When I first started this blog entry, I opened by saying “I am happy to report that this past week has been far less exciting than the last.” And then Santigo was hit by a 7.2 aftershock.
To put it in perspective, Chileans are quite used to tremors, they happen several times every day, and most of them are small enough that you hardly notice. This one was a bit different.
I was at the University of Santiago- I have classes there every morning from 10am to 12. We had just taken a ten-minute break and were heading down the hallway towards the lecture area when the building started vibrating. Strangely enough, some people thought that it was just the train that passes periodically under the university. Wrong. But after a few seconds (spent in door-frames, of course), we headed down the stairs and back to class. Ten minutes later, the major aftershock hit us. I have to say that as calm as I was able to be during the first one, I didn’t fair quite as well during the second. I blame my reaction on the building- during the earthquake a few weeks ago, I was at my home-stay, the first floor of a brick 3-story apartment building, a pretty sturdy place. The University building wasn’t as reassuring, mainly because it was built with a lot of open space- I could see the support beams shaking and swaying, and since I was higher up, I could feel the floor shuddering just as much as the first quake, even though this quake was weaker (the higher up you are, the more you feel the building shift under you- intellectually, this is reassuring because if the buildings aren’t build to move with the quake, they crack and fall apart….but you can’t take much comfort in this fact until after both the earth and your nerves have calm down). Anyway, we rushed down the stairs and out of the building. By the time we got outside, the aftershock was over and, unfortunately, most of the phones had been knocked out. My friend’s dad managed to get through to him on his Chilean cell phone and a few minutes later, I was able to call my mother. I was lucky really- my major point of panic was that she’d get another phone call before I could talk to her and tell her I was ok- but when I finally got to her, she was completely calm.
I feel very lucky to be alright, particularly when I look around other parts of Santiago. The older portions of the city (presumably the structures that predate the aseismic building codes) were badly hit by the first quake. However the overall damage here was miniscule in comparison to Concepcion, Chile’s second major city, parts of which are still without water, electricity, or communications- it is also the city that my program was supposed to visit next month.
That trip’s been canceled, but I would still like to go there with my best friend’s family. I realize that it’s a bit of a strange desire, but you should understand that, although I am in Chile at a point where they are experiencing a lot of confusion and, in some cases grief, I feel very disconnected from it. I mean, yes, I see the effect that the quake had on some of the city (not even the part that has been worst hit), but the part that I have seen is nothing that a country with Chile’s resources can’t handle. I understand that there have been 800 lives lost, but it could have been so much worse (In the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about Haiti- and there is absolutely no comparison between the two). And, I suppose I am…confused…by the contrast between everyone here saying what a massive tragedy this was, and then the sense of normalcy just two days later (the trains and buses ran, my friend’s host family asked her where she planned to go dancing over the weekend).
This disconnect between witnessing and emotionally understanding the loss, this bubble, is hard for me to break through for different reasons. First, I am only learning how to speak the language (and my Spanish classes tend to tailor lessons to the subjects of our other classes, so I could probably understand a conversation telling about an economic depression better than a conversation about an emotional one). Second, I am American.
The latter creates more of a barrier because there are other students here, who live in neighborhoods just as safe as mine, who have no family ties here, and who cannot say that they really knew anyone whose home had been destroyed, or who had lost a family member. We have no roots here- and the resulting detachment is a hard thing to bridge when you cannot really see the impact of the terrible event that everyone is talking about. There has been only been a few times when I really felt the sense of confusion and worry that others experienced during the quakes- and that was through talking to my best friend’s family. I could understand his mother’s worry about relatives that she, at the time, she had no way of contacting to see if they were alright (she lives in NY and for most of the day couldn’t communicate with her family here in Chile), or his aunt who told me about how long and complicated it had been to get from the south (where she had been during the earthquake) back to Santiago- a trip that should have taken a few hours took a few days. The personal connection is a bit once-removed, but it was the closest that I have come to understanding what a lot of Chileans are feeling.
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