Over the Fourth of July weekend in the Texas Hill Country, as the rains kept coming and the Guadalupe River kept rising, chef Ashbi Wilson waited anxiously at her home in Wimberley. For the past two years, after closing down her bakeshop, she had worked full time for Mercy Chefs, a nonprofit that deploys to disaster areas around the world to serve food to residents and first responders.
Normally she travels far and wide where the need arises. This time, the disaster came right to her backyard. “My bag was packed and ready by the door,” Wilson says. She had served as a counselor at Camp Mystic, a century-old sleepaway camp that was caught in the worst of the flooding, and she’d attended college and lived in hard-hit Kerrville. “It was my home for eight years,” she says of the town.
As soon as it was safe on Saturday, Wilson and the team set up as close to Kerrville as possible, in the City West Church in Ingram. As the toll of the dead and missing climbed, they got to work. “By Saturday night we were serving dinner,” she recalls. Since then, Mercy Chefs has prepared something like 9,000 meals to first responders, law enforcement, hospital staff, and evacuees from the flood zone.
“I have been doing this for thirteen years,” says Lisa Saylor, who, as Mercy Chef’s director of disaster relief and long-term recovery, has deployed to over 200 disasters. “And this is one of the hardest situations I’ve ever seen, with the loss of so many young people.” The organization foresees being on the ground for at least ten more days.
Some meals are packed up and delivered to sites closer to search and rescue operations, but most have been served at the church. “Though it’s chaotic and heavy, we’re able to provide some small respite for these men and women who are out there in the trenches,” Wilson says. “You look at a table of sixty or seventy men and women who have just been out in the muck going through one of the worst things imaginable, and you see them take a bite and a deep breath, and know that in that moment, they can enjoy the sustenance.”
The community response has touched both Wilson and Saylor. Just yesterday, two farmers showed up to the church toting fresh tomatoes and watermelons for the chefs to incorporate into the meals. “Even though it’s a devastating situation—especially when you have a personal connection to that place and those people—I feel so full at the end of every day because all we see is hundreds of people coming together and doing anything they can to help,” Wilson says. Or as Saylor puts it, “Texans love to help Texans.”
Wilson, as a pastry chef, is always in charge of the desserts. She’s made rocky road brownies, fresh berries and cream, an apple crisp, and next up is chocolate cake. “I get to put that extra little sweet touch on things that gives comfort,” she says. “I hope anyone who eats these meals feels there is more than food in the box.”
Donate to Mercy Chef’s relief efforts here.
