Please Pray for Peru

As I'm sure you have all seen, Peru sustained a major earthquake yesterday. Since we just left Peru after spending a year there, we have been watching the news carefully. Messages from our friends who are still there paint quite a picture. The city of Lima seems to have come through the quake without much major damage, but as you head south, the sceen must be pretty devastating. The towns of Pisco and Paracas, Ica, and other towns closer to the epicenter of the 7.9 quake were ravaged, and I heard a report that one town was as much as 80 percent destroyed. You have to imagine that in a lot of these areas, the construction is pretty basic, brick and cement, and while this may survive the smaller quakes, most of the buildings, and especially the homes, aren't built with a lot of structural integrity. So while the death toll seems to be around 450 right now, I'm sure that will go up. So please pray for the people of Peru. The country lacks the infrastructure to respond, and many of the roads leading to the damaged areas were themselves damaged, thus rendering aid very difficult.