Friday, November 30, 2012

Inundaciones!!

Hey Hey Hey!
    Well the biggest thing that happened here, as you can probably tell from the pictures, the whole town of Chorrera is under a mountain of water! OK, not the whole town but most of it. My house didn`t get flooded  but some neighbors close by did. What apparently happened is that it rained a ton in Colon and the Canal was filling up with too much water so someone opened the gates where the boats pass through to let some water out, and so much water came out that it flowed into the rivers and is flooding everything downstream. Martinelli the Panamanian President is really angry about that, according to the news, because the person didn`t have permission to open the gates. Yep, so now there are a ton of houses that you can`t even see anymore because the water is like 10 feet higher that their roofs! Yesterday we went out visiting all the members and investigators we have to see if they were ok and everyone got out fine but they lost pretty much everything. A recent convert that we have been visiting has her house almost completely underwater. If you look in the pictures where i`m standing in the water, the house in the back on the left side of the picture i think, that is her house. One member who works are a repairman fixing washing machines and stoves and stuff like that had his house covered in water. I`m guess that at the peak his roof was sitting about 15 feet underwater because his neighbors house is like 10 feet above his and you could barely see the roof sticking out a little. And even worse for him is that he had all his projects, like the washing machines, fridges and stoves just sitting outside in his back yard. When we came you just saw a bunch of stuff floating above his house but most of it got washing away by the river so who knows what he`s going to do about work and they didn`t have time to get stuff out of the house before it got flooded so everything inside got ruined too. The officials were telling everyone to stay out of the water ( i found this out after i got in it) because it had a bunch of chemicals and gas in it from some tanker the river washed down stream and that the water was really unhealthy. I walked through it before i found that out to help this member get some things out before they got ruined. Pretty much it was a huge mess yesterday and it means i`m going to have a lot of service projects cleaning stuff this week haha. 
    Well in other news, we found a cool family that we are teaching that wants to get baptized and are positive just that the husband is hesitant to get married, but we are working with that so i`m hoping we can baptize this family of 5 in December for Christmas. But the floods caused more problems because their house got covered too so i don`t know if marriage will be the first thing on their mind right now. We were able to baptize Anthony this past Saturday but he wasn`t able to be confirmed because the river blocked him from getting to church so we`ll do that next week - but the baptism was really special. We did it with the hermanas from a different area and there was a lot of people there and a great spirit so it turned out great! 
    Sadly i gotta run, but as for me and everything, it`s all good. Don`t worry about me! Tell everyone hi for me. I miss you guys and every week closer to Christmas i miss you a little more, haha. Take care! I love you!
love,
elder Pfister

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