Still Working Hard on Hurricane Cleanup

November 19, 2012

Dear Familia,

That's cool about Madi and Amanda's mission calls.  That will be pretty exciting for them. I will be able to keep my Spanish up with them when they get back. I will have to make fun of them for their Argentine accents though.

Alright, so I think I will just go through Mom's questions again, that seemed to work pretty well last time. I don't have a planner to guide me right now. So Thanksgiving, we are trying to get in with the Phillips (I don't think I mentioned this but Elder Phillips is the new branch president, they were a senior couple working in Lynbrook, which is the next branch over from us, so they just moved them down.). I don't know that we will have many more options. I don't really want another Hispanic thanksgiving. Love their food but they just don't know how to have a real thanksgiving. We didn't even get to go to church yesterday to figure all that out though. President Calderwood just had to do a sacrament meeting with our district and head straight to service. As for all the people in the damaged houses, I think they will be fine for Thanksgiving. There is a big FEMA tent down where we serve and they give everyone food every day and I bet they will do something for Thanksgiving. They also have a bunch of food trucks out there every day giving free food. So between those two things we have been eating pretty well out there.

The labor has been pretty hard again this week. I'd say my body is getting more used to it though. This week has been more pulling out drywall and floorboards and the like. I have met a lot of cool people this week though. Like one guy named Harry. He was a member from Manhattan that we worked with for a few days. He doesn't have a job right now so he has just come down every day for a few hours to work, often by himself. Talking to him I learned that he was an executive chef in Manhattan and last Friday he had a tryout for the Next Food Network Star and is applying for Chopped this week. But he just doesn't stop working. We ran into him yesterday as we were leaving and he had a big gash in the side of his head. He said a floorboard snapped while he was pulling it out and came up and hit him in the temple. He just waited for it to stop bleeding and then kept pulling out floorboards. He told us he heard that down in the FEMA tent they were giving free tetanus shots and he was going to go get one, but not because of the head injury, but because a rusty nail went into his thigh earlier in the week, but he just kept working. One of the places we cleaned with him though was the chiropractor's office, so they are giving us free adjustments twice a week, which will be really nice.

And no I wasn't in that group you saw on the news. I haven't been to Broad Channel. And I am not in that Helping Hands movie that's going around either. Don't know if you have seen that one yet but it's a cool video about us. It is by Joshua Brown if you haven't seen it yet. But ya us Rockaway missionaries seem to get left out of every picture and video even though we have been down in there longer than any other missionary. Don't know how that works out. I guess we are just always working in the basements when the cameras come around.  And Elder Olsen who was in that video is the Area Seventy here.  He lives in Lynbrook.

We actually did get out and visit some people this week. We can't go very far from our apartment and we can't stay out very long but we were able to visit a few members this week plus Fransisco. We can't really do any knocking or anything like that yet either.

And with the Longs, are they heading to Rockaway? I would think that they would help out in Jersey, they have a lot of cleanup too I hear.  But I will watch out for them.

And ya we are back to normal food, we just didn't have refrigeration before so we needed non-perishable stuff.  And ya our apartment is a block from the beach. Our window faces the ocean too so that is often distracting during personal study.

I am holding up alright, just little aches and pains. Yesterday we got a little sick because we were bleach-spraying a house and they had pretty thick mold in a few of their room so we had to use a lot. It wasn't bad until the very last room we did. It was a small tool room with thick mold and very little ventilation. We got about half the room done and it started getting hard to breathe so we went outside for a while to catch our breath and to let the room air out. It ended up taking three different shifts to finish that 8 foot by 5 foot room. Luckily that was the last thing on the agenda for the day so we were able to just go back to the apartment and relax for a while. Emotionally and Spiritually I am doing fine. Those first few days I was a little shell shocked but that has long since past.

Elder Bush's first name is Steven. He is doing pretty well with all this, although he wishes we could teach more. I am interested to see what happens with us. We are supposed to stay together until at least January but I am also supposed to be training him on how to be a missionary, and that is nearly impossible here. I was trying to figure out if they will move him somewhere else and have another missionary train him. Recently I have heard that they might move both of us out to a new area. I really don't want to leave though. So I am getting worried about that. I would love to finish training (really start training) Elder Bush but I really want to stay. So I guess we will see what happens. The Lord knows best.

I think that's about it for this week.

Love you all,

Elder Pearce

Here is a link to the video that Sean mentioned by Joshua Brown "Hurricane Sandy Helping Hands".

https://player.vimeo.com/video/53357089