FINALLY!!  AN EMAIL FROM JUSTIN!!

Dear Mom,
I'm fine! I'm doing okay. This week has been pretty crazy! Hurricane Sand hit HARD! We've done some service for some members around here, but nothing serious. We just helped them rake up a bunch of leaves in their yards. As you probably heard, there is a gas shortage here. If your car's license plate ends in an even number, you can only fill up on even days, and the same with odd numbers. There is also a dollar cap you can buy gas. We waited in line for an hour and a half the other day for gas. Many people are telling us that that isn't a very long line either. We could only fill us $40 worth of gas. We're doing good on gas so far. So there are a lot of missionaries that live really close to the coast. President Jeppson evacuated them to other missionary apartments before the storm. We had 8 missionaries with us when the storm came. It came earlier than we thought. It was supposed to hit shore on Tuesday morning, but we were quickly ordered to stay inside on Monday. We got the brute of the storm on Monday afternoon. It honestly wasn't very bad around our apartment. Monday around 5:00pm is when we lost power. When we were finally allowed to leave our apartment on Wednesday at noon, we got to see the damage that Sandy caused. The biggest damage that happened to the Plainfield, Middlesex, and Scotch Plains area was trees. There are (or better said, were) lots of old trees with weak roots. They were very big and fell over everywhere. They fell across roads, blocking off traffic. They fell on houses and tore off parts of houses. They fell on tons of power lines causing power outages almost everywhere. They quickly got to work on fixing all of the damage. Last night at around 9:00pm, we were at the Branch President's house when the power finally came back on for our area. Such a relief! It was so hard to do studies in the morning with little light. Also, Tuesday night, President Jeppson told us that it is unsafe to use indoor candles. We, being obedient missionaries, immediately put out all of our some 50 candles. Sad. We lost a lot of light from that. No flooding around us. I saw a newspaper article from the Daily News last night at a members house. I could not even believe the amount of damage that happened in New York and the Jersey Shore. Most likely, when the gas shortage lets up, President Jeppson will be sending us to the Jersey Shore and maybe even New York to help clean up. One picture I saw of New York, showed almost every home destroyed in many areas. Devastating. I had no idea that a hurricane could be this destructive. It feels almost unreal being part of it. My week this week has consisted of going around and trying to visit all our members and some investigators to see if everyone is okay. Pretty much everyone has food and water. Many are still without power and it's very cold. Gas is sparse. I think it'll start coming back to normal soon in the next few days as the power starts coming back to the area. I also heard that the hurricane has done about $20 billion in damage!!! 18 people have died. It's crazy. Some missionaries still aren't allowed to go back to their apartments because of flooding in some areas and the amount of devastation. I also heard of a snow storm coming in the next couple days. I hope it's mild. I'm okay. We have plenty of food. We have had plenty of food and water. We have power now. It's warm in our house. We have plenty of gas in our car. It's time to start cleaning up. I read a quote somewhere this morning from President Hinckley. I don't know exactly how it went, but it went something like this: There is so much sadness in the world. I don't know what the answer could be but this, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It's true! This event is something that I'll never forget. I'll have a part in this clean up and I'm thankful for that opportunity. I was hardly affected by the storm. Our milk and eggs went bad and now our kitchen stinks from it, but that's about it. So many other people have lost so much. Pray for the people of the tri-state area. 
     President Jeppson let all the zone leaders know last Friday about the storm. The zone leaders texted us and told us that we would not be allowed to leave our house on Tuesday. Gradually we got updated on the storm. Eventually we were told we couldn't leave on Monday. Luckily we had prepared a little bit on Saturday night. I was planning on doing all the preparation on Monday, but the storm ended up coming on Monday afternoon. I remember one missionary opening one window Monday afternoon and hearing the wind blow so hard. You know how if you take a long stick and spin around really fast and you can hear the stick hum through the air?? I know you don't want to think about that too much because you don't want to get dizzy, haha! But the wind from the hurricane was doing that to all the power lines. It was kind of eerie. Another really, REALLY weird thing that happened. On Monday night through Tuesday, there was a really strange kind of lightning... at least I think it was lightning. I've only seen this happen once before and it was at Freedom Academy in a freak storm. It was colored lighting. I never actually saw the lightning itself. But it would light up the sky. Usually it was really close to the ground and over the trees. It would flash green or orange and it would flash for on average 5 seconds. There was one time I saw this "lightning phenomenon" happen for literally one whole minute. For a couple hours, I just sat by the window and watched this happen. It just kept going and going. It was pretty creepy actually. Hurricane Sandy really was a freak storm, especially with this lightning. I should have taken some pictures, but I don't think they would have turned out very well. It reminded me of an alien movie.. Creepy..
     We played a lot of games through the storm. We played scum a lot. I learned a game called Hearts. You should buy a game called Pictionary Man. Lots of fun!
     I knew you would be worried mom, but I was fine the whole time. Thankfully, nothing happened to our apartment. We live close to a forest, and a big tree fell over there, but that was the closest thing that happened. Love you! Miss you! 

-Justin