HARRISONBURG, Va. (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Five people from the Harrisonburg area are in western North Carolina to provide storm relief through Mennonite Disaster Service, or MDS.

Among them is MDS executive director Kevin King, who arrived at noon Monday to begin assessment. He was joined by crew members from hailing from Harrisonburg, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

King says crew members’ offer both physical and emotional assistance. They’re the first installment of a volunteer relief effort that will last several months and eventually turn to home construction.

“Our volunteers are really responding well,” King said. “We have 34 people on the ground. They came from Ohio, Virginia – from the Harrisonburg area – and also two crews came down from Lancaster, Pa.”

King, who also hails from Harrisonburg, says more Virginians will join future rotating shifts, which will include two dozen, max, due to safety concerns. Among them is the threat of discovering bodies, a threat so great that search and rescue crews from Alabama conducted a search before assigning an area for the crew to set up its headquarters.

Before work began in earnest, King met a distraught couple who felt no one could help them. That because they had lost their son in a motorcycle accident day before the storm hit.

After all three of them shed tears, the husband finally spoke. He mentioned the need to clear fallen trees on the property in order for emergency crews to reach them if they needed to call an ambulance for his father, who has leukemia.

“I said: ‘sir, you’re going to be the first job we do,'” King recalled. “And I can report to you, that’s the first job we did. So, maybe we restored a little hope on that street, and on that mountain pass.”

King added that giving people a shoulder to cry on is as important as the physical work they do.