MANTA, Ecuador (AP) — A nun from Northern Ireland killed in the Ecuador earthquake has been remembered as a “superstar” by her family.
A Roman Catholic religious order says Sister Clare Theresa Crockett was leading a group of young trainee nuns to safety at a school where she worked when a stairwell collapsed. She and five of the young postulants died. Three injured nuns were rescued from the rubble.
Crockett, who was 33 and from Londonderry, taught music at the Colegio Sagrada Familia school in Playa Prieta.
The order of the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother said Crockett and other nuns had been working to help residents hit by heavy local flooding when the earthquake struck on Saturday.
The order said in a statement that “Sister Clare had spent nearly 15 years of her life in consecration to the Lord. She was a generous Sister with a special gift for reaching out to children and young people.”
Crockett’s cousin Emmet Doyle said: “She was a superstar. Everybody loved her.”
“She died as she lived, helping others.”
Speaking to the BBC, Father Roland Cahoon, her spiritual director, described Crockett as “a beautiful person” who “died for the Gospel”.
“This is a young girl who gave her life to God and died for the Gospel. She was a joyful girl. I’ve known her since she was a teenager,” Cahoon said.
“I’ll remember the joy that she brought to her youth group and the enthusiasm she showed for her vocation to religious life,” Cahoon said. “It’s counter-cultural to join a religious order for a young girl and she embraced it. We’ll remember her with such affection.”
According to a profile in the U.K.-based Catholic Herald, Crockett wanted to be an actress as a young woman. She tripped across the Servant Sisters when they offered a free 10-day trip to Spain, thinking it was a chance to party, only to realize it was a pilgrimage group composed mostly of middle-aged women heading to the order’s 16th century monastery.
She tried to back out, but ended up discovering her religious vocation.
Ecuador’s foreign minister says more international rescuers are heading to the country’s disaster zone of flattened buildings to help in the race against time to find survivors from the powerful magnitude-7.8 earthquake.
Guillaume Long tweeted that 654 search experts from other nations were on the ground late Monday and that more were expected to arrive Tuesday — bringing to 13 the nationalities involved in the rescue.
The government reported Monday that the official death count had increased to 413, and was expected to rise further in the days ahead. Among the dead were an American and two Canadians.
Complicating rescue efforts is the lack of electricity in many areas, meaning noisy power generators must be used, making it harder to hear people who might be trapped beneath rubble.
More than 2,000 people were injured.
Spain’s Red Cross said as many as 5,000 people might need temporary housing because of destroyed homes and 100,000 need some sort of aid.
