QLD
Sarah Borg watched as her house and her street disappeared under water during the recent Brisbane floods.
During February, unable to fix her own house, the 23 year-old nurse arranged to join the volunteer effort in Warwick.
"It was a time where we couldn't do anything else, so while I couldn't do anything on our house, I thought if I went and helped someone else it would be a way of saying thank you for the other people helping us," she said.
During the long days of debris removal, Ms Borg saw first hand how extreme events bring people together to work energetically as a team.
"There was a big feel of 'this is our community', people were really keen to help each other because these were the people that were really struggling. So we worked hard all day and tried to do as much as we could," Ms Borg said.
It was the community spirit and involvement that made the experience the most memorable to Ms Borg.
"What really stood out to me was how close everyone was. Just from looking at them and how they interacted, you would have thought they had known each other for years, but in fact they had known each other for only a few days."
While Ms Borg had to come back from Warwick to continue to rebuild her own house with her partner and return to work, she wished she could have volunteered longer.
Sarah volunteered in Warwick from 18-20 February. She traveled the three hour journey to Warwick to stay at a local high school and help on Warwick’s local farms, where fields of crops were wiped out as a result of the flooding.
The day would start with the volunteers waking up for breakfast at 6.30am and then gathering the equipment together for a safety briefing at the high school at 7.30 am.
“We were then split up into teams because there were a few different farms we were helping out on the same day. We helped get debris off fences and went through all the paddocks and picked up sticks,” Ms Borg said.
“The flood in itself is hard to believe. The farmer told us that where we were standing the water was above our heads, it was so hard to imagine, but you could see the debris up in the trees,” she said.
“I know what it feels like to be so displaced by floods. I know how much hard work it is, only our house was flooded, but for these people it was their house and land, and that’s their life and job, so for them the job is even bigger. I could only imagine how long it would take,” Ms Borg said.
The Warwick community is still in the process of rebuilding, like many flood affected areas in and around Brisbane.
Life for Sarah today
Sarah is now able to live in her house, however the repairs are ongoing and the kitchen and laundry are still in progress, but she described herself as “one of the lucky ones” and wanted to thank everyone that had helped both at Warwick and in her own area.
“Even though our house got flooded and we lost furniture, we are all okay, none of us were hurt and at the end of the day they are things that can be replaced, while people can’t be,” she said.
“I think that everyone is really feeling at the moment, but we realise that it’s happened now and can only move on and rebuild.”