When Deborah Budney’s husband died, she found herself at a loss for what to do next and searching for a way to fulfill her desire to help other people.
This desire recently led to her spending three weeks in Kentucky with the Red Cross helping tornado victims, only returning home to Peterborough last week.
“I was kind of sitting around the house, sad and lonely, and I’ve always been a caretaker,” Budney said of the time following her husband’s death. She was in the nursing field for 33 years, she said, and before that spent time helping out as a teenager at her mother’s job in a nursing home. Her children recommended that she look for a way to volunteer, such as at a food pantry.
“And I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to do something bigger,’” she said. “And I decided to join the Red Cross.”
Her first deployment with the Red Cross was to Louisiana, after Hurricane Ida last year.
“I called my kids and they said, ‘Mom, we said volunteer, but this is extreme,’” she said.
Budney’s most-recent deployment with the Red Cross came on Christmas Eve. She packed up and headed to Kentucky, where she found a scene that she said was unlike any she had ever experienced.
“The devastation is beyond what anybody has ever seen,” she said. “What people don’t understand is that it is nowhere near over, just because it’s been a month. All they’ve been able to do is clear the roads enough for people to get into where their homes used to be.”
Often, Budney said the Red Cross volunteers would go to a home to help assess and catalog the damage and find that the only part of the property left was the driveway.
“The damage, you’re driving along and all of a sudden there’s nothing,” she said. “It just looks like a bomb has dropped and the whole town was wiped out.”
Budney’s work was primarily focused on providing shelter both for clients and for the staff on site. She eventually came to be in charge of three different hotels, all sheltering clients who had been displaced by the tornadoes. She also met with clients and did assessments on property damage, as well as other associated paperwork.
Helping those affected by the tornadoes was sometimes very emotionally taxing, she said. She thought of one child in particular who had lost her entire family to the storms.
“It’s hard, because we have to be strong, but we can still be compassionate,” she said. “We still shed some tears with them, because you can relate somewhat to what they’re going through.”
While in Kentucky, Budney said that she was extremely impressed by the hospitality of those the volunteers were trying to help. A local school even hosted Christmas dinner for the volunteers, complete with gift bags and cards.
“The people of the South, they were so grateful, and so kind, and it was unbelievable how they treated us,” Budney said. “Here we are trying to help them, and they’re trying to help us.”
Budney said she finds this work so rewarding that she signed on for a few extra days past her initial two-week deployment. She came back for doctor’s checkups, and because the Red Cross typically wants volunteers to rest for a week before they redeploy, which she intends to do.
“It’s done wonders for me, personally,” she said.
She said volunteering led her out of a depression following her husband’s death, which was followed by other huge life changes, including her being forced to move and give up her dog.
“It was hard, because it was like my whole world was just torn from me, and finding this was the best fit for me,” she said. “I’m doing what I’ve been doing since I was a kid, and that’s pretty much all I know. So to be able to do that again but in a different light, has just brought me so far. Even though I’m sorry to say it, with the devastation I have to go to, but what it’s done for me personally, you can’t buy it.”