Local efforts in Haiti

By Taryn Plumb
Turley Publications Reporter

All of a sudden, right around 5 p.m., the earth convulsed.
There was a thunderous roar; the ground shuddered.
One of their party was thrown against a wall. Others scrambled for cover under a bed.
Later, when Grand-Goave, Haiti regained its equilibrium and the missionaries from the Sturbridge Worship Center emerged in the light hazed by dust and debris, they saw rubble, chaos, pain.
Everywhere.
“I'll allow you to imagine the sights and smells, and the sense of uncertainty and panic,” an exhausted Stuart Rankin, who was in Grand Goave along with eight others from the Sturbridge non-denominational church, wrote in a blog post just after the disaster.
Thirty seconds – that's all it took to kill tens of thousands of people, level buildings and cripple an already anguished country.
Nine members of the Sturbridge Worship Center were there Jan. 12, witnessing and experiencing the devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake that rocked and crumbled western portions of Haiti.
None of them were hurt.

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