9-1-14

Hello all!

flooding in yeon san

Well I'm sure you are all pretty unaware of it, but last week the city of Busan got hit by a really bad storm. A lot of people that have lived in Busan said that the had never experienced anything like it before. What happened was last Monday it started raining a lot. We had a couple of blackouts, and after the rain stopped all of the streets were flooded. It was crazy. So for a good part of last week we did a lot of service cleaning up after the flood. Sadly several people even died from the flooding. 

flooding in on cheon

We went to a spot just a 10 minute walk from our house where 2 people drowned in a tunnel. Others got hit by runaway cars caught in the flood, and some people got pinned under the water by debris and drowned. Other than that there were hundreds if not thousands of others who were affected by the floods. 

me and my comp in flood cleanup

On the first night, Monday night right after the rain stopped, we went to a certain area that had been hit the worse. We got sent to an especially bad spot where a manhole had burst open and water was continuously flooding out to about knee or even deeper level. Because Korea is very mountainous a lot of water was flooding down from the mountains into the city. So the water was moving very fast, and in some parts it was more mud than water. 

me and my comp in flood cleanup

On the first house we helped in an old ladies house (it was more of a tiny shack) but the mud was so thick that just walking in it sucked our shoes off, so me and my comp just took them off and did it all barefoot. My comps got completely destroyed in the process too, and after working for a couple of hours we walked home. I gave my comp my shoes and I just walked home barefoot. 

me and my comp with a cool background of my area

The next day we went to the same place and helped a lot of other people clean debris from there houses, and shovel mud too. At one point I went with another elder to a house to shovel out a lot of mud in this little courtyard which was right next to the house me and my comp had worked at the night before. It wasn't a rich part of town and the bathroom(which was outside) broke or something in the flooding, so some of the mud we had to shovel wasn't really mud. It smelled really bad and we had to carry it out in buckets, and the buckets weren't necessarily in the best shape and i didn't have any gloves on at the time... plus we had walked in the deep mud and other things barefoot the night before. 

more area shots

It wasn't exactly the best of circumstances but me and the other elder did it with a smile. Afterwards we worked in basements of buildings shoveling out water, worked in house moving out ruined furniture like wardrobes, fridges and desks, and moved trash and rocks out of the streets. It was very hard and we did it for just about all day on Tuesday. We helped a lot of people and they were very grateful. We may have gotten on the news a couple of times so you can try to find that. If not you can just see some of the stuff that happened to the city. 

We did other service projects cleaning up after the floods throughout the week and that basically made it all up. It was awesome though. The missionaries were able to get a really good reputation and some investigators were actually made through the process, and a lot of interest was created about who we are as missionaries. Other than that there isn't much more to report. The work is going good. My new area is awesome and I'm super excited that I can serve here in Korea. I love you all and I'll talk to you again next week!

 sushi isnt scary anymore

 me after sushi eating

Elder Maccarthy