Keep Your Ax Sharpened: Twisters and Transfers

Dear all,

A really dramatic picture of me dressed like a WWII soldier.

I regret promising to send a more interesting email this week, because this week got REALLY exciting. If you hadn't heard, Ottawa got hit by a pretty serious tornado on Friday night. We didn't get hit too hard, since we're pretty close to Downtown, but the far west side of the city pretty much got destroyed, and a lot of other areas lost power. Our building lost power for about a day, and that was as serious as we got.

Elder Burton and I got the call from the Zone Leaders telling us to go on lock-down while we were downtown. So we struggled through the storm and the traffic to make it to the church building right next to our apartment building to wait out the storm. We spent a few hours there, and lost power after a while. Once the storm had calmed down it was about 7 pm, and we headed back to our apartment to eat some dinner. When we got there though, we realized we had no power and couldn't make any food, so we drove downtown (which still had power) so we could eat at Subway.

Our tornado selfie.

Me after our midnight trek across Ottawa.

We decided to spend the night in our dead apartment, and that went pretty well until about 2:30 am when our carbon monoxide detector went off. Elder Burton and I, with our sleep-deprived brains, decided that the best course of action would be to ditch our apartment and head to the Dow's Lake Elders' apartment (which is currently uninhabited) downtown. After a quick text to the Zone Leaders, we drove across a totally dark and deserted Ottawa, and spent the rest of our night there. Our power came back later the next day, so we went back home that evening.

Yesterday, all the missionaries in Ottawa headed out to Dunrobin, a little suburb way to the west of the city, to help out with cleanup. They got hit the hardest, and most of the houses were missing roofs, or walls, or were totally destroyed. It's kind of weird to help people pick up their broken house, but it was really nice to help out and do some manual labor.

Us helping out in Dunrobin after the tornado 9/22/2018

The beautiful sunset that followed the storm.

In other news, transfer calls came. I'm going back to downtown Montreal to be in the English-speaking Montreal ward. It's pretty much the same area as I was in with Elder Tsai and Elder Furness, I'll just be speaking English instead of Chinese. I'm definitely excited to go back to Montreal, but I'll miss the laid-back feeling of living in a smaller city. It should be pretty fun when all is said and done, though.