Sanjogeeta Kiran, right, with her sister Sulva Kiran, second left, and her children Shivendera, left, and Raajeen, sit amid the debris of their home in RakiRaki, Fiji, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2016, after cyclone Winston ripped through the island nation. (AP Photo/Brett Phibbs/New Zealand Herald)
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is deploying field personnel to the South Pacific island country of Fiji, hit Feb. 20 by the most powerful storm ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.
Eddy Ruble, who along with his wife, Cindy, was commissioned 1998 to serve in Malaysia, is being deployed on behalf of Asia Pacific Baptist Aid, the relief-and-development arm of the Asia Pacific Baptist Federation, a CBF disaster-response partner.
He will work with the Fiji Baptist Convention making initial assessments and developing a disaster response kit and action plan to assist recovery from Tropical Cyclone Winston, which battered the archipelago of 333 tropical islands promoted as home to some of the happiest people on earth with winds topping 200 miles per hour.
The Category 5 storm killed at least 42 people, making it the deadliest storm in Fiji history, and caused a record $468 million in damage, equal to 10 percent of Fiji’s gross domestic product.
UNICEF said March 1 that the storm directly affected an estimated 347,000 people — 40 per cent of the country’s total population — including 120,000 children.
Last April CBF deployed Ruble, disaster-response specialist, to head up relief efforts in Nepal where more than more than 7,350 people died in a 7.8 magnitude earthquake.
—With reporting by CBF communications.