Albufeira (Al-boo-fay-ra) FLOOD

This beautiful little city was struck by a flood yesterday.  The water was up to the tops of cars and a river of mud came down the hill.  Several of our branch members live there and a couple of them own lojas (stores) that were hit by the mud.  One of these members is from Equador.  He comes here in the summer for festa (? party but not quite as it lasts all summer long) season.  He and some others play music at night.  When he opened his store others told him he would never make it unless he opened it on Sunday.  But being a very faithful member he kept it closed on Sunday.  These musicians sometimes don't finishwork until 3 or 4 in the morning but still make it to church every week. They call them Lemanitas (lamenites) So the church has mobelized and gathered all the missionaries from the Algarve (our district) to go today and help the members and any others they can.  Gale is there but  I stayed home because we didn't know what we would find.  I will cook a warm meal for our missionaries and any others who could stay with us.  If the situation is anything but shoveling mud I will go with hiim tomorrow. I truly enjoyed the beautiful rain as it turned everything here that was brown a beaiutiful green.  Like Idaho in the spring. But now I am hoping that we don't get any more in Albufeira.

 Just received these photos from Elder Sousa and thought it would be good to add them to the blog
so you could see what it was like and I could remember later.

 The above picture we helped these people who are not members in this store. First we had to pick up all the mucd covered items that were on the floor and we missed apicture of the 15 bags that are to my right. We then shovel about twenty five wheel barresl of mud and hauled it out to the middle of the street.

 The stock from this members store was in this basement and it was total flooded. We hauled all the items out of the there after they pumped the water. then we shoveled buckets of mud for a 5 hours the next day and then we bucketed the rest of the water that they couldnºt pump out. Iºm sure I walked up and down the theses stairs at least 100 times that day.

 These are Items that came out of the basement that were now trash and that was about 1-3 of all we took out.

I didnºt get quite as dirty as Elder Wilson as you can see.