A Letter from Matthew -
Tsunami Experience
Sunday March 13,
9:47am, Ebeye, MI
Good afternoon Dad and Mom,
I would of written back yesterday but I was exhausted. It's been a long 24 hours. That being said, I'm doing great and we are getting a lot of work done at the kingdom hall. We now have 5 of the 10 massive columns erected for the Kingdom hall.
I've personally never worked on any construction project like this. The amount of steel going into this building is impressive. There are 35 vertical pieces of #8 re-bar in each column. These 1" bars are sitting on two giants steel mats that are 8'x 8' of #8 bars also. Up until yesterday it has been taking us 2 days to prep just one of these columns. Yesterday on short rest because of the tsunami scare, we prepped one column in just 4 hours! We then poured the footing and pier (6 yds of concrete) around it in the afternoon. It was amazing to see all that work done in one day but needless to say we were spent.
The tsunami scare was an event in itself. We received a call from the Guam branch moments after the quake around 6:30 pm our time (3:30 in Japan ) alerting us to the potential danger ahead. I turned on the TV using my computer and we watched the news. There was no report of an earthquake or tsunami. 15 minutes we watched until the first report came on the news. We are part of an amazing organization. We were alerted and had an emergency plan in place throughout Micronesia before the first news report! Then we waited and watched. There were about 15 of the family watching the news in my room for the next four hours. We watched, and we waited. We knew if Guam or Saipan got hit by a tsunami that we would be in big trouble. Everyone was very calm and we actually really enjoyed the evening together. At 10:45pm our tsunami arrival time came and went without incident. We thought we were in the clear. I went to bed around 11:20. 15 minutes later we received a call from the branch urging that we take safety. There had been reports of a five foot tsunami on an Wake Island. Five feet doesn't sound like much, but when you live on an island three feet above see level a five foot wave could do a lot of damage to us here in Ebeye. Moments later the local police were driving around alerting the island that a six foot tsunami was potentially headed are way. We all evacuated to higher ground. This is the time that I spoke with you and mom. We were at the second floor close to 1:00 in the morning when we received a call from the branch telling us that we were no longer in danger. All in all and eventful past 24 hours wouldn't you say?
So exhausted and emotionally spent we all showed up for work at 7am. We proceeded to have the hardest day of work in the hottest conditions I've felt yet.
And at the end of the day, a tremendous amount of work accomplished, and a real sense of closeness with the group and congregation. Smiling faces on all the exhausted brothers and sisters. To me, this is just another example of Jehovah's invigorating power. Pretty cool stuff!
