03 February 2008

Beaches and earthquakes

This weekend, several friends and I headed west to the town of Kibuye for a relaxing weekend on the lake. Saturday was just the relaxation for which we were looking; we spent the day laying in the sun, reading, dining by the water's edge, taking in the beauty of the landscape and enjoying one another's company.
Sunday was not so relaxing. Around 9:30 in the morning, I was putting on sunscreen, when suddenly I heard a rumbling sound and felt the building begin to shake. For a split second, I honestly thought there was a group of children running around upstairs; quickly enough, though, I realized that was not the case, so we quickly grabbed our things and fled the building. As it turns out, there had been a 6.0-magnitude earthquake just southwest of Kibuye, across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For the rest of the morning, we felt aftershocks, and then, as we were eating lunch, around 1:00, we experienced three more quakes. These three ranged in magnitude from 4.5 to 5.0 and were centered south of us in Rwanda. All four are shown on the map below as yellow squares. Thankfully there was not much damage where we were in Kibuye, and no one was injured. However, at least 34 people were killed and hundreds were injured in the areas that were directly hit by the quakes. Please keep those persons and their families, as well as all of those who were affected, in your prayers.

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