Chile just had one of the biggest recorded earthquakes in history. Puerto Varas, where I live, is far from the epicenter yet I woke up with my house rocking. Then there was the suspense--without power or internet I had no idea what had happened. The phone lines were jammed.
The 8.8 registered locally as a 5.0 and we didn't sustain big damage. But the disaster is present. Chile is, after all, a small country. Everyone has friends or relatives in the capital. I have friends whose house has disappeared. Another did not appear for days.
I thought Puerto Varas was left unscathed. I was slow to realize that the effects will come slowly here--with shortages, roads out, power blinking on and off. There is one highway through the country and when its bridges are out, our connection breaks. Things--like toilet paper, gas, food--are slow to arrive. The only local service station that isn't already out is limiting $10USD worth of gas to each car. Cops direct the line, which twists around the block. I skip it and wonder if I will ever have to attempt the 20km walk from home to town.
Not knowing about what is going on elsewhere becomes an obsession. How can I work when the ground still trembles? Disaster pushes the everyday off our radar and steeps us in the big questions.
A Chilean friend told me the quake brought him to apologize to an ex for bad behavior ten years past. Friends reconnect in crisis, but strangely, so do the ghosts of our past. It's a time of wondering. In the grocery store I feel like I'm buying way too much. Six heads of garlic? But they are bound to save bad meals to come. I reexamine each aisle, trying to perceive what I'm missing, what I'm undervaluing. And that's only in the grocery store.
What remains fascinates me. My town is a rarity in Chile--upper middle class. All diet food is gone. Really, disaster hits and you think about losing those last five pounds? No one has touched the imported goods I covet. Will the day soon arrive when Chileans will have to learn to cook bean thread noodles and quinoa? Somehow, it makes me feel more competent, more safe, knowing I can cook ethnic. But it's total bull. I remind myself: you are just as fragile as everyone else out there.
Predictably, there has already been a run on good value reds in the wine aisle. It is about survival, I think.
Showing posts with label earthquake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label earthquake. Show all posts
March 1, 2010
December 22, 2006
Tremors in El Salvador
On Wednesday I bolted for the hostel garden at 2am, certain the sky was caving, or the beams shifting.
There have been over 800 seismic tremors since last Sunday in Northern El Salvador, one that was 4.8, the rest negligible, if sober bedspins and squaking barn animals don´t phase you. Most of these have been between 11pm and 5am, leaving me a zombie wreck, sending me to sleep with my room door wide open (they jam in quakes) that night. In San Lorenzo people just said the hell with it, threw their mattresses in the street and slept in jeans and sneakers. Over a thousand homes are damaged, mostly improvisory or old quarters inhabited by the poor.
Add this to the soup of everything else that disconcerts about El Salvador: Raw war images in the museum, precise folk art scenes tucked into a miniature carving like a strawberry or egg (sorpresas), retired school buses from Cranston and Cooperstown turned public transport--recast in psychadelic tones, gleaming clean, tossing passengers to the pavement without hitting one full stop. Men hissing and clicking appreciation, topped by an old woman who stopped me on the street to say, ¨Me alegro por tus ojos.¨ (it helps when they´re blue). It took me a week to meet other tourists. I was beginning to believe I was the only one. A suspicious feeling that is.
But---it´s mostly been lovely. I have had El Salvador to myself, which first meant holding hands with paranoia, then precaution. It has ebbed into drifting conversations with the streetside sandwich girl (wondering about dad--seven years gone in the US) when the bus never comes to the elderly neighbor who uses the skinny apartment entrance as his patio (¨Marco Polo, now that´s a story¨) and the deadicated surfers, radical sons of old money, and people--hands split, heaving hundred pound sacks--who bring us Starbucks.
There is no reconciling--the homicide statistics and the not-distant war with such, well, friendliness. As a traveller it is too tempting to make an explanation. Folks are willing to talk (best when they´re not the ones clicking or hissing), to walk you five blocks instead of giving the directions, to respond in a way that´s frank. It makes for something of a trip.
There have been over 800 seismic tremors since last Sunday in Northern El Salvador, one that was 4.8, the rest negligible, if sober bedspins and squaking barn animals don´t phase you. Most of these have been between 11pm and 5am, leaving me a zombie wreck, sending me to sleep with my room door wide open (they jam in quakes) that night. In San Lorenzo people just said the hell with it, threw their mattresses in the street and slept in jeans and sneakers. Over a thousand homes are damaged, mostly improvisory or old quarters inhabited by the poor.
Add this to the soup of everything else that disconcerts about El Salvador: Raw war images in the museum, precise folk art scenes tucked into a miniature carving like a strawberry or egg (sorpresas), retired school buses from Cranston and Cooperstown turned public transport--recast in psychadelic tones, gleaming clean, tossing passengers to the pavement without hitting one full stop. Men hissing and clicking appreciation, topped by an old woman who stopped me on the street to say, ¨Me alegro por tus ojos.¨ (it helps when they´re blue). It took me a week to meet other tourists. I was beginning to believe I was the only one. A suspicious feeling that is.
But---it´s mostly been lovely. I have had El Salvador to myself, which first meant holding hands with paranoia, then precaution. It has ebbed into drifting conversations with the streetside sandwich girl (wondering about dad--seven years gone in the US) when the bus never comes to the elderly neighbor who uses the skinny apartment entrance as his patio (¨Marco Polo, now that´s a story¨) and the deadicated surfers, radical sons of old money, and people--hands split, heaving hundred pound sacks--who bring us Starbucks.
There is no reconciling--the homicide statistics and the not-distant war with such, well, friendliness. As a traveller it is too tempting to make an explanation. Folks are willing to talk (best when they´re not the ones clicking or hissing), to walk you five blocks instead of giving the directions, to respond in a way that´s frank. It makes for something of a trip.
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