Bomberos

Recently, I got to cover a cool story about how an earthquake volunteer who came to Chile from California last year is still ministering to the people here. Since I try not to use names on this blog, I’ll just call the guy California.

While he was here building temporary shelters in a small town south of Santiago, California ran into the towns volunteer fire department. When the department heard that California was also a fireman back in the states, they gave him a tour of their department. In Chile, firemen are completely volunteer and get little or no support from the government. So often, they have very limited access to the equipment they need. California was shocked to learn that the Chilean firemen didn’t even have fireproof uniforms to work in.

When he got back to the States, California was able to quickly collect 30 sets of surplus uniforms. Fortunately, the policy in the States for firefighters to replace their equipment every ten years, so there’s often perfectly good, used equipment to share. But the challenge was to move the heavy equipment halfway around the world. California searched for almost a year, but every mode of delivery he looked into was simply too expensive.

Finally, after a lot of prayer, a friend of a friend heard about the situation and offered to ship the equipment free of charge. I was able to travel to the Chilean town’s volunteer fire department to see them ceremonially accept the gift from their friend and fellow fireman.