The e-mails came in one after another, all with the same message, each from different senders.

Andy Kampman skimmed over the first one asking for volunteers to help build shelters for earthquake victims in Pakistan and thought about how nice it would be to help. He read the second message more closely. Then the third e-mail with the same details popped into his inbox.

“I really read through it,” said Kampman, the world director and head of college ministry at Parkview Evangelical Church. “Then I said, ‘OK Lord, it seems like you’re really trying to tell me something here.’”

Kampman read about the damage caused by the Oct. 8 earthquake and how 2.5 million people could freeze to death because they didn’t have the proper shelter.

“There was a quote from one of the directors of World Vision and he said, ‘I think the shelter idea is really going to work, and if   somebody wasn’t coming over to build these shelters, the next best thing we could do is give them all shovels so they could dig holes in the side of the hill and live in caves all winter,’” Kampman said. “You read something like that and you’re like, ‘How can you not go?’”

Kampman organized a six-man team that consisted of his college friend Jaron Vos, his brother Joel and their father, Judson. UI student Trystan Woods and John Sokoll, a Solon graduate and a minor league pitcher in the Kansas City Royals organization, rounded out the group.

They left for Pakistan the Sunday after Thanksgiving. They were sent to Balakot, a northern city spread out through a valley with little villages in the surrounding mountains. It was one of the areas hardest hit by the massive quake. On one hill alone, 6,000 people died, including 700 children in a school.

“The place is just completely destroyed, just leveled,” Kampman said. “Anything that’s left is severely damaged. The devastation is just impossible to describe unless you’ve seen where a bomb has gone off.”

Many of the survivors were living in tents that couldn’t provide dryness or warmth for winter.

Kampman and his crew built shelters made of corrugated metal, slightly insulated, big enough to house 12 to 16 people and “about a thousand times better than what they had.”

In the first of their two weeks in Pakistan, the group built more than 50 shelters.

“We didn’t want to just build them,” Kampman said. “We’d teach the local people how to build them so that after we left and the supplies continued to come in, then they could continue to build them for their neighbors.”

— Andy Hamilton

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