An Earthquake Strikes

As you probably already know, there was an earthquake registering at 7.8 in Sichuan (about 350 miles away from us) province yesterday.

At the time Tabitha was napping while Jenna and I were just doing some language practice when all of a sudden I could feel a rumbling underneath my chair. I was a bit confused and then the water in the fish tank started swaying backwards and forwards, Jenna shouted "get Tabitha". So I ran into Tabitha's room grabbed her and we started down the stairs. We are on the 12th floor and so there was quite a long way to go down. I wasn't sure if the best thing to do was get under a door frame but we just decided to leg it. We didn't even think that it was an earthquake, we just thought there was maybe some structural problem with our building and it was going to collapse.

We were flying down the stairs. Jenna thought I was going to trip myself up and so grabbed Tabitha from me. Heading down the dark stairwells we were being thrown from side to side as the building swayed. About halfway down a man was trying to make us wait, at this point Jenna was praying in tongues and we both thought that we were going to die. We waited for a few seconds but then decided just to go for it. When we finally got to the ground floor there was clouds of dust plooming out of the side of the building.

It was only when we got to the street that we realized that it was probably an earthquake as people were pouring into the middle of the road from all of the other buildings.

We met the other foreigners from our building outside and from there we started trying to figure out exactly what had happened. We soon started hearing rumors of a major earthquake hitting ChengDu, but didn't really have any details. One of the ladies who lives 3 floors below us was just outside our building when it happened. She said she saw it swaying backwards and forwards, and the road was moving beneath her feet.

We waited in the beaming sunshine for about 3 hours before deciding to head back to Aaron and Lois's second floor apartment for dinner. They were great, they cooked for about a dozen of us on short notice, and while we were allowed to go back into our building last night we decided to stay at Aaron and Lois's.

We have just come back this morning. Everything seems to be fine apart from some cracks in the walls.

The outlook isn't so good in other parts of China, however with over 10,000 feared dead. The Chinese government is doing all it can to reach the worst affected areas but are having to contend with roads blocked by landslides. Our thoughts go out to all those who are more seriously affected than us as well as the authorities as they work around the clock trying to rescue people.