What Can I Do To Help?

One Windsor woman was sandbagging her business and those of her main street neighbours who were unable to take care of their own when a thought popped into her head.

It was 1 o’clock in the morning when Amy Handley was caught off guard by the thought that she and the others she was working beside could lose everything they had worked for started racing through her mind.

“That’s when I knew I wanted to help people,” Ms Handley said.

“I wasn’t able to hand out money, but I could do what I could do.”

What she could do turned out to be a lot. She organised six places to donate goods, including clothes and furniture and signed a lease with Store It in Mulgrave and proceeded to fill the storage shed with donated items for flood victims to collect.

“I set up the weekend after the floods, put together the facebook page and within a matter of a week or two there were 1400 members.

“We had a lot of help from Sarah Richardson and Susan Templeman.

We were even accepting donations from Susan’s office as well.” Together with her sister, best friend and a work colleague, she managed to help 35 families in small ways, including bags of clothes.

“We helped 17 families on a much larger scale, almost refurnishing their homes, with beds, furniture, and clothes,” she said.

One of those families was from Pitt Town Bottoms. They lost $35,000 worth of crops and most of their house. There were also four or five farm hands living on the property in demountable houses, two of which were picked up and floated away with the flood waters.

With the help of their Harvey Norman contacts, they were able to provide the families with brand new beds and mattresses. Ms Handley was meeting with the families every other day after school to help meet their needs.

“It was fairly time consuming, but well worth it,” she said “There were a lot of tears, from me and the victims.”

One such occasion was last Thursday when one of the farm hands who hadn’t been able to get away to organise help for himself, met with Ms Handley to thank her for all she had done. His was one of the homes that had washed away, so Ms Handley and her team flew into action to get their hands on anything that would help, starting with towels.

“The experience has changed me forever,” Ms Handley said. They still have a six-seat dining set and beds available for those who need them.

• Topics:

• Floods
• People