Tornado Hits Small Town of Mena, AR

I’ve been out for a while.  Thursday, April 9th, 2009 was a day like all others, the kids colored Easter eggs in preparation for Easter..I cut out some of the items for their Easter outfits.

We planned for Easter dinner and Holy Thursday mass that evening.  The kids were serving the mass..so they were excited.

Thunderstorms came rumbling in, but they are common for this area…even the tornado watch they issued for us wasn’t uncommon…it’s April in Arkansas..the weather is just weird that way.

We went on to church…it was truly divine intervention on the dear Lord’s part!  We had everyone safely in the basement of our church when the tornado struck.  Praising Jesus for our safety was an understatement!

When we emerged from the basement, our little hometown looked like a war zone.  We were unable to even get to our cars, so we had to take the kids and walk the 3 blocks to our little house…it took 35 minutes…only to find that our house and garage/sewing room had been totally destroyed.  In the stroke of about 15 minutes…hundreds of families were left either homeless or with badly damaged homes.  We were homeless.  We gathered a few things we could in the dark and continued to walk another 12 blocks to my mother in laws home.

Our kids were terrified…so were we….daylight the next morning brought pain, tears and anguish..but also a small ray of hope.  All of our pets had survived the storm unscathed…not a scratch on them.

We found that the house, while totaled..was still standing enough for us to salvage some things….and the work began.

Now, 2 weeks later, we haven’t found a home, my sewing business is down indefinitely, we are still living with my M-I-L, and the kids are as stressed and upset as we are.

We have had so much help from friends and parts of our families…it is sad that it takes something so devastating to show you just how much some of your family and friends care about you and how little others do.

I am without Internet access on a regular basis for now…I am able to get on a few times a week to check email and such…I’ll try to update as I can on our home situation and such.

You can see pictures of our little town here:

http://photo.accuweather.com/photogallery/content/PhotoDetails.aspx?pid=76557&pfrom=us

The above link is the best I found at the moment…the tree they are showing was not too far from my house…it was really spooky and sad to drive by that tree and see all that metal tangled and twisted in it.  They just got it all out in the last few days.  Our little town will never look the same in my lifetime.

http://www.talewins.com/arkansas/tornadodamage.htm

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1638984/tornado_slams_mena_arkansas_fires_assault.html

http://www.city-data.com/forum/arkansas/232432-pictures-arkansas-18.html