Disaster Relief

So the highlight this week was without a doubt the opportunity of helping clean up some of the damage from the fire up in northern Washington. Some of you may or may not know this but the church has a disaster response team that dispatches whenever there is a natural disaster, i.e. earthquakes, tornadoes, or fires that burn up 240,000+ acres in northern Washington. The cool thing about it though is its all based off member support. They have the team of leaders that organize everything but then they rely on members in the surrounding areas to come provide the man power. In this particular case they have members coming all the way up from Walla Walla (about a three hour drive to Brewster). So this past Tuesday our stake was called on to provide members and so me and two other missionaries went up to help support the ward. On that particular day they had over 50 volunteers. That was just one day. They said they had gotten almost 200 people one day to come help clean up. So we left Tuesday morning at 0 dark 30 to make the 2 hour drive so we would be there at 9. They got us all together and divied up assignments. Our particular group was going to help clean up some stuff in another town called Twisp, which for those of you who don't know (and I'm assuming most don't…it’s a small town) was another hour up the mountains. So 3 hours of driving later we finally get up there and we get to the place and get to work. Our group helped a single older lady who had lost her husband about a year ago clean up burnt vineyard and bushes and miscellaneous things around her house. It was a miracle that her house survived because bushes up to 3 feet from her house had burned, but her house was unscathed. She was so appreciative of what we did for her because being old and single she didn't know how she would clean everything up. It was a truly amazing and humbling experience.

And in other news there was a little Mexican fiesta concert thing going on in one of the parks here Friday and Saturday. Have no idea what it was about but the little bit of music we heard sounded pretty cool and there was a ton of people out.

So this week for a quote just simply typing it isn't enough. I need to include the picture. It just isn't the same. Here’s the background.

We were walking through a trailer park around 2 in the afternoon. It was over a 100 degrees outside, nobody was home (literally, no one), none of us were in a terribly good mood, and then we realize that all the Mexicans that live in said trailer park were still out in the fields working. So we face-palm ourselves for not realizing that sooner and begin the walk back to our car when we see this sign:

I have never felt so mocked by a dumpster before. But anyways things go on and eventually the day got better.

Stay awesome everyone!

Elder Kupferer