Today we had the opportunity to go to the Murphy Town Community Center to help with several projects. This community center is the central hub for many activities for the youth and other community members. Our group joined together with a group of men from North Carolina to tackle a few projects installing windows and doors to make the center secure. During the hurricane a shipping container was blown over the building tearing the roof off leaving the walls standing. The building sat open to the elements for 3 years, but had a roof put on in the last month. The teams worked together to remove broken tiles, put the windows and doors and general clean-up around the property.
After lunch we split into 3 teams to work at different sites. The community center was one site and the team sent there finished getting the center secure. There was a team that stayed at Camp Abaco to finish painting the dorm that was started on Monday. The third team was sent to Agape, a Christian school in Marsh Harbor, to finish sorting books and installing shelving for the thrift store. Rebecca, a team member at Agape, has a calling to run a thrift store from the school for the high school students to learn how to run a business. Her hope is that this store will succeed and they would be able to move it from the school to someplace in town eventually. At the end of the afternoon several local teens and young adults assembled for spirited games of volleyball which some of our team participated in while other members of the team talked with members of the community. The gym that all of this is taking place in still has damage from the hurricane. Portions of the roof are still being repaired while all of the activities are going on inside the gym. It’s amazing to see how joyful these kids are to have a place, even without a roof, to play volleyball and basketball.
Pastor Ryan Forbes and his family joined us for the evening and Ryan told us their story of how they survived the hurricane. We were all spellbound with the story that he told of him and his family’s survival. Ryan, his wife and 2 boys were in the living space above their church and decided to ride the storm out there because they were still being told that the storm wasn’t going to be that bad. They ended up laying flat on the floor while the roof and walls disappeared around them, leaving them with no shelter from the storm. They continued to pray for God to keep them safe and somehow they were shown a way down from the top floor and managed to survive. Now Ryan holds special services at the site where the church was. On New Year’s Eve they held a gathering there praising Jesus until 2 a.m. For us this was probably one of the most impactful stories we heard here in Abaco. The winds they survived were over 200 mph and the only way to survive those types of winds is by God’s hands.
This experience for us has been eye opening. To drive around and still see all the destruction 3 years after the storm is heartbreaking yet to say the people of Abaco are joyful is an understatement. We have so much to learn from these people! We have so much and sometimes grumble and complain and in reality we have nothing to complain about because we still have a roof over our heads and food on our table.
