CONNOQUENESSING TWP — Sometimes it’s a hurricane or cyclone, sometimes it’s an earthquake.

Bruce Heller, of Allen, Texas is part of a nonprofit team that deploys to disaster zones. Though every deployment looks different, his mission, no matter what part of the world he finds himself in, remains the same.

A volunteer with international nonprofit ShelterBox, Heller hand-delivers emergency shelter supplies to displaced families.

In collaboration with Western Pennsylvania Rotary Clubs, the relief organization held a fundraiser dinner Friday, Nov. 3 in hopes of raising $30,000 to help provide aid to people impacted by natural disaster and conflict.

The organization was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Heller was one of the speakers following the dinner Friday evening at The Stables at Connoquenessing.

“It’s very rewarding work, but at the same time, there’s real high emotions and there’s times when it can be real aggressive,” Heller said before his presentation. “At the end of the day, we’re there to get the job done and help families that have lost everything and have to restart their lives.”

Heller’s most recent deployment was close to home. He found himself called to Houston, following Hurricane Harvey’s devastation.

Heller said each disaster area he has been deployed to is different.

“Anytime you go into a disaster area, it’s just pure chaos,” Heller said. “You’re going into a place that you don’t know anything about, you’re going into a place where you don’t know anybody. And you have got to get organized and just do (your job).”

“There’s not a book that says, here’s how you do an earthquake in Haiti, or a typhoon in the Philippines,” he said.

On his deployment to Iraq following the Syrian refugee crisis, Heller said he met a man who worked as a cab driver in Damascus. The man, whose first name is Hassan, was married and had three children.

“He told me that Damascus was just beautiful — the most beautiful place in the world to live,” Heller said. “And he had a good job and he had a house and a great family. And the military took his cab and his house got damaged from the shelling.”

Hassan had to evacuate Syria, Heller said, taking his family eastward, across the country to Iraq on the back of trucks.

“His life wasn’t a whole lot different than me,” Heller said. “He was from a big city, had a job, family, house, all that kind of stuff. And overnight, because of the war, he (lost) everything.”

Heller said Hassan’s daughter would have been a senior in high school at the time, and had been looking forward to starting her university studies. Instead, because of the war, the teenager and the rest of the family were living in a tent in the Iraqi desert.

“(Hassan) was still upbeat, and I used to ask him, ‘How can you be so happy all the time with everything you’ve been through? You’re living in a desert in a tent,’” Heller said. “And he says, ‘There’s nothing flying in the air that’s going to hurt my family,’ meaning that he didn’t have to worry about missiles or bombs or anything like that.”

“It’s just, it’s thinking about the people that go through these disasters — they’re so tough,” Heller said. “It just makes you really want to help them because they’ve been through so much.”

As a boots-on-the-ground volunteer, government officials can be helpful, he said. Other times, they can stand in the way of getting the humanitarian work done.

One of the hardest things to face as a volunteer is insufficient aid, he said.

“We have a process where we prioritize certain families, depending on who is sick, the elderly … sick or pregnant women or single moms,” he said. “When you hand out the last (of the aid), that face just sits in your mind for a long time. You know, they were thinking we were going to help them, and we didn’t have enough aid to help. We didn’t have enough supplies. That’s probably one of the tougher things.”

Depending on the need, not all aid looks the same, said David Sturrock, member of Rotary District 7280 and ShelterBox Ambassador.

A standard offering is a green box, called a shelterbox, Sturrock said.

The cost of delivering one shelterbox is about $1,000, Sturrock said.

A shelterbox comes with a tent, as well as other kinds of gear, such as blankets, mosquito netting, water purification equipment, lanterns and more, he said, as he pointed to different tools and kits set up at the entrance of the venue.

He motioned to a lightweight, portable lantern, called a luminAID. The lantern is solar-rechargable and includes a USB charging port.

“One of the neat things about it is you can charge your phone,” Sturrock said. “A lot of places when they, you know, lose power, you have to evacuate because of a flood or an earthquake or something. What do you take with you? Often not much more than your phone. But your phone isn’t good for very long until you can recharge it, and if your electric grid’s down, you’re off. But with this, you have lights and a little bit of electric to charge your phone.”

“We found that it’s not necessarily one-size-fits-all,” Sturrock said. “In some cases, we’ll deliver just some of those things. Like, maybe somebody just needs tents … or maybe they just need a sleeping bag. Maybe they need mattresses.”

“We’ve been in Ukraine, I think six different times … each time has been totally different,” he said. “Initially, it was families on the move to a community down the road. And so often what they just needed there was hygiene kits and blankets and things like that. Then I think with the next deployment, they needed more mattresses and things like that.”

When he was deployed to Kenya, Heller and his team put up 7,000 tents in six weeks for 7,000 families. When deployed to the Philippines, Heller said the team delivered just a few hundred boxes.

Some boxes also include supplies and activities for children, such as crayons and coloring books.

“The kids are going through the same thing,” Heller said. “The kids are, from the disaster standpoint, seeing everything, hearing everything, smelling everything about disaster. So if you can just do something for the kids, you can get them going to be a kid again for a little bit, you know.”

Sturrock said he was drawn to the organization in part because of the focus on families.

“When you think about disasters, if you or I had an earthquake or flood, we would survive, and we would find a way,” he said. “But if you were tailing, you know, four little kids behind you, it’s a totally different situation. What do you do with the kids? I could sleep in a cardboard box, but I wouldn’t want my four kids to sleep in a cardboard box.”

Sturrock’s latest deployment was to Morocco in September, following the deadly 4.3 magnitude earthquake in Adassil that killed 3,000, and injured thousands, according to the Moroccan government.

Brian Glenn, one of the volunteers originally slated to speak Friday evening, had to cancel after receiving the call about the disaster. He is now deployed in Morocco with the rest of the ShelterBox Response Team.

“If there’s any reason to miss a fundraiser for disaster assistance, it’s to be one of the guys who’s delivering disaster assistance,” Sturrock said.