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RSSLight in the Darkness
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
11/4/2005
It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear... -Amos 5:19
The earthquake in Pakistan is like that for its survivors -- what comes afterward is as dangerous as the quake itself.
You seem to have survived those terrifying seconds -- you don't really know what has happened, but you crawl out of what used to be your house, standing in a gingerly manner because you're not sure you haven't broken something. You brush the heavy dust of rocks from your eyes and your hands, and you look around. Nothing is standing. Not a single structure in the entire village. You realize that this was an earthquake. You survived an earthquake.
The school is no longer standing. You can see the place where it was, but the building is gone. You think you hear a child crying from over there, so you scramble over piles of rock and bricks toward the sound. Some other people have already gathered at the school, and they are tearing frantically through the rubble with their bare hands. Some of them are screaming the names of their children.
This is hell. There is nothing worse than this.
But there is. It is a week later, and it is getting colder. Nobody has any winter clothes, and the nights grow darker and more frigid. There are no wells; water is scarce. There is nothing to eat. People with compound fractures lie on the ground, unable to move, and their untreated wounds fester. Your village was always remote; now, it is almost unreachable.
But after a few days, a truck carrying a team of rescue workers and a load of supplies appears in the distance. Those who can move wave scraps of blankets, rags of shirts, cry out weakly for the visitors to hear them and stop. The truck draws nearer along where the road out of town used to be, and a crowd of haggard children surrounds it right away.
The truck is from Peshawar. The Diocese of Peshawar has sent tents, blankets, bottles and bottles of water, bags of rice and cooking oil and flour, pots to cook in, matches to light the cooking fires. The Mission Hospital has sent a team of medical workers to treat the wounded and make decisions about which of them to transport first. They have flashlights for when darkness comes; it will be the first light in the darkness you will have seen since this happened.
No one has told you that other villages have been wiped out completely. You don't know that more than 79,000 people have died. You don't know what has happened to the roads. You don't know that people from far away are weary of tragedy, that they gave money for their countrymen who had a hurricane and to others who had a tsunami and that your hell is running a distant third to those hells, for no other reason than the fact that they happened first.
But you do get a bottle of water and a tent and a blanket from the truck, and you share your tent and your blanket with two other people that night, the three of you close together under the thick wool, your first night under a roof. The medical team remains behind and the others leave for Peshawar before nightfall. They will return tomorrow with more supplies, more tents and blankets, and more food.
So this must not be hell after all. In hell, nobody cares about your suffering. Nobody comes to find you. But help has come here, to the ruins of your village, heaven-sent.
