Post Storm - Cleanup

Yesterday, we spent several hours in a small farming community between Borden and New Pekin, Indiana, helping clear trees and rubble and helping clean salvageable goods out of houses. My friend Monica documented some of the things we saw.

This is a little chapel next to the cemetery. You can see what's left of it: a staircase, a pew or two, and the pulpit. The rest of it is just gone.

This is another view of the remnants of the church.

A look through the cemetery up the hill. You can see a large pile of cleared trees to the right. If you zoom in, you can see some of the damage to the houses up ahead.

This is a look in the other direction. If you zoom in and look at the house to the left, you can see the house we spent a lot of time pulling belongings out of. Deg passed countless books, computer parts, pictures, etc out the window to me as other men salvaged pieces of furniture.

You can see how some areas are knocked over, and some remained completely untouched.

Today, church was changed to sacrament meeting only so that we could get to helping. After sacrament meeting, we made over 200 sack lunches in about 30 minutes. We all went home, changed, and went up to Marysville, a town of about 500 that was completely destroyed. There's not a salvageable building left in the town. My friend Shelby caught a few photos of what we saw there.

The house pictured here was lifted and moved over kind of like Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz.

This is the roof of that house. It's sitting probably 50 feet from the rest of the house.

Here you can see half of a house and, around the trees, you can see car and semi trailer parts wrapped haphazardly.

In this picture, members of our ward and others from many communities work on a huge field that is strewn with walls, doors, clothes, siding, anything you can possibly think of. We basically gathered stuff into 3 different kinds of piles: wood, metal, and garbage. As the ground dries, dump trucks can come in to carry the rubble away. As it is now, several trucks were stuck several feet in mud if they tried to go for the rubble.

This is all that's left of this house. And the wall in front of it is from another property.

These people will have no power for a long, long time. This is what's left of the poles for their power lines.

Needless to say, it's been an incredibly humbling experience. It's been so good to get out there and to get helping, but it feels like, even though there were upwards of 60 people there helping, that we didn't even make a dent.The silver lining, though, is the amount of help we've seen. Everyone is so willing to jump in and help. Several of our friends and coworkers who aren't members of our faith came with us. Many people just drove up to see if they could be put to work. At the stake center (which, incidentally, is the building our ward meets in), the stage is full of humanitarian kits and supplies from the Bishop's Storehouse in Indianapolis. There are pallets of water, soap, shampoo, towels, hygiene supplies, cleaning supplies and buckets, and the list goes on. People raced to get gas in their chainsaws and even people who are sick and don't join us for Sunday services were out there, doing what they could to help. I think the most touching thing I saw was when we were making sandwiches at the church. There's one little 4 year old girl in the ward who I had the privilege of working with when I was in primary. She has a lot of energy and that drives a lot of people crazy when dealing with her. However, she put that energy to work. She came right up to me, asked for a pair of gloves and a chair that she could stand on, and she put together about 20 sack lunches by herself. She put all the components in, double checked their contents, and then handed them to the older ladies who were gathering the finished things. This sweet little girl was ready to help in whatever way she could. And it's been like that with everyone. People who you wouldn't even expect to see out there working are up to their ankles in mud, covered in sawdust and sweat, and shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers, working as if they were best friends. I'm having trouble getting my phone to download this image, but in the middle of the rubble, some men hung a tattered American flag from one of the trees left standing among the rubble. It was breathtaking.

You know, I whine a lot about my life. I couldn't find the right pair of shoes, or Deg stayed 45 minutes later at work than I wanted him to, or I had a headache, or the person in front of me was driving too slow. But you know what? None of that matters. Deg and I are safe, our friends and their families are safe, we have power, clothes, electricity, our belongings, and we have the ability to help those who don't have those things. Today while we were working, I stepped on a board to keep from stepping in the water, and just under the surface was a nail. It went through my shoe and sock and got my toe that I broke back in October. It hurts a bit and I had to leave to go get a Tetanus shot, but the thing that made me the most upset was that I had to leave and couldn't keep working. I have to stay away from that area for a few days while my foot really gets back to healing, and that just makes me so sad. I want to get back in there, put on my work gloves (because I own those now), and haul tree limbs and vinyl siding. I want to go in there with a bunch of food and cook for everyone. I want to wrap everyone in fuzzy quilts and sit with them while they talk. I want to follow the command of our Savior Jesus Christ to get out there and help "the least of these," not just because He commanded it, but because not helping would be ludicrous. I want to be the answer to someone's prayer because it's the right thing to do and because I would want someone, anyone, to come in and pick me up if this happened to me. Deg and I feel like we're chomping at the bit to get back out there and work. We may not do a whole lot, comparatively, but we can be there and we can work while we're there. I know I'm waxing long here, but I'm passionate about this. How could you not be?