Emergency RV, Part II

Read Part I of Emergency RV’s Woody Faircloth Interview here.

LAUREL HUNTER: In order to find candidates for the RV, you made a post on Craigslist and a Facebook relief group asking families to submit a little bit of information about their situation. The response to that post, and the media coverage about what you were doing was bigger than you expected. Talk a little bit about how that affected your mission.

WOODY FAIRCLOTH: There were so many stories that would just rip your heart out. We reviewed them all and narrowed it down to four families that we wanted to help, but we only had one RV. And, you know, fate, chance; we had this woman call from San Francisco and say, “Hey, I saw your story on the news and I’ve got an RV I’ll give you if you want to find a family for it.” And we thought that was amazing. Now we had two.

LH: What happened next?

WF: We were getting close to Chico, just down the hill from Paradise and we decided we were going to connect with all four families and figure out who would get the RV after-the-fact. And right when we made that decision my phone rang. A woman said she had two RVs she would give us – she just needed a charitable donation letter. And I had no idea what that was, but I said okay, that I would get back to her. We had RVs for four families now, and I just started crying. My six-year-old daughter had to tell me to pull it together.

LH: That’s incredible.

WF: I had no idea what a charitable donation letter was, so I was Googling around, trying to figure things out when my phone rang, again. I went to college at Wake Forest and a guy named Larry Zehfuss called and said, “Hey, you don’t know me, but I saw what you’re doing on Facebook. We’re fraternity brothers. I graduated a number of years before you, and I’m an attorney and I’ll give you any free legal support you need to do this work.” So, I said please call this lady back for me who wants to donate and just started working immediately to provide the letter and to file a 501(3)(c).

I was feeling so overwhelmed by all the things that were happening, and sure enough, my phone rang once more. This time it was another friend who I had worked with a few years back to help refugees in Greece named Anna Segur. She offered to build a website for me that could provide intake forms so survivors could give us their information, and RV donors could give us theirs and a database was created with the information. It was such a Godsend.

LH: That seems like divine intervention.

WF: You know, to that point specifically, my mom was a great Southern mother and we were in church and Sunday school every week. I was in youth group and Boy Scouts and other things as an adult. But I wouldn’t say that Jesus and I were tight, you know what I mean?

LH: I do.

WF: But, you know, when all these pieces started falling into place the way they did, I couldn’t help but think, wow, somebody’s pulling some strings here. And I just surrendered to Gods will and here we are, still doing it, 87 RVs later. And what I’ve learned in the process is that when something bad happens, or this thing we have created seems to be coming to an end, now I get really excited because it usually means something really amazing is getting ready to happen!

LH: What a wonderful takeaway.

WF: Yeah, and the blessings kept flowing. We delivered twelve RVs between that first Thanksgiving and Christmas. In the meantime, my daughter’s second-grade class moms got together and held a toy drive for the 40-some kids that were now in RVs. They got each kid two or three Christmas presents, because that is the last thing you can think about when you’re in survival mode as parents, I guess.

LH: Yes, everyone just lost everything.

WF: So, my house here in Denver was overflowing with presents and I had no idea how we were going to get them to California. I think we had ten bucks left of the money we’d raised, and we didn’t have any additional RVs on the horizon. But then this guy called me from Estes Park named Chuck Banza. He said, “My wife and I are 30-year career FEMA employees and we haven’t been out there but we know that people are hurting, we have a beautiful fifth-wheel that we’d love to donate to you.” And now I was Santa with a sleigh to take out all these presents but I didn’t have a truck or the attachment to tow it. So, I told him I’d need to find one to tow the RV, and he said that I could use his truck – a guy I’d never met in my life! We drove up to Estes a couple of days before Christmas and I left my beater car in front of his house and he said, “Just please bring it back and be safe and God bless you for what you’re doing.”

LH: This is so emotional.

WF: That same day a guy named Bill Miller called me and said, “You don’t know me, but I need to tell you something.” And he told me about him and his wife, who had an $18,000 kitchen cabinet budget for some renovations they were doing on their house. The cabinets had been the basis of several arguments because they’d already replaced the cabinets before, and he thought they were just fine. So, they were in the middle of a quarrel about it when they saw our story. He let me know that right then the argument ended and they both agreed to give me and Luna the $18,000 to continue our work.

LH: Could you have ever imagined?

WF: I had just opened up a bank account that day because we got the nonprofit working and all that stuff. He told me he was at the Dulles Airport flying to Germany with his adult-aged children for Christmas and that when he landed, he was going to call his banker and wire the money, and I was like, okay, we have a Nigerian email scammer. I just didn’t know what was happening because it all sounded so weird. But I didn’t have a penny in the account. I gave him account and routing number to do whatever with. The next day there was twenty-grand in the bank and his only request was that we spend it all by Christmas to get as many people as we could in RVs. And we delivered.

LH: Unbelievable!

WF: We delivered five RVs that weekend, the last around Christmas Day, which was amazing. We had gone from being at a dead-end street with a present problem and now we had an RV, a truck and twenty-grand to take the gifts out there. It was just incredible.

LH: I’d like to talk about Luna a little bit. How did she deal with the devastation she saw in the aftermath of the fire?

WF:  When we got to Chico, we stopped at Target and it was just shocking. I was super naïve and unprepared for the extent of trauma in this community. I mean, there were people everywhere, camping in tents and sleeping in their cars. Regular people like you and me. It was really kind of hard to get my arms around it all.

(To be continued…)

To learn more about Emergency RV, please click here

This multi-part series is authored by Laurel Hunter, a freelance creative writer with over 20 years of experience covering a broad range of topics. She and her family are 2018 Camp Fire survivors who have since relocated to the Pacific Northwest Olympic Peninsula.