Church Groups Band Together For Christmas In Flood Torn Iaeger

Samantha King is 8 years old. She wants a dollhouse for Christmas. A big Barbie house.

That is not unusual. Unfortunately, neither is why she wants it. She used to have one, but it was on the porch of their house when the February floods swept through. 

The floods taking toys is a common story told by families gathered in Iaeger. They form a long line along the narrow main street, leaving one usable lane. They’re waiting for Thanksgiving turkeys, sacks of onions and potatoes and cases of bottled water. These are distributed by Rock Springs Ministries, a local church-based nonprofit. 

Jessica Stapleton is its director; she remembers the street during the flood. “Water was up in the street out there, like almost five foot.”

Stapleton lost the building the ministry used for food storage and distribution in the flood. Her daughter-in-law lost her house.

As Stapleton describes that event, “Water was coming in the windows. They says that the walls was no longer sitting on the foundation. It like, shifted the whole house.”

Stapleton quickly organized another food distribution building with the help of Woodward Baptist Church in Chester, South Carolina. The two churches have a 17-year history of working together. Woodward volunteers showed up with tarps, shovels and supplies as soon as they could get through after the floods.

It’s standard for Woodward to do an angel tree for children whose families regularly come to food distribution. But this Christmas, the team wanted to get every child affected by the floods onto an angel tree. Stapleton asked the school system for the names of children from Iaeger Elementary, Sandy River Middle and River View High School, as well as schools in nearby Bradshaw. 

Danny Bailey, a volunteer from South Carolina said, “We’ll stick them names up on a Christmas tree out there in front of the church, and everybody’ll grab one.”

Bailey is one of several volunteers who drove up from South Carolina. Jamie Anthony is the founding volunteer from Woodward Baptist. He connected his church to Rock Springs Baptist Church almost two decades ago. While he’s done many angel trees since then, Anthony said he’s never seen requests like the ones coming in this first Christmas after the flood.

Like one kid asked for, like his toy list, his wish list, was chicken strips and Coca-Cola. I mean that breaks your heart,” Anthony said. 

Many requests included food, something the group of volunteers haven’t seen before. But the hardest requests to see were for furniture. 

“Some of them just wanted a couch or a TV back in their house, because they lost everything,” Anthony said.

Rock Springs’ Stapleton said the families have been warned not to use the flood damaged furniture, but that’s all they have.

“I told them to trash it. There’s no way to clean it because it’s not safe. I passed out papers to them telling them how to clean stuff that could be saved. But they had no choice but to use what they had so they’re still using it,” Stapleton said.

Shirley Cline came to the distribution with her granddaughter Adalyn. The flood took Adalyn’s bed. As one volunteer followed Cline back to her car with the food boxes, the South Carolina volunteers quickly gave Stapleton $20 each to purchase a bed, joking about how to wrap it.

Families in Iaeger appreciate the assistance in making Christmas special this year, but they are making plans of their own. Alicia Ball said her daughters look forward to family get-togethers. 

“When we spend time with other family is what they most look forward to,” Ball said. “Because we don’t get to see them often because they live two hours away.”

Ball said family is what keeps them in Iaeger, despite the lack of jobs and infrastructure. Like many in town, the Balls have to use bottled water for cooking, drinking and bathing since the flood. Job prospects aren’t good but they looked after her husband’s mother until her death, and now care for his grandfather. Family keeps them here, and family keeps Christmas special, Ball said.

“That’s mostly, I think, everyone’s answer: it’s family,” she said. 

So families in Iaeger celebrate what they have, even as they seek to replace what they lost.

Like the Metro brothers, Michael Ezekiel Phoenix Metro and his older brother Gabriel Jupiter Magnus Metro. They waited in line with their dad, Nathan. He detailed what the flood took.  

“It got our washer, our dryer, our deep freezer, our water heater … But the biggest problem was our gas furnace,” Nathan Metro said.

The cost to fix the furnace was an estimated $8,500. Metro, a widower on dialysis, received $720 in flood reparations from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). 

But he is not allowing the financial or emotional stress to get to him, Metro said. “I’ve learned stressing ain’t no good. And these kids, they’re beautiful, they’re smart, they’re healthy. That is my Christmas.”

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To read more about this story and the longstanding relationship between the churches in South Carolina and West Virginia, visit Rock Springs Ministries’ website. The ministry is based on Bradshaw, West Virginia, and welcomes volunteers.