So along with assisting the flood victims & cleaning up the base chapels, a HUGE service opportunity happened in August for our entire base. When the US pulled all our people out of Afghanistan, the Taliban gave us only a short amount of days to get everyone & everything out of the country, including thousands of Afghan refugees. 30,000 refugees were sent to our base here in Germany & it was incredible to see how quickly the entire base worked together to make this happen.
They set up tents, showers/bathrooms, clothing distribution, food, & more in every spare nook & corner they could find on base. Thousands of tents lined the runway & over 30,000 people made this their home for a week as they went on their way to the US & other nations. It truly was a sight to behold.
All hands were on deck. Every office on the base stopped usual operations as we took care of our 30,000 guests. Active Duty spent time helping on the flightline while spouses & families found other ways to serve. An entire clothing donation building was set up where we could shop, donate, sort, & collect different clothing items for each of our guests. Hours upon hours upon hours were spent making sure it worked well.
Another station was set up just to make tea & baby bottles for the thousands of mothers & children we had staying here. Here we are one month later & we still are operating this station as several thousand refugees are still here awaiting flights to the states.
That's my sweetheart handing out water to our guests.
At other areas on the base, people were on call 24/7 making food for our new guests. Can you imagine serving 30,000 people 2 meals a day? Yeah, I couldn't either until we helped do it. It was INCREDIBLE.
Our church setup a system in one of the buildings & the base supplied us with food. We worked week after week after week, day after day after day, preparing lunches for our guests. Our assembly line was amazing & we had adults, youth, & children all pitching in to make as many meals as we could.
Each meal got 2-4 pieces of fresh bread/rolls, jam, butter, honey, & nutella, 2 pieces of fruit, 2 sources of protein, & anything else we had on hand. These snack-like meals were given to the refugees as they got off the planes onto our base, as well as were given to them as they boarded their flights to the US. We were making about 3,000-11,000 of these a day. I still remember one saturday spending over 10 hours making 11,000 of them. It was hard, but really really fun.
Teamwork is amazing. We accomplished some pretty amazing things through teamwork.
We have been so blessed this month for many opportunities to serve. I am SO grateful for those opportunities.
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