At 3:24 in the morning on April 17, 2016, I sat in the dark and posted to Facebook — a habit from a season when Facebook was still where missionary friends and family members held vigil together — and I wrote one sentence I am still trying to learn from.
Praying for our sweet Ecuador tonight as they face the difficulties from this earthquake. So far, reports from our valley are of superficial damage only. We have yet to hear about the ministry center or our house.
Twenty-six words. Two of them — superficial damages — would turn out to be true. We have yet to hear what would turn out to be the truer line.
The earthquake had hit at 6:58 PM the evening before — a 7.8 magnitude rupture off the coast of Manabí that would, by the time the counting stopped, take more than six hundred and fifty lives. Bobby and I had both been in Southern California when it happened, speaking at separate engagements that weekend. From somewhere in that night, he had texted a single line at the bottom of an unrelated thread, in the small voice the news travels in when it has nowhere else to go yet. Quito had a nasty earthquake this afternoon. Everyone is safe, but some of our buildings took a beating. I’ll know more tomorrow.
I have thought about that sentence often since. Not because it was heroic — it was logistical, mostly, the way most of the next month was logistical. But because tomorrow was the only available word, we sent it anyway.
* * *
By the next afternoon, I could update the status. The ministry center was fine. Our house was fine. Please keep praying for the many, many churches and families who cannot say the same.
That second sentence is the one I have spent the better part of a decade trying to understand.
Christians say things like God is so good in moments like that one, and what we usually mean is we were spared. I understand the impulse. I have made that statement myself in seasons when there was nothing else available to say. But the longer I have done this work — the longer I have sat with parents and pastors and children for whom God was just as much theirs, and the building still came down — the less willing I have been to wrap a theological bow around the difference between my outcome and theirs.
We were fine. Pedernales was not fine. Manabí was not fine. The death toll, which would stop above six hundred and fifty, was that first night an unknown number that climbed every hour we refreshed the news. Both things were true. They did not need to be braided together to make a moral point. Please keep praying for the many, many churches and families who cannot say the same was the most honest sentence I had — an acknowledgment that the gap between our valley and their valley was not a thing I could close with gratitude.
I have come to believe that the spared have one job in moments like that, and it is not to perform thankfulness for the unspared. It is to stay close enough to the unspared that the gap does not become the end of the conversation.
* * *
For the next nine days, we did what people in our position do when something terrible happens nearby. We counted who was hurt. We counted who was missing. We counted what was needed, and we sent it. Food. Water. Tarps. Diapers. Bobby and our supervisors made calls to coastal pastors whose buildings had collapsed and whose churches were now the closest thing some neighborhoods had to a shelter. Sophie — my work partner, who knows our community in Quito the way only a Quiteña can — coordinated everything from her end, thirty-some weeks pregnant and a few weeks out from a daughter who is now my goddaughter. She could not load a truck. She managed the trucks. She managed the calls. She managed me.
This is the work most people picture when they hear earthquake relief. It is real work. It is necessary. It has the cleanest arc — a need, a thing, a hand, a delivery. It runs on adrenaline, existing infrastructure, and the muscle memory of churches that have done this before. I am grateful for that part. I am not going to pretend it is the part I learned the most from.
Around day ten — somewhere in the slow, uneven middle, when the trucks were still going west, and the news had moved on, but the funerals had not — I started to notice that we were missing something. The food was getting to the coast. The water was getting to the coast. The roofs were being patched. But a pastor in Manta whose church had become a shelter mentioned, almost in passing, that the children would not sleep at night. That they cried when their mothers went into other rooms. That they refused to go inside buildings with windows.
What that pastor was naming was something we had been quietly doing for years on our own campus — Agua Viva, on a hillside outside Quito — without yet calling it by any name. The same children, the same Saturday, the same lunch, the same workers who knew them by name. That is most of what trauma-informed care looks like when you slow it down far enough to see it. We had a practice. We had a posture. We did not yet have the vocabulary, and we did not yet have a framework for what happens to a child’s nervous system when the ground has just told them safety is no longer a guarantee.
So on the Tuesday morning of the second week — April 26 — I sat down at my desk and wrote a small email to a Lee University professor I had met once and barely knew, in the slightly apologetic tone of someone asking a favor they have no real standing to ask.
We are now looking at how we can do something to specifically help the children as they are beginning to get past the shock and are left to deal with the emotional trauma. We are thinking of sending in some care packages with coloring books about God’s love, some small toys, stuffed animals, etc. Can you recommend any more specific things we could do?
The instinct was sound. Look at any first responder anywhere in the world today, and you will find a stuffed animal somewhere in the kit — paramedics, firefighters, social workers, hospital chaplains. A soft thing pressed into a child’s arms is one of the oldest interventions we have, and it is still one of the truest. What I did not yet have on April 26 was the system around the stuffed animal. The vocabulary. The follow-up. The trained adult who would know what to do when the child finally started talking.
Heather wrote back within a day. She sent PDFs. She sent a children’s book about earthquakes, written by clinicians for displaced kids in disaster zones, in Spanish, which I could get printed at a shop in Quito for seventy cents a copy. She offered to come down with two psychologists and some of their former students and train pastors and Sunday school teachers in how to actually help. By the second week of May, eighteen of our former and current seminary students were sitting in a training room in Quito alongside that team from Tennessee, learning a vocabulary I did not yet have for the work I had been doing for fifteen years. We loaded suitcases with two thousand stuffed animals — vacuum storage bags are a missionary’s best friend — and we went to the coast.
* * *
We went back, and we went back, and we went back. Through the rest of May and into June and beyond, we returned to the coast over and over — Heather’s team and ours, then ours alone, then ours with whichever local pastors and teachers we had trained the time before. We did workshops with pastors. We did training with teachers. We did direct interventions with children in the makeshift refuges where families were still sleeping under tarps and tin, where somebody — sometimes a pastor, sometimes an army officer, sometimes a man who had appointed himself — was trying to keep order over a few hundred people who had nowhere to go and no clean way to feed themselves. We taught the Ecuadorians how to do the work so the work would continue when we left. After the first weeks, some of those refugees required special permission for outsiders to enter. We kept going.
I want to tell you what those first weeks were actually like, because I think the part that gets lost in the institutional retelling is the part most worth telling.
The buildings on the coast had crumbled, and the bodies of the people who had lived in them were still inside many of them. You could smell it. There was a stench around the city — a stench of death and destruction — and it followed us in the windows of the trucks as we drove between sites. Everywhere we stopped, somebody had a story to tell me. They told it to me because I spoke their language, and they wanted me to tell it to Heather, the visiting psychologist they had been told was the expert. They told their stories like they were handing me something heavy, and they watched my face for the moment when I would deliver back a miracle that would make the heavy thing lighter. I did not have that miracle. Heather did not have that miracle. We had a few techniques. We had a children’s book about an earthquake. We had a roomful of trained pastors. We had a stuffed animal in a vacuum bag.
What we had to say, in the end, was we love you, and we are here with you. In the face of that level of loss, that was both unbearable and the only honest thing I could offer. I have come to believe that we are here with you is the closest pastoral approximation of Emmanuel — God with us, most of us will ever get to offer. The people listening understood, more often than not, that we love you and we are here with you was not a substitute for the thing they wanted. It was, however, true. It was a sentence we could keep.
One afternoon, we tried to hand out food bags we had prepared for a refuge of several hundred people. The scarcity in the room was older than the earthquake. The earthquake had only sharpened it. Within minutes, I was pinned against a wall by people begging for one more bag, one more for this aunt, one more for that grandmother, one more for the family, two tarps over who had lost everything. A local pastor reached me quickly. He stood between me and the room and spoke in the voice you learn to speak in when you have lived inside scarcity your whole life — the kind of voice that calms a crowd not by performing authority but by reminding the room of itself. The crowd settled. The food bags were distributed. I was not harmed. I had also never been pinned against a wall before, and I have never quite forgotten the way the wall felt against my back, or the way the pastor’s voice held the room together while my hands were still shaking.
That night, I lay in a borrowed bed and thought, this is what the children inside this refuge fall asleep to. This is what they wake up to. They refused to go inside buildings with windows, the pastor in Manta had said. Of course they did.
* * *
The aftershocks continued for months. Strong ones. Strong enough that we could feel them at our house in Quito, hundreds of miles from the epicenter. One night, Bobby and the rest of the team were at the coast working, and I was home with our five-year-old. The tremors that evening were close enough together that I made the decision to leave the structure. I did not want him to be scared, so I framed it as an adventure — we were going to take a blanket out to the yard and look at the stars, the way we sometimes did on clear nights when the city below us went quiet.
Our backyard, on the outskirts of Quito, sits at almost ten thousand feet on the equator, which means the sky above it on a clear night is the kind of sky you do not forget. There is less ambient light than in most of the city. The stars are close enough to feel like a roof of their own. We sat on the blanket. We watched videos on his little iPad. The ground shook several more times underneath us. The back wall of our house — almost floor-to-ceiling glass — held, but one pane cracked clean across, a thin line we would only find in the morning. He did not know that was why we were outside. He thought we were having an extra adventure, and we were having an extra adventure, and both things were true.
What I could not stop thinking about, on that blanket, was that I was experiencing — at the lowest possible dose, hundreds of miles from the rupture, with a roof I trusted still over my belongings and a child whose nervous system had no reason yet to panic — what the children in those coastal refuges were experiencing several times a day. They had already been buried once. They had felt the building they trusted decide it was not a building anymore. And now, every few hours, the ground was reminding them that the first time had not been the only time. There is no children’s book written for that. We brought the one that came closest, and it was not enough, and we kept bringing it anyway.
I have thought about that blanket often. I think it is closer to the center of what I learned that year than any of the training sessions.
* * *
The story that gets told about that response is usually told in the institutional voice. It is the story of a partnership that became a lineage; an organization that pivoted in three weeks toward a trauma-informed framework that would shape the next decade. All of that is true. None of it is what I learned.
What I learned is that being spared is not the same thing as being chosen, and being chosen is not what God does to people in earthquakes anyway. What I learned is that the gap between the valley with the working roof and the valley with the stench of death is not a gap you close with theology, or with gratitude, or with the right framework. You close it, as much as it can be closed, by going. By staying. By telling the woman handing you the heavy story of her loss that you do not have a miracle, that the visiting psychologist does not have a miracle, that what you have instead is your presence and your willingness to come back next month, and the next, and the next.
The buildings in our valley were fine. That was the gift, and that was also the assignment. Please keep praying for the many, many churches and families who cannot say the same — that was the closest I came, in those first hours, to a theology of being spared. I am still inside that sentence. I expect I will be inside it for the rest of my life.
We love you. We are here with you. It turns out that is not nothing. It turns out, on some days, that is most of what there is.
* * *
Tamitha Lynch writes from twenty-five years of walking alongside vulnerable children whose stories are not hers to tell. She has lived and worked in Ecuador for two decades, establishing a community-based outreach focused on the holistic care of children, where the THRIVE Model™ was born. The work has taken her throughout Latin America, equipping churches to care for vulnerable children through trauma-informed care, and now around the world.