One Good Deed Deserves Another

BY: EVELYN REMPEL PETKAU

Farmer who lost his house to a tornado helps other farmers who lost their crops to flooding.

Reprinted with permission from "Canadian Mennonite"

Edith and Norman Desrochers remember the evening of June 23, 2007, with remarkable clarity.

“It was very dark,” Edith recalls. “We couldn’t see a thing. It was completely, ominously silent. No wind.”

They were visiting late into the evening with their son around the kitchen table. Their daughter-in-law was putting their son to bed in the camper just a few metres from the house. It was then that their daughter, who lives five kilometres down the road, phoned and told them that her husband had spotted a tornado.

“She told us that it was going to hit either our place or our neighbour’s yard,” Edith says.

Within seconds they were all in the basement.

“I was just at the foot of the stairs when I began to hear the wind roar,” Norman says. “The windows were breaking, the doors popped off, stuff was hitting the house. We hung on to the plumbing and whatever we could find, and huddled in the corner over Bryce, our grandson. It wasn’t very long until we heard a loud, loud crash, and the whole house was gone. It probably wasn’t more than a minute.”

Two years later, as the Desrochers sit around the kitchen table in their brand new house and recount the details of that terrifying night, they are very grateful. Grateful they came through this experience alive and unharmed, and grateful to Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) for its assistance in rebuilding their home.

Like many farmers, the Desrochers did not have insurance.

“In tough times, expenses like insurance are the first to go,” explains Larry Redpath, who farms in the area and is the regional Mennonite Church Manitoba representative on the MDS board.

“You never think you’ll lose everything at once,” says Edith, but every building on the Desrochers’ third-generation farm was gone, including 10 steel granary bins, a Quonset hut with a heated shop, a hog barn and a hip-roof barn.

“We really didn’t know what we were going to do,” Norman recalls. “We were farming and I had a trucking business, but all the trucks and farming equipment were smashed.”

They were six weeks away from harvest, with winter not far behind. For the remainder of the summer, they moved a recreational vehicle into the yard to live in.

Overwhelmed by all the decisions that needed to be made, and feeling the pressure of time, the Desrochers appreciated the help of neighbours and a local Hutterite colony. One neighbour in particular, Redpath, was quick to respond.

“He’s the kind of person who would help anyone in any circumstance, no matter how difficult. He’s very perceptive, not selective, in his compassion,” says his pastor, Erin Morash of Trinity Mennonite Church in Mather.

With Red Cross providing much of the funding, Redpath coordinated volunteers and managed the work site while tending to his own farm. By Thanksgiving of 2007, the Desrochers could move into the basement of their new home.

“I had never planned to build a new house and all the decisions were needed so quickly,” says Edith.

With the urgency for shelter gone and harvest work behind them, they decided to slow down the pace and finish the house on their own. On March 13 of this year the Desrochers moved up from the basement into their completed home.

Last summer, when Norman learned that MDS was assisting farmers in the Interlake area who had lost their hay crop to flooding, he saw an opportunity to return his gratitude. With his repaired truck he hauled a load of bales that he collected from several farmers to Steep Rock, a distance of more than 350 kilometres.

“It felt really good to help,” says Norman with a smile.