Recently Prairie Hog Country had the privilege of spending a morning with two brothers, Paul and Manuel Maendel, the ‘heart’ of the Heart Team of certified divers from the Oak Bluff Hutterite Colony east of Morris, MB. The Team volunteers their services for Emergency Water Search and Rescue in Southern Manitoba and beyond. The Team specializes in underwater search and recovery of drowning victims using trained divers, Sonar and Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV).
“If you become aware of an emergency, please notify us as soon as possible for a fast and effective response,” says their Facebook home page.
The Heart Team now consists of seven trained divers and three people who help out along the shoreline.
When a call comes in from someone to help recover a missing body, they spring into action. “Let’s say, a person who drowns in the Red River and you need to respond right away. Okay. Then we get together, and we phone the colony management, and say, look, there’s another call out. We need to get going,” said Paul. “Nobody makes the decision. You come together, discuss it and decide whether you can respond or not because there are times when you can’t respond. Either we don’t have the vehicle available right away. Like right now, we don’t have a dedicated vehicle.”
Other journalists who write about the Heart Team, its accomplishments, needs, activities and personalities often aren’t able to write about the main reason these two brothers started this outreach and thrive.
“… This is a way to use that passion to bring glory to God.” That’s Paul describing why they do what they do. First, a passion for diving and use that passion to provide hope and closure to grieving and hurting families.
“It’s a double tragedy, they’re gone, and they’re missing. And what’s interesting is, the grief of the missing is so deep, and it’s almost as if it is harder than the death itself,” said Manuel. “When days go by of that person missing, and we recover the body, the family cannot explain why they have joy now. They can’t explain, their loved one is dead, but having the body helps start the healing process.”
A couple of guys with dive equipment helped in the search of missing 17-year-old girl where they realized they had to move from recreational divers and take public safety diver training.
“We need to be able to respond when there is a drowning. And so we started looking into public safety diver training,” said Manuel.
It was on that search on the way home where both Paul and Manuel felt they contributed something worthwhile.
“We did something valuable, giving us a feeling of satisfaction of being able to bring hope,” said Manuel, especially when no one else was searching at that time, initially.
On the way home, they determined to come up with their name and acronym, “Hutterian Emergency Aquatic Response Team,” HEART!
“It is a very fitting name,” said Manuel. “It includes not just us but the greater Hutterite community, a name with much meaning. The meaning is Hutterites following their passion, serving God, and our fellow man, in love. Sharing the Hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Real Hope and Love go together so well, they said, coming from the heart.
Paul said it comes up often in their searches, especially when people grieve who have eternal hope.
“We’re searching for a child that passed away, somebody who was walking in the Lord … If we’re searching, like when we were in Alberta searching for those three girls that drowned recently,” he said. “There was one that was hard to recover, much grieving, intense hurt there, but they’re singing, a huge community of believers encouraging each other, mourning not as those who have no hope.” •
— By Harry Siemens
