December 6, 2009

On November 27, we were going to the Church in Madadeni to meet someone when we got a call from Lucky saying that he had a problem and asked if we could come to his home. We had to go to the Church first but as we got close to the township we saw white balls on the ground about the size of a tennis ball. When we got to the church we saw broken tile on the Church and on the neighboring homes and the lawn was filled with hail. A storm had moved through and smashed windows, windshields, dented cars and gone through roofs of homes. We spent all that afternoon until it was dark and the next week fixing roofs on houses and helping in any way that we could. As we would work on one home, a widow, or woman with children would come up and ask us if we could help them since they didn't have anyone else to help them so we moved from house to house working. All 8 missionary (Elders) and two sets of couples along with lots of members assisted in the work. These are just a few pictures to show the damage and what we were working with. We have many more pictures but this should give you an idea. Many of the homes we worked on (you can see them in the pictures were about 20 feet by 20 feet in size (one room and a small bathroom).

These are holes that the hail created in the ground...the hail had melted when the picture was taken.

Here is a picture of the hail that had come down and had melted for about 30 minutes so it is smaller than it was when it fell

Here are the holes left in the roof looking at the roof from inside the home.

This is in the middle of the work experience as we were moving the ladder from one house to another in order to set missionaries on each house to do repair work on each roof.

Here are the missionaries working on the roof of the house that they eventually fell through.

Here is the hole caused by the 3 missionaries falling through the roof.

Here is the inside of the house after the missionaries fell through. The missionary on his back was very sore that night but was back the next day working on roofs. The family took it well but we didn't finish the roof until the next afternoon.

This is the house after we had replaced about 3/4 of the roof on one side with galvanized steel to fix the hole that was caused when the 3 missionaries fell through. The picture is taken from inside the home.