During our visit to Nepal, it was easy to drive through parts of the capital city and forget that an earthquake happened here. But turn a corner and a reminder might loom before us-- a building crumbled to the ground or an empty shell dangling the reminder to all who pass. A five story building might have uprooted and now leaning against its neighbor building. Or-- it might be standing as if unaffected, but a closer look reveals frightening cracks, as if one more small shake might bring it down. People were still living in tents, whether their building stood or not. If it still stood, there was the fear that something might bring it down. The ground still shook almost daily. I was aware of some of the tremors and sometimes I heard about them from others or read in the daily internet news.
Outside the city, whole villages have been destroyed. Houses built from mud and stone went down with the first tremors. Some of them can be rebuilt from the same materials, but in other cases, the ground was left unstable. The people need to move to another place and start life again with nothing. The suffering is impossible to grasp, especially as rainy season is upon the land. The rains make shelter a critical priority and it needs to be more than fabric tents. The rains mean the time of planting -- and those who miss planting also miss reaping. The agricultural cycle is a fact of life in the village-yet the land that the family owned might be gone, or no longer habitable.Please pray for our people in Nepal. Even if they have no personal loss, the suffering is all around them. Allow was able to help as we wired earthquake relief funds to four different areas. Our trusted partners carried food and water, tents and medicines to people that the government agencies seemed to forget. Now we are busy with plans for a new children's home to orphaned and homeless children from one village which was forced to move.
