FALLS CHURCH, Va. (ABP) — A Christian college president in Haiti told Baptist World Alliance officials that the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that hit near the country's capital Jan. 12 "will affect everybody in Haiti."
"The whole country is in shock by this terrible event," Jules Casseus, president of the Northern Haiti Christian University in Limbé, located about 80 miles from Port-au-Prince, told leaders of the Baptist global group based in Falls Church, Va.
"Everybody around the country has a relative in Port-au-Prince," Casseus said. "In our area in the Limbé Valley, we have many cries of people who have lost a relative, a son or a daughter studying in Port-au-Prince."
In an e-mail, one of the few forms of communication coming out of an infrastructure devastated by the earthquake, Casseus said one student at the Baptist university lost his house and a daughter who died in it. Another family in Limbé lost two daughters and the son has a broken leg."
Casseus said even though the university founded by the Baptist Convention of Haiti was mostly outside the disaster zone, it would feel the effects in students from Port-au-Prince who won't be able to return next semester and shortage of fuel needed to run its electric generators and other machinery that is purchased from the nation's capital.
"I believe that it will take years before the country and especially Port-au-Prince to return to normal," Casseus said. He asked Baptists around the world to pray for Haiti "so that we can manage to do the right things in order to meet some of the urgent needs of the Haitian people."
Biene Lamerquea, a prominent Baptist pastor in Port-au-Prince, was among an expected to thousands of Haitians killed in the disaster. Gedeon Eugene, a vice president of the Baptist Convention of Haiti, told BWA that Lamerquea is presumed dead but still buried under the rubble.
Several Baptist pastors and members are still unaccounted for, while others are homeless. "A lot of church members are now homeless," wrote Eugene. "They spend nights in the streets. They are starving."
At least one Baptist church building, First Baptist Church in Port-au-Prince, was damaged.