In the midst of all the madness, it’s nice to read a story like this:

When the volunteers began cooking, famished storm victims emerged out of nowhere. Some were naked, having lost every stitch of clothing to Katrina. All were so hungry that the Texans began running out of food. They decided to pray.

“We thought we’d better be specific, so we prayed for hot dogs, because they could be cut up to feed a lot of people,” Fay Jones said. “About the time we said ‘Amen,’ a guy drives up with a truck filled with 2,600 hot dogs. That was the beginning of the miracles around here.”

The next wondrous event occurred when the Rainbow Family appeared. The ministerial group was exhausted from nonstop cooking for a crowd that multiplied with every meal. Hippies with dreadlocks and body piercings poured out of a bus painted like a Crayola box.

“We set up two 10-by-10 pop-up tents and started cooking,” said 25-year-old Clovis Siemon, an organic farmer and filmmaker from Wisconsin. “We were trying to find someplace to fit in, somewhere to be useful.”

Aaron Funk, an Arthur Murray dance instructor from Berkeley, also was among the first Rainbow Family volunteers here. Funk, 33, said his group was well prepared for the effort after decades of Rainbow Family gatherings on mountaintops and in national forests.

With tens of thousands of “brothers and sisters” scattered around the world, the Rainbow Family calls itself the largest “non-organization” of “nonmembers” on the planet. There are no rules, no dues and no officers — just a website (strictly unofficial, the group emphasizes) that promotes the belief that “peace and love are a great thing, and there isn’t enough of that in this world.”

Funk said the Katrina disaster response marked the Rainbow Family’s first major volunteer effort. The call for help went out on cellphones and the Internet.

“We figured it was a social obligation,” he said. “We already had the working knowledge of feeding large numbers of people. We got here, and the sense of desperation and urgency was off the charts. There was no time to talk about it. It was just service, time to do what we came here to do.”