Our visit to Villa Alta Gracia with pastor Fredy and his family on Wednesday was a success.  We held a mobile clinic in an area where people had lost their homes and in some cases their lives, too.  The police and civil defense were out and keeping people from going into areas where they where still digging bodies out of the mud one week after the floods.  We took a tour through a river that had washed out a couple bridges and the road was temporarily made out of rocks and dirt piled up.  The van barely made it through and at one point the police told us that we wouldn’t make, but we did! 

To see the devastation the floods caused was very sad. Whole communities were washed out.  Huge aqueducts and pipes carrying clean water to thousands in Santo Domingo were strewn about like toys. Thousands of trees were downed and stripped of their bark as they made their way down the river.  We saw huge rocks caught in the branches of trees 10-15 feet above the riverbed.  In one instance, we two buildings next to each other one was a church the other a business. The church was left untouched; the other building was leaning off its foundation.  It made me think of the passage by Jesus “if any man builds his house on the rock, his house will survive the flood.”  People were just sitting in front of there washed out homes doing laundry or kids playing in the mud as if nothing happened.  I guess life has to go on no matter how difficult it is even after a deadly flood like the one caused by Tropical Storm Noel two weeks ago.