Westmont Coach Reconnects with Hurricane Victims

Westmont Head Baseball Coach Rob Crawford is returning to the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast this week to help 16 families who were forced to evacuate. Crawford is following up with about 40 people he and other local residents helped on a trip earlier this month. Crawford hopes to take the victims shopping for food and clothes with money donated from the Santa Barbara community. Crawford is concentrating his efforts on the families that 21 local volunteers relocated to hotels where they are being allowed to stay for 30 days.

“But they still don’t have a change of clothes and they need food to sustain them through those 30 days,” said Crawford. “Then they’re going to be relocated again.”

Crawford says there’s a great opportunity for local residents to sponsor some of the displaced families. The idea came from Westmont Theater Arts Professor John Blondell while he and Crawford were talking.

“When I was a child my mother was involved with Christian Children’s Fund,” Blondell said. “We adopted a little Vietnamese girl and then an Indian girl. I still have these pictures of these little girls and then we sent pictures to them. I was remembering what my mother had done 35 years ago. The image came back into my mind and I said to (Crawford), ‘Hey, you want to take a picture with you?’”

Blondell gave Crawford a check and a photo of his three sons, 8-year old Nicholas, 6-year old William and 3-year old Simon.

Westmont Intercollegiate Athletic Secretary Ann Cavalli pitched in as well. She gave Crawford $80 worth of new socks as well as a photo of her and a couple of girlfriends.

“They’re blanketed in prayer,” said Cavalli, “but, to have an actual name and face of who is praying for them is a whole different situation. To know that somebody is going to the Creator, solely for them, that other people care enough to come before the most powerful source in the universe, is an uplifting experience.”

Tami Hogen is a temporary worker at Westmont and joined Crawford on the first trip to Louisiana and Texas. She remains in contact with some of the evacuees and has had a difficult time returning to life as usual.

“When you start a job you want to finish it,” Hogen said. “There’s so little help, I wanted to finish the job. There’s so much to do. The need there is greater than the need here.”

Hogen says it was impossible to not get emotionally involved while moving the evacuees from the Reliant Center in Houston, Texas to a hotel. “We had to sell them on the fact that they needed to be moved to a hotel,” she said. “We’re trying to convince them to trust us enough to be transported to a hotel. There were a lot of people who needed their hand held through the whole process. They were suffering from post-traumatic stress and just weren’t getting it. They needed the hand-holding so you had to connect (emotionally) to help them.”

Crawford has brought along a video camera on his latest trip and hopes it will connect hurricane victims with the local community. He says many of the evacuees are from New Orleans and don’t want to return. The majority of them were employed in the hotel and restaurant industry. Crawford hopes by videotaping and interviewing the evacuees he’ll be able to find them work.

“They don’t have access to computers and things at the shelter,” said Crawford. “Because they’re shutting down the shelters, they’re putting people in vacant apartments with no furniture and dropping them off and saying, ‘Good luck.’”

Crawford will fly into Alabama, Tuesday, Sept. 27, and rent a truck to assist the stranded hotel evacuees. He plans on driving back to Santa Barbara, Friday, Sept. 30.

“He has a giant calling for this and he needs to pay attention to God,” says Cavalli. “I believe he doesn’t have a choice in this. It’s the core of who he is. God made him this way. God is using him in a mighty way.”

Contact Crawford by cell at (805) 245-0538.