Helping out

The first two Saturdays that we had back, were spent helping the community clean up. We had over 500 volunteer from the Austin Stake and ours out in the community in our yellow Mormon Helping Hands shirts. It was an extremely neat and humbling experience. I almost broke into tears several times just thinking about what we were doing. Most of the families in our stake were there helping others when they could have been working on their own yards. I had a chance to get out there and work with John. We were assigned a park that is near our house. It was a HUGE assignment and even though we worked from 9-5 we still had not cleaned it all up, but it looked so much better.

John and I had an opportunity to leave a few times to help some other people out. One family we went too didn't need help with branches or trees, but they needed help getting some of their furniture out of their house. The reason being an enormous tree had fallen through their 2 story making it impossible to live in. A beam had fallen on their stairway making it difficult to remove things from upstairs. The lady of the house was just amazing. She said that at least she will get to build her dream home surrounded by very few trees. ":)
After removing their fridge, oven, washer, dryer, and dishwasher, we asked if there was anything else and said our goodbyes. The women gave me a hug and again, I felt like crying. What a great example of hope this lady was. We only spent an hour there, but I felt like we had a bond, and I am so grateful for her and the opportunity I had to meet her.
Also during the power outages, our friends the Reynolds opened up their home to us (as well as a few others). They fed us and let us stay until late hours so we didn't have to sit in the dark. The Bergers also let me get to work early so I could take a warm shower. We were touched at how willing people were to share what they had. We have some great friends.
The experience has been good and things are starting to return to normal. We still don't have cable, and John got poison ivy from the clean up last Saturday, but it really has been a wonderful experience. We are very grateful for everything we have been blessed with and will hopefully never take for granted all the comforts we have been afforded. Our home is safe, and we are safe.
Here is a picture of the park that we helped clean. We'll get an after picture to put up next to it later.

This is a picture of a house down Yaupon that we thought was pretty unfortunate.