In a word, responding to Hurricane Milton in Florida was “humbling” for Red Cross volunteer Felix Silva.

“Sometimes we get so hung up on first-world wishes, but then you see what they are going through and think, I shouldn’t be complaining,” he said. “We are so blessed and need to help each other out. Disasters can happen to anybody.”

Felix, a retired software engineer and cybersecurity executive from Eagle, Idaho, saw his role in the Red Cross response change throughout his deployment.

“You just do whatever is needed. It was fulfilling to be able to help and to see the days evolve,” he said. “You see the hunger and want of everything at the beginning, and then the desperation ebbs as the intensity fades.”

Felix deployed just ahead of Milton and was a shelter supervisor at an evacuation center in Cross City. It was a place to weather the storm and hosted more than a hundred people from a diverse swath of Dixie County.

“It was well organized,” he said. “We took care of people, and the community was very glad. They didn’t want us to go. They prayed for us as their way of giving thanks.”

Bringing together the Red Cross team, which included folks from California to New Jersey was also a bringing together of brain power, life experiences and others’ resourcefulness.

“There was a lot of talent, a lot of diversity, and a lot of life experiences – and the more qualified they were, the more humble they were about taking any assignment,” he said.

Felix moved onto a new shelter, then drove a truck to deliver water and meals from Tallahassee to Tampa. His last role was feeding people in Tampa.

“The challenge is those are long days almost without stopping,” he said. “I would do it again, but it is demanding.”

“Some apartments in Tampa were totally destroyed with water damage. It was so sad to see everybody’s homes,” he said. “There was a lot of hazardous water. People were just roaming around trying to figure out what they were going to do. People lost everything, including food. They needed that and clean water.”

He and another volunteer would start at community centers and then go street to street knocking on people’s doors to “sling beans and BBQ and bread.”

“You would know when you were hitting the spot. You’d see it in their faces, in the kids’ faces,” he said. Faces also lit up when folks realized Felix spoke Spanish.

This was Felix’s first deployment, though he also was part of disaster responses as a teenager in his native Venezuela.

With hurricanes, as with local disasters such as house fires, “you have to treat people with the same dignity and help them think beyond the immediate disaster by engaging with them and giving them hope.”