The Great Tribulation
God's Protection of the Elect
God saved Missionary and 28 Orphans
in
With Little Warning,
Director Saves 28 Orphans from Tsunami
By John Lancaster
Thursday,
NAVALADY,
Then he
heard the pounding of feet in the corridor outside his room, and his wife burst
through the door, a frantic look on her face.
"The sea is coming!" she said. "Come! Come! Look at the
sea!"
Thanks to
quick thinking, blind luck and an outboard motor that somehow started on the
first pull, the orphans and their caretakers joined the ranks of countless
survivors of the epic earthquake and coastal disaster that so far has claimed
the lives of an estimated 78,000 people in
It is also
the story of their chief rescuer, Sanders, a Sri Lankan-born missionary and
In 1994,
Sanders founded the Samaritan Children's Home in Navalady,
a small fishing village that occupies a narrow peninsula on
With ocean
on one side and a lagoon on the other, the four-acre orphanage was a strikingly
beautiful place, set in a grove of stately palms. The children -- some of whom
had lost their parents in the civil war -- lived four to a room in whitewashed
cottages with red tile roofs, attending school in the village nearby.
Bougainvillea spilled from concrete planters.
"People
used to come and take photographs of the flowers," said Sanders, a
handsome, youthful-looking man who speaks precise idiomatic English and peppers
his conversation with Scripture. "They used to say it looked like
It was a
busy, happy time at the orphanage. On Friday, the children sang, danced and
performed the Nativity scene at their annual Christmas pageant, followed the
next day by Christmas services and dinner for 250 guests, many of them Hindus
from the nearby village. Sanders was so exhausted by his duties as host, he said,
that he went to bed early on Saturday night. He also forgot to check, as he
usually does, on whether the outboard motor had been removed from the orphanage
launch, as it was supposed to be each night as a precaution against theft. It
proved to be the luckiest mistake he ever made.
On Sunday
morning, Sanders said, he rose at his customary hour of
"It
was so calm and so still," he recalled. "The surface of the ocean was
like a sheet of glass. Not a leaf moved." Two young men on his staff
wandered down to the ocean for a swim.
It isn't
clear who saw the wave first. His wife, Kohila, said
she was alerted by one of the orphans, a girl who burst into the kitchen as Kohila was mixing powdered milk for her 3-year-daughter. Kohila ran into the brilliant sunshine and saw the building
sea. Even the color of the water was wrong: It looked, she said, "like
ash."
Kohila ran to tell her
husband, who told her not to panic, he recalled. "I said, ‘Be calm. God is
with us. Nothing will ever harm us without His permission.'”
Wrapped in
a sarong, he ran outside and looked toward the ocean. There on the horizon, he
said, was a "30-foot wall of water," racing toward the wispy Casuarinas
pines that marked the landward side of the beach.
With
barely any time to think, let alone act, he ran toward the lagoon side of the
compound, where the launch with its outboard motor chafed at a pier. By then,
many of the children had heard the commotion and had also run outside, some of
them half dressed. Sanders shouted at the top of his lungs, urging them all
toward the boat.
Desperate,
he asked if anyone had seen his daughter, and a moment later one of the older
girls thrust the toddler into his arms. Sanders heaved her into the boat, along
with the other small children, as the older ones, joined by his wife and the
orphanage staff, clambered aboard on their own. One of his employees yanked on
the starter cord and the engine sputtered instantly to life -- something that Sanders
swears had never happened before.
"Usually you have to pull it four or five times," he said.
Crammed
with more than 30 people, the dangerously overloaded launch roared into the
lagoon at almost precisely the same moment, Sanders said, that the wall of
water overwhelmed the orphanage, swamping its single-story buildings to the
rafters. "It was a thunderous roar,
and black sea," he said.
As the
compound receded behind the boat, Sanders said, he watched in amazement as the
surging current smashed a garage and ejected a brand-new
The
vehicle bobbed briefly on the surface, collided with a palm tree -- the mark of
its impact was clearly visible Wednesday -- then slid over the edge of the
compound in the torrent before slipping beneath the rapidly rising surface of
the lagoon. Another vehicle, a maroon van, was smashed against a palm tree. A
three-wheeled motorized rickshaw parked on the property whirled around as if it
were circling a drain, Kohila Sanders recalled. The orphans' ordeal did not end when their
boat pulled away from the shore.
Not only
was water cascading over the lagoon side of the peninsula, but it also was
pouring in directly from the mouth of the estuary about two miles away. Sanders
feared the converging currents would swamp the small craft. At that point,
Sanders said, he recalled a line from the Book of Isaiah [59:19]: "When the enemy
comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall raise up a standard against
it."
He raised
his hand in the direction of the flood and shouted, "I command you in the
name of Jesus -- stop!" The water then seemed to "stall,
momentarily," he said. "I thought at the time I was imagining
things." With the water pouring into the mouth of the lagoon, he then
began to worry that waves would overtake them from behind, swamping the small
boat. Reasoning that it was better to hit the waves head on, he said, he
ordered the driver to reverse direction and head back toward the open ocean.
But that
maneuver carried its own risks. As it made for the mouth of the lagoon, the
boat was broadsided and nearly capsized by the torrent pouring over the
peninsula. "The children were very frightened," Kohila
Sanders, 30, recalled. "We were praying, 'God help us, God help us.'"
As the
waters began to roll back out to sea, the turbulence subsided. It was then,
Sanders and his wife recalled, that they became aware of the people crying for
help as they bobbed in the water nearby. They were villagers who had been swept
off the peninsula. The passengers rescued one young man, who was "howling
for his missing wife and daughters," Kohila
Sanders said. But they had to leave the rest behind. There wasn't any room.
"People
were crying, 'Help us, help us,'" Kohila said. "Children were crying."
Eventually
the boat made it to the opposite shore, about a mile and a half distant in the
city of
The city
is short of food and water, and on Wednesday afternoon, corpses were being
burned where they had been found at the edge of the lagoon. With more than
2,000 people dead in Batticaloa district, local
officials say they lack the means to dispose of the bodies properly and that
residents are burning them as a precaution against disease.
The scene
at the orphanage was one of utter devastation. The grounds were covered by up
to three feet of sand. Several buildings, including the staff quarters, were
entirely wiped away, and the others were damaged beyond repair. A body burned near the ruined chapel.
Surveying
the wreckage, Sanders broke down and cried. "Twenty years of my life put
in here, and I saw it all disappear in 20 seconds," he said between sobs.
The orphanage had no insurance.
But at
other moments, Sanders was philosophical about his loss. "If there was
anyone who should have got swept away by this tidal wave, it should have been
us," he said. "We were eyeball to eyeball with the wave."
May God bless you
This testimony was shared by Paul Wong with
the ARK
Forum on
congregation in Houston, Texas on January 1, 2005
For comments please write first to: arkpw@sbcglobal.net
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Paul Wong is a Christian minister and the
President of ARK International. |
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