This is Aaron.
I spent the day working in Joplin, Mo and will go back up tomorrow morning to help again. The devastation is worse than I imagined after seeing it on tv. Today we cleaned up yards and cut down trees that had fallen on houses. All that was left of some of these buildings were the cement foundations. Some of the piles of houses that you see on the tv coverage are actually piles of other houses down the street that were blown to new locations and dumped there. I heard today that a bunch of the medical records from the files at the Joplin hospital have been found in Springfield, Mo two hours away. Debris is everywhere. They've even found medical records in Indianna.
Looking at the mess, I cannot believe that only 139 people have died. You would think there would have only been 139 people alive. I talked to some of the homeowners we were helping today. They lived in older homes and waited out the storm in their basements. They said that the storm passing over them while they hid in their basement sounded like they were being run over by a freight train, and since the tornado was not traveling at a very fast past, it just sat on these neighborhoods and stirred up the houses into soup. It must have been so sad for them to finally come out of their basements after the storm and see everything above them had been destroyed. Some people are left with nothing, others are sleeping in the non-damaged parts of their homes under the parts of the roof that are left. The electric company is working through to get power back to these houses, but their water is still under boil order. It was clear that the people we helped today were poor to begin with, and I felt so bad for them that they are still sleeping in their houses. Their houses were still standing, but they aren't really liveable. The rubble smells bad, there are bugs everywhere, it is humid and it got up to 90 degrees today.
I feel glad that I could help them, and there were a lot of volunteers there. 150 men from our stake were requested to help this weekend and 300 showed up. We came home tonight because the campsite for volunteers was full. It was great to see so many able to volunteer. It was difficult work and a lot of it was more than manpower could handle. A group of guys can't lift chunks of a roof, and chainsaws can only do so much to cut things into manageable pieces. They need to use sawzalls but don't have any electricity in many areas, so we did what we could bit it is like picking away in small bites. There were bobcats there to help move debris into the dumptrucks and our job was to make the debris accessible and get it to the street so the bobcats could get to it. At this rate it will take them years to recover.
Please continue to pray for these people. It is going to be a long recovery for them. They need all the help we can give.
