Priesthood in Action

This past weekend I was able to lend a hand with the cleanup efforts of the hurricanes that have passed through the Southern States. While you hear about the cleanup efforts and the involvement of the church in those efforts, it's a totally different perspective to actually participate in it.

Friday I gathered all the supplies I thought I would need. Food, bedding, tent, water, toiletries. I brought everything that I would need to be self-sufficient for a few days. I met up with the rest of the Priesthood from my ward, and we headed down to southern Louisianna. We arrived around 11 o clock at a large Baptist church that had been gutted and was being used as headquarters for this operation and set up tents, and crashed for the night.

We woke up in the morning, got ready, ate breakfast, and gathered for assignments and gathering supplies to help fix roofs, cut trees, and deliver goods to people. We had a total of 1,200 people present and ready to help. The most impressive part to me was how this all came to be organized.

Martin Luther King III called up the local bishop for help last Monday. The bishop in turn sends the call for help up through the lines of the Priesthood. The area authority of the Southern States is the main go-to guy with all the relief and cleanup. Elder Anderson calls up the Stake Presidents, who in turn call the Bishops and Branch Presidents, and arranges for the supplies to be in place for us to use. The Bishops and Branch Presidents call their Elder's Quorum Presidents and High Priest Group Leaders. They call the Priesthood members of their quorums and get the word out on when and where. 1,200 people answered this call. This was all arranged in less than a span of five days, excluding the one day a week when all are present at once on Sunday.

This is just amazing to me. The scary part is that this was a small effort compared to the immediate response after the hurricanes of a force of 7,500 Priesthood members. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints already has the infostructure in place to react to any disaster with an immediate response. These Priesthood members know exactly who they need to report to and who they need to tell to get things rolling quickly. Very few organizations in the world can produce this type of response in an organized fashion as the LDS church can. Perhaps even more spectacular is that this is in the South, where Mormons certainly are a minority, yet on a given weekend, we can produce 1,200 people in a town to help out with relief.

This is not to say we didn't have help. Many local churches helped out as well by providing us the information of those who needed help, facilities to camp and store supplies, and local knowledge in general to help us out.

Our bishop picked up our orders for the day. Again, the pattern is in place, and everybody is already divided into groups by virtue of the Priesthood and their wards. We grabbed an order that involved cutting down some of the more difficult trees to cut down. We have two people who are basically professionals at dropping difficult trees, and have it down to an art form. We had a little over 20 people from our ward. We headed to our first destination. It was a Baptist church that had some leaks in the roof, pretty steep. Here we met a local Catholic Priest who knew the area well, and was our guide on where to go. You can't really have 20+ people patching one roof, so we divided into a couple of groups. One to do roofing, and another to take care of trees. I was on roofing crew.

From the church, we headed to several more roofs that had leaks. We patched those up, nothing really too bad. Basically, we had some large tarps, cover the leaks as best as possible, then nail down boards to hold the tarps on. Not great for roofs, since the nails will create holes, but since all these roofs have to be replaced anyway, we're just doing a temporary fix for them. One place, they had a tree that needed to be removed, as it had fallen over. Fortunately, it wasn't on the house or in another akward spot. Although since my crew wasn't as chainsaw savy as the other crew, we did get it stuck, and needed the other group to help us out breifly. They finished up that job, as we went to grab lunch. The church we fixed, prepared a great lunch of red beans and rice and sausage for us. So finished that, then back out to get some more roofs. First on our list was an old gentleman who lived alonge, and had had two strokes. This roof was in pretty bad shape. We covered it all except for the carport. Not quite as steep, and at this point was starting to get a handle of walking decently on roofs. Headed off to do another roof. This one a little steeper, but only needed one large tarp. Little more comfortable on this roof, but had other buildings nearby to jump onto if you started sliding at all. Especially wearing tennis shoes. The lady said there was a second leak on the other side of the house, but all the shingles looked good. We deduced that the wind pushed it underneith the ledge and it got in that way. We were running low on slats of wood to nail the tarps down, so we were trying to be as conservative as possible with what we were laying down.

A lady on the street asked if we could come help her, since a tree had fallen on her house. We headed down to look at it. She had several large cedar trees in her yard. One had fallen onto the house. We originally thought to just pull it off, but didn't have any chains or ropes to pull, so we decided to cut it down as we could. We climbed up on the roof and removed all of the small limbs and debree from the roof. Spent quite a bit of time doing that. Found out that the tree had caught on a pipe. Had we tried pulling that tree down, we would have ripped a huge hole in the roof. We cut it down to that pipe and the tree fell the rest of the way on its own. We cut that whole tree apart and moved it all to the side of the road. Nice smell. A couple of the guys cut off some circular pieces of cedar for keepsakes. There's really a lot of good wood going to waste down there that'll probably just be trashed. I think we went and did another roof after that.

We left to join the other crew, as they had a huge job going on where they were at. Four large trees had fallen on one house. It was in bad shape. We got there in time to see them working on the last two largest trees. The back portion of the roof had caved in, and the diameter of one of those trees was the largest that our experienced tree cutting people had ever worked on. These pieces couldn't be moved by people, so we had to chain the pieces up to a truck and drag them out of there to the front. As he was cutting one of these large pieces down, it happened to land on a can of purple paint. That exploded and spewed paint all over one of the local members who was helping us. We finally got things more or less cleaned up in that area. If I remember right, that was the last of the work we were able to do on Saturday.

The Catholic Priest invited us to the Catholic Student Center to shower and watch the Alabama-Georgia game. So we went to grab clean clothes, headed over there, ate dinner, watched Alabama cream Georgia, and shower. We needed it. When you can smell yourself, you know it's bad. Headed back to camp after the game and crashed.

Up at 6:30 in the morning and ready for another day. Met at 7:00 for sacrament, with the local bishop conducting and Elder Anderson presiding. Most of us were in work clothes, only about 6 in white shirts and ties.

After the sacrament, headed out for tackle some more trees. The first place had about four large trees that needed to come down. We didn't need to transport the wood, so it was just cutting, that effectively eliminated most of us from doing anything. One part of our group went to do more roofing. The rest of us hung around till we were called on to hang on a rope to pull a tree down. Afterwards, headed to one more house. We only had an hour left and a large tree with plenty of branches, so I figured we needed to hurry as fast as possible, so I went into work mode rather quickly. One of the guys with a chainsaw in front on me cutting them, I'd grab it to make room and toss it over my shoulder. We're talking fairly large branches. I don't think everyone else apprieciated having large branches tossed at them, but they'll get over it. They more or less just made fun of me for it. One guy asking if I'd ever been part of a demo crew with as much damage as I was doing to this stuff ripping and yanking it all out and apart. Good thing they never handed me a chainsaw. Finished that yard and headed back to pack up camp and head home.

All in all a good experience. It's nice to see the Priesthood in action and fulfilling those responsibilities. Actually doing it has made me see what this side of the church is more about. Often, within our own wards we don't see all that does happen within the church.