Dear Mom,

I'm not getting transferred. My companion and I are both staying. I'm happy to be staying here. There's a good amount of work that I can do here. I really do love the members here. Even if they aren't the most productive. 

We do have a place that we're going to go for Thanksgiving. It's the Pleitez family. She's divorced. She has three daugthers. One I don't know about. One has been sealed in the temple with a RM. The other is 20 years old and wants to go to BYU-I in January. They're pretty cool. I'm excited for Thanksgiving. 

That's always an uneasy thing to hear about missionaries. It's very real. I heard a story from a missionary here who got held up at gunpoint in Newark. The guy who did it was very high on drugs when he did it. By some miracle, the guy let him go. Safety also comes in obedience to the commandments and the mission rules. That's one reason why I'm so careful to obey the mission standards, because it brings safety, protection, and blessings. 

We gave more service this last weekend. We actually had a lot more to do this weekend, so we were ordered from President Jeppson to keep Saturday and Sunday cleared for service. We went to the same place as last week: Union Beach. We found a new street that needed a lot of help. I'm going to send some pictures in the mail this week. Everywhere is littered with garbage and stuff from people's houses that got flooded. Some houses were flooded with 8 or 9 feet of water depending on the area! Others only had a few inches, but the crawl space with insulation and wires were completely destroyed. Some yards had roofs in them! And the roofs were from houses that were down the block! Absolutely amazing the amount of damage and destruction. I heard a statistic that this is the worst disaster in the United States only second to Katrina! Wow! And I was in the middle of it. It's a weird feeling to be a part of it. I actually have a crazy story from the service. We were walking down the street looking for people to help. This guy said that he could use some help. This other Elder and I said yes. We ended up going into this guy's crawl space that was only two feet high. Our job was to take out all the soaking wet insulation. A small part of insulation feels like it weighs about 10 lbs. We got soaking wet and it was so dark in there. My knees hurt after.

Well, I don't have any time left. I'll write more next week. Sorry I couldn't answer the questions. I'll talk more next week.

-Elder Gajewsky