Message from President Hansen

Highlights from the Area Authorities & Stake Presidents Conference Call:

• Elder John Anderson—Area 70 from Florida has put in charge of all Church Relief Efforts for Hurricane Katrina. Probably because of his experience with Florida Hurricanes.
• It is always important to follow the brethren! The Church had concerns about putting individuals into our homes just as we did, but if we would have taken individuals into our homes, (without being asked by FEMA), those individuals would have gone to the bottom of the list for Federal Help and may have forfeited all claims or hope for any other governmental assistance.
•The Church is not going to send volunteers into the stricken area until the sanitation and water is better than it is now. The time will come when we will go, so we need to be ready to do that.
• Elder Packer and Elder Ballard were in Baton Rouge Monday to further assess the situation and to see what else the Church can do to help this situation.
• I found out that if the Relief Society were to try to take meals into any of these shelters it would be thrown away; all food must go through an inspection process or be provided by a Foodservice entity. For instance if we bought 150 Pizzas from Pizza Hut—they would be accepted since these type of Foodservice operations meet all governmental guidelines.
• Individuals can go and volunteer—and volunteers are needed to serve food. Anyone doing this must first go through a “Serve Safe” course which ordinarily takes 3 hours of training and passing a test to be certified. They have streamlined this now down to 1 hour and a test.
• We can continue to have individuals help in any way they can by volunteering, (please have them contact the Red Cross or Salvation Army by phone and be assigned), the Arlington ISD needs children’s clothing and school supplies for all the children who are enrolling—this would be a great way to help, or in any other way that they deem to be a worthy effort.
• The Church still continues to ask for members to donate generously to Fast Offering and Humanitarian Aide Fund through our Tithes and Offerings envelopes.
• It was decided that each Stake will be assigned to be the lead Stake on an area that we think will be needed. Just a few of the things we talked about are; Food Drive, Blood Drive, Volunteers, clothing drives. The Stake assigned would not be the only Stake doing this, but would act as the lead in gathering all the information.
• It appears the bottom line is that we are still in somewhat of an evaluation state, both Church Headquarters and our own Regional Welfare Council.

Sincerely,
Pres. H