LDS missionaries ran
to safety during quake in Philippines
By Tad Walch, Deseret
News
Published:
Wednesday, Oct. 16 2013 11:50 a.m. MDT
CEBU CITY, Philippines — Sister Bethany Crowley of
Clinton, Utah, was sitting at her desk in the Philippines studying her
scriptures on Tuesday morning when the LDS Church missionary felt a giant truck
passing by her apartment.
Then she realized it wasn't a truck. It was a
major earthquake.
"Doorways!" she yelled to her
companion as she flipped over her chair and ran. The two young women stood in
the doorways of their apartment in Cebu City watching a nearby grocery store
sway from the shock of the 7.2-magnitude earthquake centered on Bohol Island,
an area where Sister Crowley served earlier this year.
Due in some cases to quick thinking and
effective training, Sister Crowley and all of the missionaries serving in the
Cebu East Mission and the other 20 missions of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints in the Philippines survived the quake, described by a
Filipino seismologist as packing more energy than 32 Hiroshima bombs.
"All missionaries of the church serving
in this region are safe and accounted for," according to a statement released
by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The quake killed at least killing 144 people, according to officials. The earthquake struck the central island of Bohol near Carmen on Tuesday morning, the
Associated Press reported. Carmen is 40 miles southeast and across the Cebu
Strait from densely populated Cebu City, which also sustained heavy damage.
Cebu Province, with 2.6 million people at the
2010 census, is the second-largest province in the Philippines. The population of
Bohol Province is 1.25 million.
The LDS Church statement said
several structures related to the church suffered damage.
“Church leaders are working with local
officials to identify and address local needs," the statement added.
"Several member homes have been destroyed or damaged, and some church
buildings have sustained minor damage from the quake.”
The church's Cebu City Philippines Temple
also had minor damage, the Deseret News confirmed. Independent sources said the
Angel Moroni statue, which faces east on LDS temples, rotated 90 degrees to
face south.
Sister Crowley, who interrupted her studies
in chemical engineering at the University of Utah to serve a mission, is
serving in the Cebu East Mission, which includes part of Cebu Province as well
as Bohol. She wrote about her experience in her regular letter home to her
parents, who received her email Tuesday night. The earthquake struck at 8:12
a.m. local time on Tuesday, or 6:12 p.m. MDT on Monday, making for a long day's
wait for her mother, Sherri Crowley, who posted her daughter's letter on her
missionary blog.
"We're happy that she's safe,"
Sherri Crowley said.
"The worst that happened in my apartment,"
Sister Crowley reported in her letter, "was a few cracks in the wall
re-opened, and a bottle of shampoo fell over. But in the (grocery store) next
door, glass doors shattered, and merchandise broke. One missionary apartment
collapsed, but the elders ran outside first."
Sister Crowley wrote that her zone leaders
took safety precautions when they saw the cracks in her cement apartment wall.
They instructed Sister Crowley and her companion to stay the night with another
pair of sister missionaries.
In addition to the minor damage to the LDS
temple, news reports said the quake damaged many churches, including the collapse of the roof of Bohol Island's Church of San Pedro, built in 1638,
the New York Times reported. Officials said as many as 10 other historic
churches were damaged.
Sister Crowley mentioned that damage in her
letter home: "Over in Bohol, the big ancient Catholic churches that I
walked by every day collapsed. Crazy."
Another missionary, Sister Teresa Davis, arrived in the
Philippines to begin serving in the Cebu Mission last week. She, too, wrote
home about the experience in a letter her family posted on her mission blog.
"My first earthquake," Sister Davis
wrote. "The whole house was shaking but it only lasted for maybe a minute.
None of us were hurt and nothing really fell down."
An Eagle, Idaho, family hadn't heard from
their missionary yet, because she is serving on in Tagbiliran, the capital of
Bohol, site of the quake's epicenter and where damage was worst.
Sister Jocelynn Clegg's mother Sandra posted
this Tuesday night: "We were pretty anxious waiting to hear but were
relieved to hear from her mission president last night in the middle of the
night. 'She is okay!' She has been moved to stay in a home of the senior couple
serving in that area and will stay there until the aftershocks have stopped and
her apartment can be assessed for safety. We are feeling so blessed. Today is
her p-day (preparation day) and the usual day that we get her email, but the
mission office emailed today and said that it might be a few days until we hear
from her because there is no power on the island right now."
The sister missionaries are representative of
the biggest part of the LDS Church's missionary surge — the number of sister,
or female, missionaries soared from 8,100 in October 2012 to 19,300 this month, according to
the church. That is an increase of 140 percent.
The LDS Church has 21 missions in the
Philippines, including the two in Cebu. The church created the Cebu East
Mission on July 1. The church added 58 new missions this year as the number of missionaries jumped
from 58,700 in October 2012 to 80,000 this month following
church President Thomas S. Monson's announcement lowering the minimum age for missionaries.
There are more than 660,000 LDS Church
members in the Philippines.
“A magnitude 7 earthquake has an energy
equivalent to around 32 Hiroshima atomic bombs,” said Renato Solidum, director
of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, during a televised press briefing. “Compared to the 2010 Haiti
earthquake — that had a magnitude of 7.0, this one had a magnitude of 7.2,
slightly stronger.”
The LDS Church has a temple in Cebu. The city sustained heavy damage as a result
of Tuesday's earthquake. The temple sustained minor exterior damage. (LDS.org)
