As Hurricane Wilma pounded Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, more than 130 people huddled inside the Cozumel church building, with little food and supplies. “It seemed she would never move off of us,” said Nancy Gardner, who oversees Ciudad de Angeles, a Christian home for orphaned, abandoned and abused children in Cozumel. “We had extraordinarily strong winds from the late hours of Thursday night until the late hours of Saturday night — almost nonstop.”
December 1, 2005

As the late October storm lingered and the floodwaters rose, firefighters brought more people to the church building. Minister Eliseo Ferryera knew the situation could become desperate. But he and the church members decided that they couldn’t turn people away, so they made room.

The firefighters returned and asked for food. They had been working for two days with nothing to eat. There was almost nothing left, but church members shared a package of saltine crackers.

It wasn’t much, but Ferryera said that it brought expressions of relief, delight and gratitude to the faces of the weary firefighters.

Phil Waldron, a former missionary to Mexico and member of the Campus View church, Athens, Ga., saw the damage firsthand as he led a team to the affected areas of Mexico in early November.

“Overall the situation seemed to be stabilized,” Waldron said. The government is addressing people’s immediate needs, but church members in Cancun and Playa del Carmen told Waldron that “the real need would be in the near future when the subsidies ran out.”

That could be as soon as two weeks, he said.

Church members in Atlanta are collecting funds for relief, and Nashville, Tenn.-based Healing Hands International also is assisting victims.