The Kids of Courage Medical and Volunteer Team spent Sunday, November 4 in the Brooklyn community of Sea Gate taking care of the medical needs of this devastated community.

Volunteers from K.O.C. have been on the scene for days trying to help the community and the surrounding area of Coney Island get everything they need and will continue to do so. Headed up by Head Nurse Sara Miriam Kaplan and Medical Director Dr. Stuart Ditchek, the team has been on the scene extending care to all in need, families, first responders even Con-Ed repairmen.

Yaakov Moshe Miller, K.O.C.-EMT and Hatzolah volunteer spent many hours coordinating with the local response getting the K.O.C. staging area set up. K.O.C. has many volunteers from the community, as well as the President of the Sea Gate Association, Pinny Dembitzer, who was with his family in Los Angeles this summer with Kids of Courage.

Volunteers from K.O.C. are also working vigorously in the Rockaway/Five Towns area assisting another community devastated by the storm. In the spirit of K.O.C., Howie Kafka, co-founder of Kids of Courage, whose home was damaged by the storm, was able to salvage ski coats that were donated for the upcoming January adaptive ski trip. These coats were stored in his basement which flooded. He was able to get these coats out of harms way in advance of the storm and will now distribute them to families in the community who lost everything. As always, Howie thought of others before himself during and after the storm.

The KOC teams coordinated with many community organizations, such as Shomrim and Hatzollah as these early pictures depict. There was coordination with the Seagate NYPD and their dedicated chief of police, Jeffrey Fortunato, as well as the FEMA/Homeland Security Rapid Response Teams tasked with providing a variety of services, including medical urgent care for the Seagate/Coney Island area. K.O.C. would like to thank all providing assistance to those in need.
 
K.O.C. volunteers exemplify the humanitarian cause and stand with all in need. These volunteers work selflessly and quietly utilizing the skills that they learned in Kids of Courage and have been blessed with to help. They are simply, worried about others…
 
Here are some of the early pictures from our media crew:
 

(Pictured: Pinny Dembitzer, President of Seagate Homeowners Association and  Duvid’l Dembitzer, KOC volunteer, with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano)

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