Prayers for Dominican Republic
ADDED 31 Oct 0900PST: from the Associate Press, “Floodwaters and mudslides spawned by Tropical Storm Noel killed at least 48 people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, officials said Wednesday, raising the death toll as the storm’s center spun slowly across Cuba and toward Florida…In the Dominican Republic, almost 12,000 people were driven from their homes and nearly 3,000 homes were destroyed, while collapsed bridges and swollen rivers have isolated 36 towns, said Dominican emergency services spokesman Luis Luna Paulino…Red Cross volunteers said a 3-year-old boy drowned as his family tried to rescue him from a raging river in the vicinity of Duvivier…thousands slogged through waist-high water that turned streets into brown rivers, carrying their last remaining possessions as they fled drenched shacks and makeshift homes. Refugees were brought by the truckload to the dense seaside slum of Cite Soleil, where they were packed into two schools and given food by volunteers.”
Received moments ago (30 Oct 1400PST) from my Amish friends Troy and Genie who are working with orphans in the hills just east of Haiti.
Woke up at 3AM, people screaming.
Houses crushed, dead people in the rivers.
Children trapped on sandbars thousands of feet from the shore, the rivers rising, encircling them.
Friends and neighbors wandering around homeless, dead looks in their eyes, teeth and bones chattering, carrying all they own on their heads.
Grown men in their underwear, breaking into boarded-up houses with hammers because they have nowhere to take their families.
The farmer’s wives crying, their life-savings they invested in their crops and animals lost because the fields are all lakes.
The streets are rivers.
Power lines down.If the internet works to send this message to you it’ll be a miracle.
We’ve never seen disaster on this scale.
The rain is still falling.
