Recovering from Hurricane Isaac

Our mission president pulled all missionaries out of New Orleans on Sunday 26 August.  We drove up with the Chalmette sisters to the Baton Rouge mission home, where we hunkered down with 20 elders (who all slept upstairs in bunk beds), a senior couple (who got to stay in the General Authority room), and President and Sister Wall.  At first, it seemed like a bit of a HurriCation; Monday was our preparation day, and the weather was still pretty nice, so we played basketball with forty missionaries in the gym of the Baton Rouge Stake Center.  On Tuesday, the sixty or so missionaries from the New Orleans, Thibideaux, and Baton Rouge zones all met up in the stake center for a six-hour ad hoc conference.  We went to 90-minute seminars on how to study, how to plan, how to seek and understand the Holy Ghost, and how to better teach with pamphlets.  Actually, we only got to go to three out of four, because Isaac moved a little bit faster out of New Orleans (toward Baton Rouge) than we expected.  

Wednesday we spent in the mission home, and then on Thursday and Friday we went out to the neighborhoods around Baton Rouge and helped out there.  On Saturday, we went to La Place to start cleaning up there.  Our apartment in Metairie still didn't have power, so we spent the night at the Chalmette Sisters' apartment.  We went to an hour of church on Sunday and then headed back to La Place.  Some time Sunday afternoon, the power was turned back on in our Metairie apartment, so we got to sleep in Metairie for the first time in over a week.

We gave up our preparation day to work in La Place.  Levees have been built all around New Orleans to keep Lake Pontchartrain from overflowing.  But La Place had never been in the flood zone before, so La Place didn't have a levee.  All that water had to go somewhere.  So Lake Pontchartrain flooded 2000 houses in La Place with 1-3 feet of water.  It's still pretty warm down here, and with no air conditioning, the mold just took root and multiplied.  We have been removing furniture, other belongings, carpet, wood flooring, sheet rock, doors, cabinets, and appliances out of houses and piling them up at the curb.  The piles are often taller than I am.  

Here's an update from the Newsroom: http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/mormon-helping-hands-clean-up-from-hurricane-isaac

You can see my current (and some former) zone leaders and some of the missionaries that I've worked with in the video.  I look pretty frazzled and frumpy about 22 seconds into the clip.  I'm standing behind President Wall as he gets interviewed.  You can also see Sister Itohara (to the right of me) and Sister Hartshorn (to the right of Sister Itohara).  At about 0:53 you can see how disgusting the carpet is when it's rolled up and moldy.  Elder Zach Dustin is the one who testifies at the end.  He was my zone leader when I first got transferred to Chalmette, and he's been my zone leader for the last twelve weeks.  He's one of the missionaries that's going to be featured in Bob Woodruff's news special.