China earthquake

This from one of Dave's students when he was a youth pastor in Texas. He is a "English" teacher in China otherwise known as a missionary. So many thousand of people have died. Pray for these hurting people.


China Update
Earthquake
As many of you have already heard, China has had its largest earthquake in hundreds of years, a 7.5 to 7.8, and it was only about 100 miles from where I live, in Chengdu. It happened this afternoon around 3:00pm while I was with some friends at a tutoring center. We were on the sixth floor and the whole building was swaying back and forth. We all got to a safe place within the room and the shaking continued. This was my first earthquake and it was quite scary. The building was shaking dramatically and we could see the bookshelf's rocking back and forth, after about a minute we decided to leave the building. We all rushed down the stairs and out on the streets to join millions of other Chinese that were evacuating the buildings. Shortly afterwards everything was at a standstill. Traffic had stopped, there was crowds of people on the street. Yet, it seemed as though now one was hurt. There were a few tiles that had fallen off the buildings and smashed on the concrete, but other than that there was no apparent damage. After we calmed down a bit, we decided it would be best to walk home. It was a few mile walk and there were people everywhere, but now cars were running again and things were slowly getting back to normal. We got back to were I am living and reconnected with other friends. We all gathered around the swimming pool which is the largest place around. We waited for an hour or two and then returned to our house to see the damages. We live on the fifth and sixth floor, which is the top of the building. Mostly what happened was that our bookshelves in our office fell down and the tv fell from the shelf in the living room. Oh yah, and the ceiling in my bathroom fell in, along with all the bricks from a chimney that ran up the whole of the building, but other than that everything was fine. We went ahead and took precautions, so we got food, water, and other necessities (computer) and took them back down to the pool. We had a little picnic at the pool with some other foreigners and waited for news. Finally around 7:30 we were allowed to return to our homes. We came back, cleaned up, and ate dinner. As I am typing, I have already felt two very small aftershocks and it is likely we will be feeling those for about 24hrs. Praise the Lord that we are all safe!

Please pray for the following:

About 45 minutes west from us there was a city that was more affected and there are reports of possibly 900 students being trapped in a collapsed school building. Please be praying for the authorities to be able to get them out of there safely.

There are already reports of about 117 deaths in our province, please be praying that the family's of the victims will find peace.

We were supposed to be on a train tonight, but we decided to stay home. We have some friends visiting and this will affect their travel plans. Please pray that we will have wisdom on the next step for their travels.

Pray for our safety and peace of mind as we experience these aftershocks.


Thank you all for your prayers.

In service to others,
Joshua Barnard
IDEAS Associate
Sichuan Project Manager
www.joshuabarnard.net
www.ideasworld.org