Earth Quakes, Mountains Tremble

There are a lot of people saying a lot of amazing things about what we accomplished on the coast. It looks pretty impressive.

There are a lot of stories about how horrible and how difficult it was down there.

There are people literally calling me a hero, and, well, I’m really so very far from it.

So I am hoping that this will give the right perspective and not a glorified version of events that makes you think I did things that I never actually did.

At 6:58pm on Saturday, April 16^th, I was standing in a supermarket with two friends. We were grabbing a few groceries to make dinner together and spend an evening eating and watching movies. As we stood in the check-out line with ground beef and ice cream sandwiches in hand, I started to feel something.

Now, for some reason I have a sixth sense about earthquakes. I can feel even the small ones. I looked around and no one seemed to notice, too busy talking among themselves and trying to get through the crowded check-out. “Temblor [earthquake]!” I said to my friend Jen.

“Stop it!” she replied, thinking I was joking around as usual.

“Temblor!” I said louder. People turned and started to stare.

“Stop trying to freak people out!” said Jen, when suddenly the earthquake got a little stronger, and people stopped what they were doing.

It wasn’t that the quake was particularly strong. It may have been a little stronger than the other 4 or so earthquakes I have felt since I moved back to Ecuador in August. It’s just that this one was long.

Very long.

And how did people react? They took out their cell phones and started filming the signs swaying from the ceilings. We all smiled and laughed together. There’s something about experiencing something like that with strangers that makes you forget that you don’t know each other. You talk to people you would normally walk past. You joke and laugh with the person next to you in line. Then, you move on.

As we paid for our food and walked out of the store we joked about the people on their cell phones. We laughed about not even trying to leave the store. We shared a pack of Skittles and went to an optometrist and laughed about the earthquake with him too. Life just went on.

But what I didn’t know was that while we moved on there were literally hundreds of people already dead from that earthquake. And hundreds more trapped in stores, hotel rooms, homes, and their work, walls collapsed in around them. There were people whose entire lives were lost in that minute or so of shaking.

When we got to Jen’s house we started reading the news, and the reality of what happened still didn’t really hit us. It was more something interesting to read, but certainly didn’t feel real to me. We watched as the death toll started to rise. We watched as pictures started to be posted of fallen buildings and overpasses. And then we all went to sleep.

Sunday morning it started to feel different. Ecuador was declared to be in a state of emergency and all public meetings were cancelled (including church). I started posting on Facebook to keep people informed. To let people know I was okay. And then someone commented on something of mine.

“What can we do?” was the question. I thought about it. What can people do in North America? Not much really. Be in prayer. Consider making a donation.

And then someone asked me, “But Robbie, what more can you do besides pray?”

That was the moment I knew that God was going to make this very real to me. That was the moment that I knew I was about to be going to the coast. That was the moment the earthquake was no longer an interesting news update, but suddenly a real event.

So I looked for a way to get to the coast. And after a few options presented themselves it turned out that my own mission (Extreme Response) was planning to go down and do whatever we could to help. Our work was going to focus in places we had connections, and this ended up including a church in Porto Viejo, a church in Manta, and a church in a tiny little town called Pacocha.

The news reports were flying in about how horrible everything was. Several friends were writing me to warn me that the police were not letting people down to the coast. That there was an outbreak of Dengue. That there were bodies lining the streets and volunteers were entering a state of shock upon arrival.

We were told to pack one change of clothes and to bring all the food we would need for 5 days on the coast. We were going to hopefully be involved in helping get people out of buildings. We were going to sleep on the cement floor of a church. We were going to be heroes!

And I really didn’t want to go anymore.

But when you’ve tried running away from God’s plan in the past, you know how futile it is to try it again.

Wednesday morning at 4am we were in the office, ready to go. We prayed together and loaded ourselves into the cars.

As you drive from Quito to the coast you get to see a lot of changes happen. Quito at 4 in the morning is cold and dark. At nine and a half thousand feet above sea level you forget you’re in a tropical country. About two hours from Quito you are in tropical cloud forest. Still cool, but lush and green. As you get a little lower the heat and humidity start to hit. It doesn’t matter if it’s night or day, you suddenly find that your sweater is coming off and the window is opening up.

We all had our eyes peeled for damage from the earthquake. At first I was pointing out everything and blaming the 7.8 beast for it.

“Did you see that tree! The earthquake knocked it over!”

“No, Robbie. It was clearly cut down.”

“But did you see that house? It was all broken up!”

“No, Robbie. It was abandoned and covered in vines…”

But after we passed Santo Domingo we started to see things for real.

First it was landslides. And I’m not talking about one or two. I’m talking about dozens on the road and countless more on the green tree-covered hills of the northern coastal jungle. Huge swathes of red earth were exposed making the landscape look like a bad piece of Christmas-themed modern art.

Then we started to see cracks in the road. Most of them no big deal. Some of them dangerous to drive over.

One of the road we came across later in the trip.

Next were the damaged houses. Oddly enough, most of the poorer communities with wooden houses on stilts were totally fine. It was the houses built with red bricks that had fallen over or had walls missing.

By the time we were pulling in to Porto Viejo around midday, the smell hit us. Maybe you don’t know the smell, but when I was a kid (or teenager….because I’m a dork), I would ask for scrap meat at the grocery store so that I could make it rot and try to attract Turkey Vultures. This was the same smell. It was something that used to be living that was now going bad in the hot sun.

Many of the large buildings in the city center looked like this. No chance of finding survivors anymore

We dropped off our stuff and asked how we could get to work. Our first project was helping get stuff out of a house that collapsed down the street. We all grabbed our tools and headed out to rip that thing apart. Well, four stories of a cement house that has collapsed into four levels of solid cement and rebar isn’t exactly something some sledge hammers make much of a dent on.

The family who lived in this house were all home when the earthquake happened. A mother and father and their adult daughter and son. I spoke with the daughter who was there helping us pull things apart. She had cuts all over her face and a bruise the size of Canada on her thigh. She told me that only a short time into the earthquake the entire house fell down on her. She could speak with both of her parents through the rubble, but her brother, who had been in the shower at the time, wasn’t making a peep.

And then a miraculous thing happened. Within 20 minutes she was out of the house, followed by both of her parents and lastly her brother, who had been knocked unconscious, but was still fine. Looking at that house it was hard to imagine that anyone would have gotten out of there alive.

“I’m so sorry that you lost your house.” Was all I could say.

A huge smile came across her face and she almost sounded like she was talking about getting to go on a cruise as she said to me, “I’m not! I’m so happy to be alive! God is so good!

And so the rest of the afternoon we barely made a dent on cleaning up that house. The only furniture recovered was a few plates and the drawers from a dresser that was totally broken. I got heat stroke (yes, on day one). And the whole time this family was in there with us helping however they could. The elderly parents were bringing us water and asking us how we were doing. And in the midst of the destruction, there I was, being blessed by this family as I failed so miserably to help bless them.

This was how the days went on. There were so many local volunteers I often wondered why I was even there. We would sometimes send 5 or more people just to drop off a few bottles of water or hand out 20 bags of food.

Handing out food was chaos. People would swarm as soon as they saw you open the car.

I would speak with people and find that I had so little to say to them, and I often walked away feeling like they had been sent to encourage me.

We helped stack endless bottles of water and endless diapers, and endless boxes of food. But there were often so many people forming the passing lines I wondered if we were just getting in the way more than we were helping.

Donations this size were coming in several times a day.

We helped make food bags, and had to push our way into the assembly line because so many people were there trying to help.

I was tired. I was hot. I was dirty. I had scrapes and bruises. I wasn’t sleeping well.

And at the end of it all I looked at myself in a mirror and realized that I was so far from being the hero I thought I was going to get to be. I had accomplished so little of what I set out to accomplish. I ate more food in those 5 days (mostly tuna) than I eat when I am comfortable at home in Quito!

This is because from the beginning I wasn’t being sent to save anyone. No. I was being sent to see that the people who were going through this suffering are just like me. Their hearts are huge. Their hands are open. Their faith is real.

God was so deep in this. It’s hard to explain. We never saw a single dead body (which every report insisted were everywhere). I never felt like I was in a dangerous situation (even when the 6.2 aftershock hit on Thursday night). I never felt like I was being emotionally or mentally traumatized (I felt great comfort from God). I was never bitten by a mosquito (even though dengue was supposedly everywhere).

I just became so aware of how huge this thing was, and how little any of us were able to do to help in it. I became aware that I complain. A lot. About stupid dumb things like the heat rash that broke out on my hands or the cut on my knee.

Most importantly, I became aware that it doesn’t matter how little we were able to go and do. It mostly matters that we went and did. Whatever we could. Because standing alongside brothers and sisters in Christ and facing the reality of this disaster together was where the real work was happening. It was holy and it was sacred. And it proved that our God is good.