The morning after the Cyclone cleared, a handful of church members thought to check on the church and arrived at roughly the same time. What they encountered was worse than they expected. The flooding was extensive, up the knees in places it flooded the church’s kid’s ministry rooms, containers that are used for on-site storage, and the pump shed (short-circuiting the two pumps used to provide on-site water). We would later discover that the flood waters around the church were badly contaminated, this was due to animal feces and the flooding of the church septic tank. This contamination meant that the water stored in our belowground water tank had also been contaminated, and all deposited silt was likely contaminated. Contaminated water was the reason why we needed extensive onsite water treatment. While contaminated silt was the reason why the church offices were later deemed uninhabitable, and why the ministry center kitchen needed to be gutted to clean the silt from under its floor. If that wasn’t enough, the flooding also caused power surges that killed the electronics within the church’s gas heaters, urns etc.
As we couldn’t do anything until the waters subsided, those church members joined many others to begin checking on church members to ensure they were ok, beginning with the most vulnerable first. Within two days, we had managed to make contact with most of the most vulnerable members of church, alongside many others.
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You can support our ‘Build Back Better’ project by sending donations to:
Account Name: Village Baptist Church
Account Number: 03-0642-0737741-01
Just add ‘Building’ in the particulars, alongside your tithe number (if you have one) as the reference.
