by Sherri Brown, posted Wednesday, October 12, 2005 (18 years ago)
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Friendly welcome Jim Caldwell, pastor of the New Orleans-area Riverside Baptist Church in River Ridge, visits with a woman who came to the church for a meal. Church members and other volunteers feed about 1,500 people a day. Photo by Sherri Brown
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RIVER RIDGE, La. (BP)--Churches at the forefront of disaster relief are easy to spot. They’re the ones with eight-foot-high stacks of bottled water dotting the parking lot and half-gallon jugs of waterless hand sanitizer on every table.
That’s exactly what Riverside Baptist Church looks like. The River Ridge church, just outside of New Orleans, has been feeding 1,500 to 2000 people every day for the past three weeks. Volunteers plan to continue feeding until November.
“We’ve got a crazy, eclectic group of people working here,” said Jim Caldwell, pastor of the church.
When Caldwell returned to the city and found the church’s facilities in fairly good shape, he envisioned the location as a food and water distribution center. He called the Louisiana Baptist Convention but help wasn’t immediately available in the post-hurricane days.
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