Brother and sister of two Marlin ministers experience Nepal quake

[Update: Another earthquake of 7.3 magnitude hit Nepal May 12, killing dozens and triggering renewed panic in Kathmandu, according to press reports.]

MARLIN—The siblings of two staff members at First Baptist Church in Marlin experienced the catastrophic April 25 earthquake in Kathmandu, Nepal, that killed at least 7,000 people and injured twice that number according to news reports.

As many as 1 million Christians live in Nepal, but they still face severe persecution. For the protection of the Christians who remain in Nepal, the names of the ministers’ siblings are withheld.

The street is one Jonathan Gamel’s sister regularly walked from her apartment to the coffee shop where she worked. Three people were killed when the wall here collapsed.Micah Titterington, youth pastor of the Marlin church, reported his brother was conducting literacy training in the capital city, as well as the surrounding villages. On the day of the quake, he was in the city talking with a family he had met.

As they chatted, the walls of the family’s apartment began to rumble, but they initially thought it might be the normal shaking that happens when large trucks pass by. When it became apparent they were experiencing an earthquake, he and the family moved near one of the walls. As they stood there, the wall on the opposite side of the room began to collapse.

After the rumbling subsided, he and the family quickly exited the building. Titterington’s brother spent the next two nights in an open area near a downtown hotel because aftershocks continued to cascade through the area.

Titterington noted his brother felt blessed to be in Kathmandu, because many of the roads through the mountain passes to the villages where he conducted literacy training were cut off by rock slides, and the people there were trapped for about a week until the road could be cleared.

The sister of Jonathan Gamel, children’s minister at First Baptist Church in Marlin, also was in Kathmandu, taking art classes in the university and working at a coffee shop owned by Antioch Baptist Church in Waco.

‘Overdue for an earthquake’

She told Gamel that just two days earlier, a conversation had centered on earthquakes. “She was told that the area was overdue for an earthquake, so the next one would probably be a big one,” he said.

The coffee shop where she worked and her apartment both were destroyed, but she was unharmed.

She, too, stayed in the open area near the downtown hotel and later traveled to the American embassy.

The two Texans in Kathmandu still have not met. Both have left Nepal.

The Marlin ministers reported their siblings felt they had abandoned the people they had gotten to know in Nepal. Both realized they were not trained for disaster recovery and should not consume scarce water and food resources the Nepali people needed, but they still had a sense of remorse at leaving at such a crucial time.

Both ministers expressed gratitude that the gospel had been spread through the work of missionaries prior to the earthquake, so possibly some of those who died will have a different eternity.