Flood in São Lorenço

On March 10th Curt's phone rang at 6:00AM - Elder Walker was on the other end telling us that there was a flood in their city, São Lorenço, and their apartment was surrounded by water. Even though they live on the second floor, the water was about 1 foot below their doorway. He told Curt that the Branch President wanted them to swim out to dry land and go to the chapel. After Curt realized that the water was about 8 feet deep, he said <NO> don't leave your apartment. Can you climb onto the roof and wait for someone to come rescue you in a boat? We told them to put together a 72 hour kit, with clothes and food, and things that they might need, and then Elder Walker and Elder Teriipaia climbed onto the roof, and waited for about an hour, until they were rescued.

It was a strange flood because it wasn't raining much that night in the city, but there must have been a big storm up-river, and the river rose very quickly. Many of the peoples homes were destroyed, and two bridges that connected them to the next largest city, Pelotas, were washed out.

A few hours later, when Curt and I were able to find out from the government, if we could drive to São Lorenço from Porto Alegre, we bought some water, and food, and hygiene supplies and jumped in the car and drove to find our missionaries. When we found them at the chapel they looked like this:

You can see that they were actually pretty excited to experience this grand adventure on their missions. It is too bad they got rescued so soon, because they missed out on being airlifted by a national guard helicopter. On our drive down from Porto Alegre the highway was practically empty. The only other people on the roads were transporting boats to help in the rescue efforts.
This is about as close as we could get to the flood area. As you can see only a part of the city (near the river) was flooded.
We drove Elders Walker and Teriipaia to a neighboring city, Camaquã, to spend a couple of nights with a set of Elders in their district, until the water subsided and they could get back into their apartment.

It took the government about a week to build a route around the washed out bridges, so about 10 days later some of our Elders from Pelotas were able to go be "Helping Hands" and assist the people in São Lorenço with the clean-up

The residents in Pelotas gathered donations of clothing and other items to help the flood victims.

This flood happened in the same week that Japan had its horrible earthquake and then tsunami. That made us all realize that even though people lost their homes, and some animals, there was little or no loss of human life - the city is equipped with flood alarms when the river rose, and everyone was forewarned. Curt and I were so sorry about the crisis in Japan, and we could relate just a little to how the Mission President there must have been feeling, so concerned about his missionaries and the members, and he wasn't able to call them, he had no cell phone service. We are grateful that none of the missionaris there lost their lives.