hurricane Harvey hit the area.The work was challenging, he said.“We completely emptied some people's houses,” he said. “Looking at the wires, it looked like a plate of spaghetti someone had dumped on the ground.”When he is not volunteering, he spends time traveling with his RV and motorcycle.Garcia said he hopes volunteering will inspire those he meets to be called to do the same. He signed up with the American Red Cross to be available for aid through November.“I am doing it with the hope that it will inspire others who we serve, whether it be California or Texas or wherever, to also volunteer to help people that are in need,” he said. “There's always going to be people in need.”
Pennsylvania Volunteers, Butler Chapter meetingWHEN: 7 p.m. the second Monday of every monthWHERE: American Legion Lyndora Post 778, 150 Legion Memorial LanePA Volunteers and American Legion Lyndora Post 778 Blood DriveWHEN: 1 to 6:30 p.m. MondayWHERE: American Legion Lyndora Post 778, 150 Legion Memorial Lane
