This is a very simple post. Pray for Haiti. The news reports are devastating and the human toll is horrendous. O Lord our God have mercy on those in Haiti. Help them, O Lord, and minister to them by your grace.
The blog of a Cuban who became an Eastern Orthodox priest.
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From everything I’ve seen in the news and on the Web, Port-au-Prince has just taken the equivalent of a Hiroshima-sized nuke without the radiation spill. Last estimate was 50,000 dead, minimum. All hospitals destroyed. Over half the buildings in the city collapsed, and most of the rest broken and threatening to collapse.
All this in the poorest country in the hemisphere, “70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Voudun”, where a flu bug results in mass graves, a continuing disaster area since the French first settled that half of the island for slave plantations. First under slavemasters (where a slave had a five-year life expectancy after purchase, max), then (after their Revolution) dictator after dictator, houngan after houngan, bocor after bocor, loa after loa.
And if you hear any Christian (televangelist, 700 Club, website, or pastor) get all glib and shoot off their mouth about Haiti and Fulfilling End Time Prophecy, punch them in the throat or push them down the nearest flight of stairs.
P.S. First volunteers to get punched in the throat and pushed down the stairs have already surfaced: Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson.
We were watching the first pictures yesterday. Horrible. One of my co-workers has family there and has not been able to reach them. Needless to say, she is terribly upset. My doctor has family in the Dominican Republic–almost as far as you can go on the island from the epicenter. She was driving when it hit and as she put it–“My car was moving even after I stopped and other people’s were as well.” The after shocks were also devastating–over 23 she said. We started praying then. One cannot even begin to imagine–as a nurse, I foresee the possibilities of epidemic disease to come because of the inablilty to handle basic sanitary needs and the bodies of the dead. What little infrastructure they had is destroyed and there are almost no resources in Haiti. Lord Have Mercy.
Thank for gathering these sources together, Father. I always love Headless’s comments on the Imonk blog.
Doesn’t ROCOR have a mission in Haiti?
Yes they do. You can find their website at http://www.orthodoxhaiti.org/.