Earthquake Strikes on First Night

As our first day of Nicaragua drew to a close, I was taking my first cold shower of many for the next 6 months. Sam and Bree were just getting finished working on presentations for service. In the middle of my shower, the power went out, a common occurrence here in Nicaragua. I stuck my head out of the bathroom door to get a flashlight so I could get dressed. That's when the house began to shake.

Like most of you, I've experienced a small earthquake before back home. The dishes start to rattle and then its over. That's how this started. Sam jumped up and yelled (you know how it sounded if you know Sam), "Earthquake!"  Then it went from a tremor to the whole house moving back and forth. That's when I got scared and started looking for a table to get under. I immeadiatley realized that a large sturdy table should be one of our first purchases for the apartment here in Nicaragua. Somewhat frozen, I saw Sam hop over to the entrance and half question he yelped, "Doorway!?!!" We sprinted underneath the doorway, and I put my hand over Bree's head. If the quaking had gone on for any length of time, I don't think that would have helped much. Sam also heroically blew out and a candle we had just lit because of the power outage which surely would have fallen and possibly started a fire. Unfortunately for Sam and Bree, I'd only managed to get my underwear on by the time of the quake. We were able to laugh about that later. Under a minute from the start, it was over.

The doorway we went under. Bree was so tired!

Thankfully it stopped before anything of significance was damaged. The flashlight lantern I had brought into the bathroom broke, and the fridge nearly tipped over, but that was the worst of it for us.

We immediately realized how unprepared we were for a disaster. We hurried to put together a go bag because aftershocks are inevitable. Small earthquakes are quite common in Central America, but any thought that this was a normal event quickly went away. We walked two blocks down the street to check in with one of the elders in the congregation whom Sam had introduced me to earlier in the day. Almost every household was gathered underneath their front door away. The elder and his family were as well anticipating another shock. When I met the elder earlier that day he was joking a lot with us, but at this moment he was quite serious. He told us this is the strongest earthquake he'd ever felt.

We started to hear from our friends in the city. One brother told us that a wall in his house started to split and that his family was going to be sleeping together in the safest area in their house. Erling, another elder in the hall who had recentally suffered a leg injury, had bolted out of his house on his crutches into the street. Zach called told us he was fine after getting under a table.

We are located at about the third ring from the epicenter

We got power back relatively quickly. We heard official word earthquake was a 7.4 magnitude strike! I couldn't believe it considering much less powerful earthquakes have done much more damage like the one in Haiti. We definitely dodged a bullet. We eventually were able to get to sleep since since it's impossible to know when an aftershock will strike.

We certainly are deep in the last days and Jehovah's people aren't immune to the signs of the times. At least now we have a conversation starter for our first days in the ministry here!

UPDATE: We found out the quake officially lasted 12 seconds. To put that in perspective, the Haiti earthquake lasted about 30 seconds and the Japan tsunami quake lasted 2 minutes.