Email - January 16 - Helping Hands

The last week has been interesting. It rain pretty good at the beginning of the week. But then on Wednesday (Jan. 12th) it just poured all day long. They say it was basically an inland tsunami and so, with the last month of heavy rains it caused serious flooding. Overall things are bad for the city of Brisbane. Since the Brisbane River runs right through the city and has many offshoots, there were a fair amount of homes flooded. The waters peaked Thursday so clean-up started the next day or as soon as people could get to their flooded houses. We've been on foot for most of the week because Elder Tui popped his bike tire. We haven't been able to do much as far as getting around our area goes. Luckily the area I'm in didn't flood at all and none of the members but one had any damage done to their homes/property.

We finally got to help with clean-up on Saturday. We slept over at the Zone Leaders flat with like 6 other missionaries and then the next morning we went out and worked in Oxley from 8am to 6pm. I've seen floods and stuff before on the TV and heard of that happening, but until you actually see it you can't realize how bad things really are. I guess the first thing about it was the smell, was pretty awful. I can't really explain it, but it smells like the mud off the bottom of Lake Worth, so it is pretty bad.

The next thing you see when walking down a street that has been flooded is the mud that’s left over. It’s everywhere...on the streets, grass, on the outside of all the houses and then inside every flooded house. Where ever the water has been the mud is as well. It’s about the consistency of Dad’s pudding he gets from Sam's in the #10 cans but it is sticky and nasty. (lol) The sad thing is you can’t save very much from these flooded home. Everything has to be thrown out and then the sheet rock and carpets and everything else have to be removed. The massive piles of rubbish left over are just unbelievable. At one two-story Queenslander's house, that we took a lot of stuff out of, had a rubbish pile probably the size of our garage. It was really sad and ever house I went to was like that.


So we started at one house pulling all their belongings and spoiled stuff from their house and then we power washed everything with clean water. Later, we scraped the mud off of another house’s lawn. We also did several other odd jobs here and there. It was cool to see how many people were out there helping. Whether they were pulling stuff out of houses or giving out food to volunteers, it was great. The cool thing was we had Mormon Helping Hands jerseys on. It was good to get out there and show the community that we do more than just knock on people’s doors all day long, lol.



I didn't get many pictures but I'll try to get some from the Zone Leader or at least the picture of what we all looked like after it all went down, lol. Needless to say we were covered in soooooo much mud and gunk it was really very funny. We can't go out and help today because it is our p-day but hopefully we will get back out as the week goes on.

I'm doing good and the work is great and going well. Happy Birthday call and cheers to all y'all, lol. Good to hear from you. Love you … talk to you next week.

Elder Hatch