A cyclone of care: flooding Northern Queensland with Christmas joy and love
When Tropical Cyclone Jasper, the wettest cyclone ever recorded in Australia, made landfall north of Port Douglas just before Christmas last year, the Salvos in Far North Queensland were already busy organising annual Christmas events and distributing gifts, hampers, and more. They immediately added disaster response to their already significant workload, supporting evacuees and emergency services personnel.
In the wake of Tropical Cyclone Jasper last year, teams from The Salvation Army worked up to and through the Christmas break, not only organising an already busy schedule of Christmas care but battling to source resources through road closures and bad weather to support evacuees and others.
Major Ben Johnson, from The Salvation Army Cairns (which supports 12 local government areas, including remote areas such as Mornington Island), says the team from Cairns, largely made up of volunteers, worked tirelessly to bring joy at Christmas time.
“In the midst of all we needed to do, we negotiated not just a cyclone and major flooding events, but also serious resource challenges due to transport routes blocked by floodwaters.”
A caring community in a challenging Christmas
Ben says the Salvos team received immense support from the community, making the experience uplifting despite the wild weather challenges and workload.
“There was so much hope and joy,” he says. “Every day, people came in to help, to give. One lady who regularly helps came in and just gave us an extra $10,000 donation because she saw what we were doing in the community.
“Some years ago, the Northern Frontier Foundation gave us a substantial donation to help with hampers. Little did we know three years ago [when they did that] the cost of living was going to really put the squeeze on a lot of people, or that we would face a natural disaster.”
Ben says, “The community’s generosity was just so encouraging and people who received that generosity were often moved to tears and so grateful.
“It really felt like an expression of the heart of God!”
“Christmas is a really special time,” Ben says. “We get to do extra things for the community because we love our community and because God loves them.
“While normal crisis assistance can still be accessed through the normal system, what we do at Christmas time is endeavour to offer an extra blessing to those in our communities who need encouragement, care and joy.”
For Townsville-based head of The Salvation Army’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Stream, Shirli Congoo, Christmas is also an extraordinarily busy time. Like Ben and his team, she and her team start planning for Christmas at the beginning of the year.
Shirli’s team works with local Salvos churches (corps), offering Christmas grants and support to engage with local or outlying remote and rural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
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She says: “Our corps did an amazing job engaging with over 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including children, nationally from November to December [last year].
“We tend to work with corps to target rural and remote communities that have less access to affordable foods, goods and services — [offering] something that actually impacts health and wellbeing.”
Joy in Christmas service
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While Shirli, her family and team are usually involved in a range of local Christmas events in Townsville, last Christmas, Shirli and her daughter instead travelled with another Salvos team to Cooktown. There they spent seven days over Christmas supporting evacuees from the remote community of Wujal Wujal.
Together with a small team, Shirli says: “We were catering for up to 200 on-site and probably 100 people from the community — serving foods that were familiar to them. On Christmas Day, we catered for a special lunch for 200-plus people.”
Collaborating with other services, Shirli says that around 100 evacuated Wujal Wujal kids also received Christmas presents, which was “beautiful to watch,” given their circumstances.
“Most of them would have had all their presents flooded. In these remote communities, a lot of people get organised well in advance when they can get to shops in larger centres. Toys would have been hidden away for Christmas, but then everything was lost,” Shirli explains.
Thanksgiving and love
“Christmas for me,” Shirli says, “is usually an opportunity to pause and give thanks for the love, joy and peace that we have in our family, and about the love, joy and peace found in Jesus.
“It was a really special time last Christmas supporting the Wujal Wujal community and others. Everyone thanked us so much. And really, we were just giving our time when they'd lost their homes and some, their pets, their cars, and they were far away from familiar settings. They’d lost everything, but they were still so thankful!
“It was a really beautiful way to spend Christmas. The local community Elders supported us too with prayer, encouragement and there was a lot of joy!”