more cleaning up

I have spent a couple more days this week helping clean up after the floods in Brisbane - this time in Fairfield at my school friends parent's house.  They live right on the river, and they were pretty badly flooded.

Starting to clean out the pool with buckets of mud.

We had to stir up the mud from the bottom of the pool so it would go up the pump.  I was convinced I could see creatures moving in the water and had visions of swamp monsters and bull sharks lurking in the water - so when a tiny silver fish leapt into my boot I let out an almighty screech totally overdramatising the event.  There were little fish, frogs, lizards, prawns and cane toads all swimming around in the mud in that pool.  It was eventually all pumped out and clean.

 Digging out the garden

The river still in the backyard

Child labour - they were in charge of cleaning up the vegie garden

but soon came to shovel mud

Also we got to use a fire hose.  Those things are mighty heavy - no wonder firemen are buffed.  Not that I have ever noticed that much....

It will take a long time before their house is back to normal and liveable.  I hope we can keep supporting them, and others in Brisbane whose lives will never be the same again.

Also - check out these pictures from the ABC website - they are amazing.

clean up time

The waters have subsided in Brisbane and the brown slick mud trail remains like the calling card of a giant watery snail.  As people try to understand and pick up the pieces I went out yesterday and started helping with the clean up - with thousands of others in Brisbane - so many that the roads were jammed obstructing the trucks from the army and the council.  Our church organised teams, provided child care for people who wanted to go and help and became a 'control central'.  We may have even needed a big map of Brisbane with little cars on it being pushed around with long sticks.

It is hard to explain feelings at the moment - a kind of 'survivor guilt' that our house is completely fine and I am doing routine things like the washing and having people over for dinner - a slight nausea that I think is from accidentally swallowing some river mud yesterday - a deep compassion for the people who have lost houses and lives - an admiration for our leaders Anna Bligh and Campbell Newman as they steer our state through a disaster.  I keep walking around our house making inventories - "I would keep that, I could lose that, I could buy some more of that, I would be sad if that went" - but you don't often get to make those choices in a flood or a fire.

Yesterday I helped two families at Karalee whose houses were underwater.  Someone described today as being like the houses were in a slow cooker, and everything was just falling off like meat off the bone.  It is a good description.  I was shovelling stuff out of one man's house and I couldn't even tell what it was - CDs, books, clothes, papers, bits of chipboard - it was all covered in brown mud and slime.  In the second house I helped at the water came up to his second floor window - so we packed up a lot of the higher stuff to take to his daughter's house and ripped up his carpets.  He told me the story of how he had to swim his horses out as the flood waters rose, and he pointed out the horses standing nervously in a higher paddock watching all the activity in the street.

It makes you wonder again about suffering.  If God is good why do bad things happen?  There are no easy answers at all.  It is a creation groaning and crying.  It is a world screaming and sobbing.  What I do know is that 'the Lord is King, He's gonna look after everything, every single thing' - and I can't see the bigger picture.  We talked about Job this morning - a man who lost everything but refused to curse God.  He chose to praise.  I hope we can show love and praise as well.

Cleaning up at Karalee

 My newly purchased gumboots came in handy

 The pile out the front of the house

flooding

Queensland is flooded.  Queensland is quite big - so that is a lot of water.  It has been raining and raining for a long time but not quite forty days.

Our house is fine.  Our suburb is fine.  But there are terrible pictures of the suburbs by the river getting swallowed up in water.  And people being lost to the water.

I went to Woolies today to grab a some dinner things - total panic buying.  There was no milk, no bread, no eggs, no bottled water - and this is in our suburb where there is no flooding.

I feel like I should do something.  But I think there will be lots of cleaning up to help with. 

Our library puppet shows have been cancelled this week - they are advising against unnecessary travel around Brisbane.

Lots of flooding.  Lots of news and media about flooding.

This afternoon I saw a rainbow and remembered a promise.

It will be okay.