Need a shovel? A can of soup? In Walker, Jennifer and Neva Baker turn donation center into a place of refuge
Published in The Mammoth Times on January 28, 2021
It’s an icy cold, gray winter day in Walker but the Mountain View Donation Center is warm and filled with light. Jennifer and Neva Baker navigate between table after table of donated shampoo, pots and pans, books, shoes, and cleaning products, with such expertise that it feels like you have stepped into their own home.
“Sit down,” they say as one of the 90 Antelope Valley residents who lost their home in the Nov. 17 Mountain View Fire comes in, seeking a shovel to help clear the ashes off their property, or restore the pots and pans and laundry detergent to their new homes.
“Have some coffee,” Neva says, as Jennifer pours a steaming cup. They know everyone here by name. “Keep me posted,” Neva says to people as they leave.
In fact, calling this place a home barely even feels like a metaphor. Spend some time with the sisters and it quickly becomes clear that the Antelope Community Center, now transformed into the Mountain View Donation Center, has become something like a true home – a place of healing – for many of those displaced by the tragic Mountain View Fire, which ripped through the town of Walker in mid-November, displacing more than 100 people from their homes and destroying almost 80 different structures. Many people and families came back to their property to find they had nothing left; not a stitch of clothing, not a dish or pan or can of food.
The task of finding shelter and basic needs for those who lost everything before the cold Sierra winter was daunting. After the tightly-knit Eastern Sierra sent a flood of donations toward Walker, the result was chaos as much-needed but unorganized donations quickly overwhelmed the short-staffed county response team.
That is where the Baker sisters stepped in.
The Mountain View Donation Center began as a Facebook post when Jennifer heard that the original donation hub was overwhelmed and had stopped accepting donations. “I thought that was just wrong,” she said. “Why are you telling people to stop donating? These people need all of this stuff,” she said.
Two Facebook posts, three locations, and many, many hours later, the donation center was set up more permanently in the Antelope Valley Community Center in Walker, complete with what feels like a plethora of recovery necessities – furniture, pads and tampons, shovels and sifters, cleaning supplies, and more.
Open Monday through Saturday, the center serves all people who experienced loss in the fire (for more information, or to donate, see box at end of this article) and there is no doubt, the center – and the two sisters who are the heart of it – have been a critical bridge between loss and recovery.
“It’s been an incredible resource for the community, and continues to be,” said the area’s county supervisor, John Peters. “I know it’s helped numerous, numerous people in so many different ways. Some of it, that I’ve heard, is just the fire victims having some place to go, talk to each other… it just provides a sense of hope.”
He emphasized that while the county was able to help by providing the community center as a location for the donation effort, “This is definitely a community-driven, grassroots effort. The credit goes to the community, to [the Baker sisters], and all the volunteers that have been making it happen.”
Jennifer and Neva Baker were raised in Bridgeport and moved to Walker around ten years ago. Both are Native American, indigenous to the area, and have deep roots in the community. The sisters have that special type of communication that occurs through glimpses and short phrases.
“She’ll just look at me and I’m like okay, got it. We don’t even have to speak,” said Neva. In the early stages of the donation center, when the two were still deciding how they would go about doing the work, Jennifer said she looked over at Neva one time and said, “Are we doing this?” and in one look they decided that yes, they were.
Both are warm and open, conversational. They laugh a lot. Jennifer loves to fish and is so superstitious about it that she will never fish in Topaz Lake on Opening Day. “It’s not just fishing,” she says. Neva is the DJ of the donation center, playing songs like “All Star” and “Don’t Stop Believing.” She dances alongside the visitors who come in.
But they are not all lightness, not in this time of loss and sorrow for so many. Gesturing to the four or five people browsing through the donation items at the center, Neva says, “Everyone in here has lost everything.”
How does one understand that, how does one help in the face of such loss? Neva calls it “the process.” The process, to her and to Jennifer, is what it means to come back from that kind of loss, to rebuild one’s life from literal ashes.
“What if your house burned down, and you had nothing? And what if your family lived hundreds of miles away and couldn’t get to you? Imagine that,” she said.
For some, the process starts with simply being able to enter the donation center. Some come in for one visit and don’t come back. “It’s too hard for them to hear the stories, and just the heartbreak, and the sadness,” Jennifer said. “Some people can’t even set foot in this building,” she says.
On the other hand, Neva said, the process for others is very different. It might be “Hey, I need to go get a toothbrush and toothpaste now. Where do I go?’”
Meanwhile, some people are not even sure what to start asking for in terms of donations. “It’s like walking blind and still not knowing what you need,” said Neva.
Jennifer explained that many people are just now “coming to the realization that it’s okay to accept help.”
‘Outsiders,’ anyone who has not gone through such loss, almost surely do not understand this process. “You don’t get it unless you’re really in it, or know somebody who’s really in it,” said Neva, explaining the sudden understanding Walker residents had of the Paradise community, who lost their homes in a larger but similarly tragic fire in 2019.
This understanding of ‘the process’ is foundational to Jennifer and Neva’s work and their center is one crucial step in it. It means that the sisters hand deliver donations to people who aren’t ready to come to the center yet. It means that the center is packed full of “the things you would never really think of… that we thought of,” said Neva, who opened packages of men’s underwear, cleaning supplies, and personal hygiene products like Christmas presents. “Alright, men’s undies, yay,” she exclaimed at one point.
Later, she said, “if you were rebuilding your life, what would you need? You would need a full-size bottle of conditioner… you have to have the full size, because it just feels normal. And we’re trying to make it as normal as possible, even though it won’t come close.”
Due to the generosity of hundreds of Eastern Sierra residents, the community center is literally almost completely filled with donations, “departmentalized, really,” Neva calls it. There are separate sections for men’s, women’s, and children’s clothes; there is a section for kitchen items; a section for couches and chairs and other furniture; another for cleaning supplies in one corner; another filled with Christmas presents.
A stack of cleaning kits from the Red Cross, which include shovels and sifters to allow people to sort through the ashes of their homes, are set inconspicuously in the back.
Jennifer and Neva’s office, lovingly dubbed “the Bat Cave,” sits in the back corner of the center. From this spot, the two make phone calls and organize donations and complete the other administrative work required to keep the center organized and running.
Jennifer focuses on this work – as Neva puts it, Jennifer is the chief and she is the lieutenant. Most donations to the center come from people who have bought the items new. These are ideal, Annie Reavey, a frequent volunteer at the center, said.
“The nicest thing about what’s going on in here is that people go out and they buy brand new things… so I can bring you a brand new coffee pot still in a box,” she said.
Basic household necessities, especially cleaning items, are always needed, Jennifer said, but the center’s specific needs change almost every week. These requests are posted on the Facebook page, ‘Mountain View Fire Donations.’ Every time thus far, generous people have jumped to the challenge these odd donation requests entail, or, one of the Baker sisters has found a way to hunt them down.
One recent valuable donation was an electric wheelchair for a fire victim. Last week, the center obtained washing machines and dryers for victims who had managed to get new houses. A few weeks before that, the sisters pulled together enough donations to completely furnish one woman’s house with beds, couches, kitchen supplies, and more.
Neva manages much of the networking that goes behind the acquiring of these essential, but oddly specific and oftentimes expensive, donation items.
“I have a knack,” she said. “There’s just been something amazing about my networking skills.”
To prove it, she said, the famed electric wheelchair was obtained in about 30 minutes through a connection through a connection.
Through the execution of their understanding of ‘the process,’ it does not feel like an overstatement to say that Jennifer and Neva have saved lives. They have touched many, at the very least.
At one point, Neva pointed to a woman looking through a pile of aprons. Neva had known this woman since she was five, and she said, “That might be just an apron to somebody else, but to her, it’s everything. It’s feeding her babies… and just taking time to not think of her loss. Because right now, she’s just getting an apron to bake some cookies.”
She extended the metaphor with a roll of electrical tape sitting nearby: “Even if somebody were just to come in for this,” she said, holding it up, “it’s just tape. But to them, this means they get to rebuild their life.”
The truth of this metaphor was evident in the faces of the people coming into the center.
Jennifer told the story of a woman who was sorting through a box of wine glasses and suddenly gasped out loud. It turned out that the glasses in the box were the exact same kind that she had had in her house, her mother’s wine glasses, lost to the flames.
“We were like, ‘Oh my gosh, you were just meant to open that box,’” Jennifer said. “Everyone was crying, and we told her, ‘Take them home. You were meant to have those, take them home with you.’”
Some victims who come to the center don’t realize that all the items are free and break down crying when they do. “The fact that it’s all free, it eases the stress,” Jennifer explained.
There are smaller victories, too. One woman, who decided to take home a piece of furniture, excitedly told Jennifer, “All weekend, we’ve been talking about how we don’t want a full couch, we want a love seat. And here it is, oh my goodness.”
One man, who had been frequenting the center as of late, was the lucky recipient of the famous electric wheelchair Neva managed to obtain.
“They asked me what I needed, and I said, ‘I lost everything, so I guess I need everything,’” he said. His story was clear evidence of the wisdom of ‘the process’ again.
“It really hits me all the time,” he said. “I’ll be like, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll go fishing,’ and then it’s like ‘Oh, my fishing pole burnt up,’” he said. Referencing an electric shaver, reading glasses, hairbrush and “the little things like that” that quickly become necessities once they are lost, he said he ended up at the donation center where Jennifer and Neva set him up with the wheelchair, a video TV (“the exact same one that burned up in my house!”) and more.
“This is great, man,” he said. “They gave me the very same clothes I had burn up… they got me an electric wheelchair. Wheelchairs aren’t cheap…”
Before leaving, Jennifer asked him whether he had gotten any reading glasses yet, and quickly found him a pair with the right prescription. “Cool, cool, cool,” he said. “It’s like Christmas every day.”
In addition to the support that material items provide to fire victims, Jennifer and Neva have turned the donation center into something like a safe haven for fire victims to heal from the other – and perhaps deeper and further-reaching – damage that the Mountain View Fire has wreaked in the Walker area. In this sense, Jennifer and Neva donate their time and their heart to a cause that has proven to be completely essential in an entirely different way.
Neva pointed to one of the couches and said, “We do a lot of counseling sessions here.” Jennifer points to some of the frequent visitors in the center, saying how she’ll pour them coffee, tell them to sit down, and let them just ‘do their thing’ whenever they come in.
“We have people who come in and chit chat, like they’re just going to the coffee shop,” she said. “They just come in and hang out.”
In addition to the friendliness of this all is a genuine desire to help people’s mental health.
“Everybody wants a little connection, instead of being isolated right now… we make them be comfortable,” Jennifer said. “They don’t have to feel rushed. We tell people, ‘Take your time. We’re not going to rush you.’”
Neva added, “We’re not really friends or acquaintances anymore. We’re definitely family. And so many other people have said the same thing… we’re so glad to hear that, because we definitely want people coming in here feeling like you are family. That we’re not strangers. We want to make sure that when you come in here and we say ‘hi’ to you, it’s the warmest ‘hi’ you’ve ever heard in your entire life. Because it is not an easy thing to come into this building. If you can get a smile to somebody, then you’ve done your job for the rest of the day.”
Reavey, the volunteer who Jennifer and Neva joke is their “employee of the month,” lost everything in the fire, like so many of the victims coming into the center. She is similarly devoted to helping people’s mental recoveries. “I’m very determined to use my experiences for good,” Reavey said. “The people that come down here know that I have lost that much and I can understand and empathize and sympathize with them, I know kind of how they are feeling,” she said.
It is clear that community members share these same sentiments. One woman who came in the center said, “…you’ve gotta mention these sisters over and over again, because if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have this place.” Another said, “The main thing… is that these two sisters are angels.”
Jennifer recounted one of the victims telling her that their talks in the center were ‘like therapy.’
“It’s like therapy for her,” she said. “We don’t sit there and tell them what they need to do, or what needs to happen. We just let them talk. Just let them know we are listening, and let them let it out. That’s been a really nice thing.”
In the end, Jennifer said, it is comforting for fire victims to have this kind of support, “to know that someone’s there that is nice to them, talks gently to them, and generally, cares for them, makes them comfortable,” she said. “It makes them not feel so heartbroken. They know that it’s a safe space they can come to and just vent and talk to us about anything and everything.”
Why do they do it? “I don’t really know,” said Jennifer. “I haven’t really thought about it. It was just something that needed to be done, and there was no second guessing it, and it was like ‘Boom, we’re gonna do it. And we did it.” She added, “We’ve never wanted any recognition for doing this. It’s just – the people needed it. That’s all it ever has been and that’s all it ever will be.”
Neva said her personal history has aided her in this process of helping so many grieving people. As a certified hospice and first aid caregiver, and the daughter of a woman who spent her life working in social services, plus a background in being a nanny, Neva has plentiful experience in helping people. While Neva and Jennifer and the rest of their family did not lose their home in the fire, Neva said having experienced other forms of loss makes it easier to empathize and understand people’s grief.
“As Native Amerians, I think it’s easier for us to be helpers… because all of us have had friends, family, that never had anywhere to go,” she said. “I have to be completely honest with you. This is probably one of the easiest things I’ve done in my life. I’ve had so many experiences and things like that doing this just seems so easy.”
She understands loss, she said, and what has to be done in the face of great loss. “It’s either that you fall apart, or you pick up the pieces and figure out how to do it,” she said. “You have to keep going.” And in this process of picking up the pieces, the Baker sisters have picked up many others along with them.
“You gotta have pretty thick skin to do stuff like this… if you’re not built for it, you’re not gonna last long,” Jennifer said. “You’ll be torn forever.
“I think that what would keep us going is just seeing the joy on people’s faces coming in… The excitement… knowing that they can get anything they want, and then request anything they want and know that we will get it for them. Including the children.”
“What keeps me going? Neva said. “Knowing… that somebody will get something, even if it’s small, and even that little small thing means the world to them,” she said. “And even if you can give them just a little bit of happiness with the small thing that they’ll take, that’s like the most gratitude, the most self-fulfilling emotion you could ever have.”
That said, Jennifer and Neva have also sacrificed a lot for the center. Jennifer is at the center from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., six days a week. “Everything has changed because we are here,” she told me. One woman who came into the center said, “These two have, like, devoted their life to this.”
But the Baker sisters remain open-hearted. “At the same time, and I know Jen feels this way too, I’m glad that we’ve gone through so much tragedy that we can do this,” said Neva. “That this has become easy. Because we’ve definitely gone through our share in tragedy. That’s what makes it so easy.”
Looking ahead to the future of the donation center, Jennifer says, is “a question mark.” The only thing the sisters know is this: “We tell the people, we’re going to be here for as long as you guys need us. It’s not an overnight fix. It’s a process. We’ll be with you guys.”
For the time being, Jennifer and Neva have been donating excess supplies (namely clothing, which they have too much of) to the Catholic church in Yerington. When the community of Walker no longer needs the donation center, the sisters plan to give the extra items to a Native reservation in Montana that they visited a year ago on a Bible study trip.
“We got to see how poor they were. We see the rez’s here, Bishop up to Reno and surrounding… we got it made compared to up there,” Jennifer said.
And so, she and her sister plan to continue giving until they have no more to give. And even then, they will find something more.
IF YOU WANT TO DONATE OR KNOW MORE
With any questions, call Jennifer Baker at 775-450-0299, or Neva Baker at 530-870-0234, and visit the center’s Facebook page, Mountain View Fire Donations.)