Lal Ruat Cawk, pastor of Victory Life Church in Mandalay, Myanmar, was driving with his sister to the hospital for a prechemotherapy blood test last Friday when his car started shaking violently. He thought he had punctured a tire.
“I could hear people screaming outside,” he recalled. “At that point I still thought it was because our car was disrupting traffic.”
It was only when he saw buildings collapsing around him that the 43-year-old realized “we had a larger disaster upon us.” He’d later learn that a 7.7 magnitude earthquake had hit central Myanmar. Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city, was one of the cities worst hit by the quake.
Two aftershocks hit minutes later, prompting Lal Ruat Cawk and his sister to turn the car around and drive home. The journey that typically took 20 minutes lasted an hour that day, amid buckled roads and crushed buildings.
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