Sager Brown, located on the Teche Bayou in Baldwin, Louisiana, is home to the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) supply depot. It hosts more than 2,000 volunteers each year and provides over $4 million in relief supplies when disasters occur anywhere in the United States. Volunteers come from coast to coast to assemble survival kits, serve in the Baldwin community, and provide service to the upkeep of the property itself.
Originally an orphanage for African American boys who had been orphaned by the Civil War, Sager Brown recently celebrated 150 years of service to Baldwin, Louisiana, and the world. (1)
In the early 1900s, the Orphan’s Home and Godman Industrial School were in dire financial straits. Dr. and Mrs. Godman took the student choir, the Jubilee Singers, on a tour of the northeastern United States to raise money. Mrs. Addie Sager and Mrs. C. W. Brown became familiar with the plight of the organization through a concert given for the North Central New York Methodist Conference. Sager and Brown purchased the school and gave it to the Women’s Home Mission Society, a forerunner of the Women’s Division of The United Methodist Church, to operate. (1)
The institution was known as Sager Brown Home and Godman School until 1978. That year, the home and school closed, and the property was put up for sale. Twenty-eight acres and ten brick buildings on beautiful Bayou Teche were for sale for $100,000, but no buyers emerged. The property sat vacant for 14 years. (1)
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew hit the coast of south Louisiana, causing significant damage to the area around Baldwin. UMCOR came to the area with volunteers and supplies and used the old Sager Brown campus to stage their operations. After two years, UMCOR determined that the Sager Brown campus would be an excellent location to build a depot where disaster relief supplies could be collected and provided to the world. The depot opened in 1996. (1)
Today, the campus is a living, working monument of United Methodist mission. UMCOR is a leader in serving those who are hungry, displaced, sick, or in poverty because of natural or human-made disasters. (1) The depot provides 48,000 square feet of warehouse storage of relief kits and volunteer workspace.
Last week, the Arkansas Conference was well represented by 27 (25 laity) volunteers graciously sponsored by the Methodist Foundation for Arkansas.
Roy Lee (ARUMC Disaster Response Co-Coordinator) and Shelley Lee (Central District Disaster Response Coordinator) led the mission trip.
Sager Brown requires that everyone who volunteers there be Safe Gatherings certified, which entails passing a background check and taking online training. They offer the opportunity to serve families escaping from violent homes and older adults in daycare and long-term care facilities. As United Methodists, we always want to be safe and keep others safe in our presence, and I am proud that UMCOR/Sager Brown requires this training.
All of us volunteers caravanned to Baldwin, LA, from various locations across our conference. We were excited to learn that we would serve alongside other United Methodists from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Rockwall, Texas. There were 50 volunteers, including the four long-term volunteers from Texas and Tenessee.
We all stayed in Zook Hall, where everyone shared temperature-controlled bedrooms and restrooms. There were rooms specifically for married couples, and the other rooms had twin beds with access to community restrooms. Everything was clean and fresh, and we could access clean towels at our convenience. It was neat how people from other conferences roomed amongst the folks from the Arkansas Conference. But ultimately, most got to make arrangements to share a room with whomever we wanted.
The grounds at Sager Hall are just lovely. It looked like we were secluded and off the beaten path, but we were not. The property is across the street from Trinity United Methodist Church and connected to a city park right off a Baldwin thoroughfare. The large trees and the view on the bayou provided much peace and tranquility.
I must say that my favorite part of the property was the Susannah Wesley Hall, which was next door to our sleeping quarters and also connected to the cafeteria. It had a screened-in porch with oversized chairs and footrests, where one could watch the Bayou Teche run south, along with a few small boats, or just sit in a circle for good conversation with a breeze.
This space also had overflow tables for meals and had a stack of puzzles and board games to keep a lot of people really busy. I was excited to play some cards or a board game with some folks, but alas, our time fell short.
We were encouraged to stay away from the wooden dock on the Bayou due to snakes and ‘gators. I learned this after taking a nice break on the wooden deck Sunday afternoon. I saw nothing that would have caused harm, just some fish bobbing to the surface. One Tennessee lady claimed she had a ‘gator come right up to her last summer while she sat in a chair on a concrete patio facing the Bayou.
We were also warned of fire ants, and sure enough, my Mom stepped on an ant hill while getting out of the car. She is still recuperating with a blistered foot.
We had our first orientation on Sunday evening, where we learned about the property rules and were assured that we would receive two more orientations before beginning our service work on Monday. We were on our own for dinner, and I went with a group to a local Mexican restaurant that was really good. All of the food that we had on our journey was good. We had breakfast served at 7:30 pm, lunch at noon, and dinner at 6:00 pm. My favorite meal was lunch on Monday. We had a cajun-seasoned roasted chicken that was divine. And it was so cool to interact with the cooks in the kitchen, who took great pride in their food, appropriately so. They even created impressive fruit arrangements each morning.
Each volunteer group took turns doing “kitchen ministry,” setting up for each meal, and cleaning up afterward. Mealtime was always a special time at Sager Brown when we gathered, prayed, and celebrated being at the table together. We always formed a big circle around the room, while one group would offer a prayer to bless the food as we all held hands with the people next to us.
Another favorite time was early morning when people gathered around the coffee pots in the living area of Zook Hall before heading to the cafeteria for breakfast. This time provided an opportunity to meet and greet people we didn’t know or to get to know people from Arkansas a little better.
On Monday morning, after breakfast, we received our second orientation, which was held in the chapel area. Amy Fusilier, Executive Director of UMCOR Relief Supplies, shared a slide show on the history of Sager Brown and the ministries of UMCOR. We then signed up for off-campus service work that included going to a long-term care center for older adults, a daycare center for mentally and physically challenged adults, and a shelter for women and their children escaping from violence in the home. (Unfortunately, we never got to participate in these local ministries, due to weather.)
We then walked to the depot, where all the emergency supplies are kept. We gathered for our third and final orientation, where two full-time depot employees trained us. Volunteers then had the option to work in the depot or work outside serving alongside the maintenance team.
Our tasks in the depot included opening cleaning kit buckets and making sure all the supplies were still usable and met Sager Brown’s and international customs standards. Several teams were working in assembly line fashion, and everyone had a task: opening the buckets, checking the supplies in the buckets, replacing items in the buckets, throwing away old and unusable products, and sealing the buckets back up with a hammer. There was a lot of bending and lifting, but they had assured us that there would be sitting work the following day that we, unfortunately, had to miss. Our volunteers in the depot worked really hard!
These supplies are shipped wherever they are needed to provide aid to people in need following a man-made or natural disaster. Currently, Sager Brown Depot accepts the following disaster items/kits: cleaning kits, hygiene kits, and menstrual hygiene kits. We worked on cleaning kits that day.
An extraordinary part of the process was the “blessing of the buckets” once they were ready to be taken away on a pallet. Everyone in the groups laid hands on the buckets and recited this prayer:
“Gracious and loving God, we come together to do your work.
One item at a time. One kit at a time. One box at a time. One pallet at a time.
To serve one person at a time, who is one from the multitude of your children in need from across the world.”
Then everyone would drum with their hands on the tops of the buckets, making a loud sound while cheering, “When the earth rocks, UMCOR rolls!”
For those who chose to provide outside support alongside the grounds-keeping crew, God was so good to provide 70-degree overcast skies with a breeze. That’s just unheard of in southern Louisiana in September!
A group used weed eaters, blowers, a power washer, and mowers to make much-needed improvements around the property.
Another group of volunteers worked in the shop sawing, sanding, measuring, loading, unloading, and connecting approximately 48 feet of plywood for a wheelchair ramp at a home in Baldwin. Unfortunately, the crew didn’t get to complete the ramp’s installation, but the crew leader braggingly said the group did two days’ worth of work in one day. Again, our folks worked hard!
I got the opportunity to learn how to operate a zero-turn mower, and I stayed on it all day. It was glorious to “paint” patterns around buildings, fences, trees, and ditches. I was approached by an employee, Frank, who has lived in Baldwin his whole life and attended school on the property in the early 1970’s. He would check in with me frequently to ensure I wasn’t getting too tired and check the gasoline level in the mower. He told me once, “You know this is holy ground, right? People come here for all good. It’s holy. Holy ground. You’re doing a really good job. Take care of it, ya hear?”
After that, I rode the mower differently. I slowed down and spent time praying for all the hands and feet that have been on these grounds, whether they had a choice or not, and for all the bodies that will come to this holy land to serve in the future. They had to come tell me to get off the mower that afternoon.
After everyone had cleaned up and was waiting for dinner, there was a lot of conversation about the impending weather. As a whole, we were divided about what we should do about evacuating or staying. We were eventually told that it was being recommended to leave before Francine arrived and the Arkansas crew decided that we would leave on Tuesday before Hurricane Francine would make landfall on Wednesday afternoon.
I can’t express how well the leadership team at Sager Brown kept us informed and stayed really calm while some of us were really stressed about getting home. When we found out that one of the kitchen staff was interviewed by Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel that afternoon, we knew it was time to go sooner rather than later.
We all made it to our destinations safe and sound by Tuesday evening, and before we left, we all shared how we wanted to come back and that we wanted to encourage others to consider this experience, too. There were also mentions in talk and prayer how beautiful it was that the Sager Brown UMCOR Depot would have never happened without a hurricane (Andrew).
We came, we served, we beat Francine, and we gave thanks for the United Methodist Church and Hurricane Andrew.
If you would like to know more about supporting Sager Brown as a volunteer or through a donation, please contact any of our alums, Cathy Hall (The Methodist Foundation for Arkansas), Shelley, and Roy Lee (ARUMC Disaster Response) cedisaster@arumc.org.
References:
https://umcmission.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/UMCOR-Sager-Brown-Know-Before-You-Go_2024-05-SC-2024.pdf
