Helping kids meal
When a tornado ripped through the small town of Otwell, Indiana, in May 2006, Kathryn Martin, 32, who lived 60 miles away in Evansville, couldn’t get the news of it out of her mind. “I kept thinking, Those poor people. Somebody’s got to help them,” she says. She knew firsthand what they were going through.
Six months earlier, in the middle of the night on November 6, 2005, a tornado had struck her town, taking the lives of her 2-year-old son, C.J., her mother-in-law and her grandmother-in-law. The three had been having a sleepover at her grandmother-in-law’s mobile home. Kathryn, her three other children and her husband survived. “It was the most terrible experience of my life,” she says. “That pain will never go away, and it broke my heart to think about what these other families were going through in Otwell, especially the children.”
So Kathryn loaded her car with juice boxes, snacks and toys and drove to Otwell. She dropped off the items with the Red Cross, and as she was leaving, she saw a couple sorting through the wreckage of their home while their children watched. Kathryn had a few toys left, so she stopped and offered to play with the kids for a while. “The parents were so grateful that I did that for their children,” she says.
On the drive back to Evansville, Kathryn came up with an idea to help more kids. She corraled family, friends and neighbors and spent the next few months organizing homegrown fundraisers: carnivals, car washes, walk/runs. Finally, in August 2007, she unveiled C.J.’s Bus, a 35-foot schoolbus-turned-mobile-playroom. Stocked with bins of video games and DVD s, toys, crafts, books and much more, the bus travels to disaster-torn towns, giving the children there a safe place to play while their parents clean up, tend to paperwork or simply take a break. To Kathryn and her team of 39 volunteers—some of them fellow tornado victims—“it’s just keeping it normal for kids.”
So far, C.J.’s Bus has traveled to three states affected by tornadoes or floods, cheering up more than 756 children, ages 3 to 13. Exhausting as it is running the bus in addition to working full-time as a township trustee, it’s what Kathryn feels she was meant to do. “On our third day in Earle, Arkansas, after a tornado there, a little boy asked where I live,” she says. “When I told him Indiana, he couldn’t believe I’d come all that way to help his family. Honestly, I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.”