What was amazing is how quickly we gelled as an Astellas team. When we got to the warehouse where we were working, people asked us if we had always worked together, and they were surprised when we told them we had just met at the airport. During our deployment, we learned a lot about the American Red Cross. We were able to sit in on calls from their regional "war room" in Florida. The ARC has a pool of volunteers from which it can pull. We met volunteers from Seattle, Indianapolis, West Virginia – all across the United States. We also learned that there are online modules we can take to through ARC to learn different volunteering skills.
I was surprised to learn that they were bringing in 800-1,000 people to Florida each day from Puerto Rico. My best memory of the experience will be the people. The volunteers in the warehouse were amazing. While I think our team all wished we could be out working to help disaster victims 1:1. However, we knew that the work we did was just as important – the next cot a disaster victim lays their head on, or the next water bottle the drink – could be one of the thousands we helped to get to them.