LAPLACE — Instead of having St. John the Baptist Parish residents impacted by last week’s tornado come and get food, two men teamed up to bring food to them.

Colbert “Bot” Clark of Bot’s Place and Lance Oncale of BaBa’s Sports Bar and Grill, along with a group of volunteers, were able to make more than 1,000 meals for LaPlace residents Sunday.

“I contacted the owner of BaBa’s and I told him we needed to get together to try to give back to the community,” Clark said. “We also got the Sheriff’s Office involved, the District Attorney’s Office and the Parish President. The Sheriff sent me a truck, and the D.A. and Parish President were out in the field delivering food in the community.”

Clark said the effort went over really well.

“We cooked everything over at BaBa’s,” he said. “We had jambalaya, pastalaya, rotisserie chicken, salad, cornbread, desert and water. By delivering the meals, we made sure the food was going to get where it needed to be. Once you put word out, people that didn’t lose anything would just come out to get a fee meal.

This way we knew for sure the food went into the community that was hit.”

Clark said volunteers delivered food to residents in the Cambridge and Riverlands subdivisions, and meals were dropped off at LaPlace Elementary School for volunteers to pass out.

“Making over 1,000 meals feels very, very good,” Clark said. “It’s nice to be able to give back to people that really needed it. We even had a few people come off the street that heard about it and came and got a meal. Nobody was turned away.”

Clark said he was glad those in the community came together to help.

“When God blesses you, you have to learn to bless someone else,” he said. “The way that I look at it, this is the way a parish pulls together.”

Volunteers worked from 6 a.m. to approximately 2 p.m. making the food and delivering it, with Oncale serving as the main cook.

Oncale, who spoke with Clark the morning after the tornado, said donations from different businesses came from throughout the parish.

“There were also several people that donated money,” he said. “(Donations) helped us out a lot so we could serve over 1,000 people. It felt great seeing the parish come together after all we’ve been through.”

Oncale said they weren’t expecting to feed so many people, but things changed when the first two pots of pastalaya went out quick.

“We didn’t have a set number of people we were trying to reach, we just wanted to help out the community,” Oncale said. “We weren’t looking for recognition or anything; we were just helping out.

“Delivering the meals made it easier on the residents that are trying to rebuild their houses and get their lives back to normal.”