Tsunami relief efforts ongoing

News of the devastating tsunami that crushed the shoreline of the Indian Ocean basin has largely receded to the inside pages of newspapers, but the human misery continues there.

The good news is that international support is continuing even though the tsunami is no longer the disaster of the week.

Just one example is a project being coordinated through the Virginia Baptist Mission Board of the Baptist General Association of Virginia.

The state's largest association of Baptists has joined the relief effort by focusing its resources on a region of southern India. It's an area well-known to some residents of the Roanoke and New River valleys because of extensive missionary connections there by pastors and lay people from several congregations.

Indian connection

The Rev. Kevin Meadows was minister of youth and family life at Vinton Baptist Church in the early 1990s when its then-pastor, Bill Ross, began a partnership with Christians in India. Ross' father-in-law, the Rev. Ray Allen, had fostered an Indian connection from his pulpit at Blacksburg Baptist Church that helped start several new churches and worked to found a Baptist seminary there.

Meadows helped plan several of Ross' trips and met many of the Indian contacts when they visited here.

When Meadows left to take a senior pastor's job in North Carolina in 1997, he took his enthusiasm for missions, particularly in India, with him. In that pastorate, he organized four mission trips to the subcontinent.

In 2001, Meadows returned to the Roanoke Valley as pastor of Grandin Court Baptist Church, where he's led three India missions so far. The congregation has helped start a church in partnership with an Indian pastor and works closely with the Baptist seminary.

That long association with a region that was devastated by the tsunami led Kunjumon Chacko, an Indian mission leader, to contact the Virginia Baptist Mission Board for aid.

Meadows was a natural to be included in an assessment team that spent 10 days last month touring heavily hit regions of the Indian peninsula's southwestern coast.

"I don't understand the dynamic," Meadows said, but the effect was devastating. "The waves wrapped around the tip of India and caused so much destruction on the western coast. It's mind-boggling."

Utter hopelessness

The team visited where Kanyakamuri and Kolochel were once thriving fishing villages but had been "completely washed away" by the tsunami, Meadows said.

"We were looking at these beautiful, wide open beaches. Then to our horror we were told that once there were homes and families who lived there," Meadows said.

They saw the mass graves and listened to the stories of the survivors, struck in particular by their "utter sense of hopelessness."

The Baptists wanted "to try to find an area where we could provide assistance for an immediate need, provide a sense of normalcy, if possible, and to give a future," Meadows said.

First was to try to meet the needs of the surviving children in those regions. That meant providing orphanage care, where necessary, and food, clothes and school supplies.

Second was to provide boats and nets for families to resume their livelihood -- even if the resources had to be shared.

Meadows said the group calculates that it will take $400 to meet the needs of one child for a year. And $1,000 will provide a boat and nets for a fisherman.

Money is already being collected, and teams of volunteers with the resources to help rebuild destroyed and damaged houses are also being organized.

"Folks are already lining up to be part of those teams," Meadows said. "We want to start right away."

How to help

Those wishing to contribute to the effort can contact Meadows at Grandin Court Baptist Church, 2660 Brambleton Ave. S.W., Roanoke 24015 or by calling 774-1684.

More detailed descriptions of the Virginia Baptist Mission Board project, as well as photos of the assessment trip, are available online at www.vbmb.org/tsunami/index.htm.