Street Stories - A Ringside Seat To Over 4 Decades Of Taking Jesus To The Streets Of The World

had boxes of Bahasa Bibles to give away to people we ministered to.

After a long journey along winding roads, many of them damaged by the earthquake with very large cracks in the road, we arrived in the Pariaman area. We got out of our vehicles and approached a large group of what appeared to be soldiers. We, too, were dressed in camouflage attire and we had disaster relief ID lanyards around our necks. Bill and I were wearing dog tags we had been given during a disaster relief outreach we had done in Galveston, Texas during Hurricane Ike. I think the group of military workers assumed we were military personnel too. The group was military from Australia. They had a large earth moving machine that they were using to dig through the rubble in search of bodies. The captain told us the day of the earthquake there had been three weddings in the area. When the earthquake hit, hundreds of people were buried under the landslide caused by the earthquake. About a dozen local men were digging with hand shovels, hoping to recover the bodies of lost loved ones. The scene before us was heartbreaking. During the calamity, our team began to hand out food packets, medical supplies and Bibles to local residents who were displaced. Most of the homes in the area had suffered extensive damage and people were sleeping on the ground and under tarps because they were too afraid to go back into their homes and buildings.

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