Julie Harshey uses her golf cart to help people around Greensburg.

I’m astounded every time I meet and talk to people in a disaster situation. That’s been true the past two years I’ve taken a class to Greensburg.

From the people who volunteer to help rebuild homes and lives to those who lived through the tornado in May 2007 and are reconstructing their existence, it’s downright amazing. This time, once again, those of us who interviewed and met people in Greensburg were inspired by their stories and their efforts.

I was humbled by Julie Harshey, the woman whose hard-fought success to live independently was disrupted by the tornado. Julie and 18 to 20 other clients of the Iroquois Center, which treats those with mental illness, were taken to Larned State Hospital and Coldwater before they were able to return home. They had nowhere else to go.

Julie’s back in an apartment, with the help of staffers at the Iroquois Center, and once again volunteering and using her golf cart to haul people around town. Her days are dedicated to helping others.

I was most taken by Sylvia, a volunteer from the Phoenix area who has been lending a hand in Greensburg for several weeks. She stays in a storeroom at the Methodist Church, where we bunked for two weeks. Sylvia’s working for pay now, helping build the new city hall, but she’s still doing her part to help others before and after work and on weekends.

Sylvia didn’t want me to do a story on her, but I figure it’s OK to comment on her attributes if I don’t use her last name or photo. I joked with her that she must be hiding from someone or in the witness protection program. Neither scenario is true. Sylvia, like Julie, just wants to led a hand to someone in need.

Friends on the way to Iowa dropped Sylvia off at the church. This isn’t her first volunteer gig. She also helped on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Sylvia says she’ll leave Greensburg to return to Arizona when the weather turns cold. In the meantime, like the many hundreds who have come to the tornado-devastated community, she’s content to do her part to help.

All of us who meet people like Julie and Sylvia are better for that experience. They’re doing their work — all those little things that are seldom noticed — for all the right reasons.

Check out the students’ work at greensburgrebirth.com. You’ll see for yourself.

I tried my third air mattress in seven nights last night. It was inflated and fairly comfortable until about 2:30 this morning. Then it felt like I was sleeping on a noisy, deflated innertube.

I think I must be getting the air mattresses from the church’s “Needs to be patched” pile in the storeroom. But there’s no sign warning that they are in need of repair.

Tonight — our last in Greensburg, I plan to inflate two or three before bedtime and place them strategically in the Sunday school classroom where some of us are sleeping, That way, when one loses air, I can move to the next.

Like everyone else in class, I’m looking forward to returning to my bed.

Rob Walton is a certified lay speaker for the United Methodist Church in Oklahoma.

Rob Walton says he’s not really one of Sam Walton’s sons, even though he occasionally jokes about it since one of the Waltons also is named Rob. He’s not related to the multi-billionaire, but he’s still looking for the branch, he quips.

Walton and his wife Vera, pastor of the Lamont United Methodist Church in Oklahoma, brought a team of two dozen adult volunteers and youths to Greensburg this week. The youngest on the trip is 8. The Lamont group arrived Monday, and then spent the afternoon walking fields and picking up debris.

“It was the third time through, but we still picked up a lot of junk,” Walton said, adding that some of the wood the workers found had been shoved into the ground by the 2007 tornado.

Walton, 70, said he and his wife, who’s “much younger” at 53, have had tragic lives. He was an alcoholic. Both have had previous bad marriages, he said, that ended in divorce. A former nurse, she entered the ministry about eight years ago, right after they went broke trying to raise corn in the Panhandle, where they don’t get much rain, he said.

Now, Walton serves the spouse role in his wife’s ministry. He just ended a four-year term as state president of the United Methodist Men. Both have worked in prison ministry.

This is Walton’s fourth mission trip.

“This is what it’s all about — working with our youth,” he said. “We have generations of people going to prison. We don’t need to build more prisons.”

I was awake shortly after 3 because my Coleman air mattress gradually deflated during the night. By 3:30, I was flat on the basement floor in the Sunday school classroom where we bunked.

Figuring I could beat the shower crowd and catch up on my work, Cort Anderson and I were ready to get into our media room — the church parlor — by 5. But the key wouldn’t open the door. Several people with volunteer groups staying at the church offered their assistance to no avail. We even tried the door leading from the women’s restroom into the parlor.

We waited until 6:45 to call the pastor at home to get his master key to the church. It opened the door without a hitch. It’s shortly after 7. So much for that early start.

The people in the communities where we worked were extremely hospitable. I think the students’ eyes were opened not only to what happens in a community after a disaster, but also to life in small Kansas towns as well. For some, it was pure culture shock.

A big thank-you to the people who helped us, particularly those who work with SCKTRO, the South Central Kansas Tornado Relief Organization. They are solid folks. To those in Haviland, who put up with us for two weeks, an extra thanks, especially to June Boettcher at the Friends Church and C.D. Fitch at Barclay College. The daily hospitality of Vic Hannan and his morning coffee crew at the hardware store also was appreciated.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the students’ work, go to greensburgrebirth.com.

As we headed home at the end of last week, we traveled east on U.S. 54. We passed the scene once again of the tragedy that occurred at the rest stop between Cunningham and Pratt, where the Colorado couple stopped to get off the highway during a severe thunderstorm. Unfortunately, it’s also where their lives ended when a tornado picked up their small car and slammed it into a wheat field a few hundred yards north.

The video by Patrick Vera of the scene is a grim reminder of the often-deadly force of Mother Nature.

An EF-5 tornado on May 25 killed at least seven people and destroyed 300 homes in Parkersburg. It’s a repeat of Greensburg, only on a smaller scale, says Matt Deighton, volunteer coordinator of the South Central Kansas Tornado Recovery Organization.

Deighton says he thinks the lessons learned in Greensburg would be helpful to the Iowa community.

Deighton says recovery leaders in Greensburg haven’t been asked, but he plans to use his FEMA contacts to open communication with people in Parkersburg. He says the people in Greensburg didn’t have anybody who had been through a similar disaster to give them advice.

Deighton says he is also going to send two groups of volunteers from Nebraska and Iowa who had planned to help in Greensburg next week to Jewell, some three hours north, to help with recovery efforts there. A tornado hit that Kansas community on May 30. More than 250 volunteers are scheduled to work in Greensburg next week.

We’re staying at Jackson Hall, a two-level building with four classrooms on the Barclay College campus. We’re occupying two of the classrooms, one upstairs and one downstairs.

There’s no stairway connecting the floors, so the women, who are staying downstairs, have to come around to get to our makeshift media room, which is also where the guys slept last night. The women opted for the downstairs room because it has blinds. The upstairs rooms don’t.

We’ll be able to use the other upstairs classroom after a CPR class today. The training is being conducted by Donna Meier Pfeifer, executive director of the Cannonball Trail Chapter of the American Red Cross in Pratt. The other downstairs classroom is a science lab with immovable desks, so we’re not using it.

We’re headed to meetings and interviews this morning. Several are going to Greensburg. A couple of us are sitting in on the South Central Kansas Tornado Relief Organization’s meeting in Haviland. Tonight, we’ll try to make the Greensburg City Council meeting.

That should give us a better handle on how things are progressing in Greensburg.

Someone said they heard there were 10 weddings involving Barclay students at the church this summer. Pretty busy for a small town.

When we return on Sunday evening, we’ll be a little more cramped than we were this week. We’ll be sharing the basement with 30-some volunteers from Texas.

When we were leaving the Barclay gymnasium after taking showers around 9:30 last night, we ran into two Barclay students who were coming to play volleyball. One is a graduate from Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire. The other is from Miami, Okla.

Except for the first day, when we had to find someone to unlock the gym, the shower arrangements have worked well. The gym is about four blocks from the church, but it’s handy and open most all hours. Only a couple of us have had to dash back to the church because we forgot to take a towel.

The showers are clean, which is a requirement for most of those in our group. Obviously, those people haven’t camped out much. I was happy to plenty of hot water.