One adventure ends so another can finally begin

The last few weeks have been, to say the very least, hectic, although, for the most part, wonderful. After being sequestered in the lush, lovely mapuche village of Chapod, about a half hour bus ride on mud and gravel roads from Temuco, for nine days as part of the independent study project that every student in my program completed during the month of May, I returned to Santiago to work and work and work, eventually writing a 39-page paper in Spanish and then giving a presentation this past weekend on my investigation.

All of that means that now I´ve finished with the studying portion of my experience abroad and now I´m down in southern Chile starting my solitary traveling adventures. I´m writing this sitting in a "cyber" in the little town of Pucón, which is a bustling center of outdoor sports in the summer (the Chilean summer, that is) but is little more than a quiet, very windy group of streets right now. However, the calm is rather nice, especially after the last hectic days of my study abroad program, and, moreover, considering that this is a town bordered on two sides by gorgeous lakes, on another by the strange towers of the Andes, and on the last side by Volcán Villarrica. Villarrica is considered one of the most active volcanoes in Chile (there was a small eruption early this year that shut down this area in the middle of tourist season) and is one of four volcanoes in the world known to have a lava lake in its crater. Even now, looking up at it´s snow-crowned peak towering over Pucón, I´ve been able to see a slow trail of smoke rolling off the top throughout the day. (It´s definitely worth taking a look at pictures of the volcano online).

Because of bad weather predicted on the other side of the volcanoe later this week, I´m unfortunately not heading to the gorgeous forests and mountains between Villarrica and its two sister volcanoes that stretch in a line to the Argentinean border; instead, I head out tomorrow morning to spend three days in Parque Nacional Huerque, an amazing stretch of unique forest that climbs up into the mountians and is known for its pristine lakes and incredible flora and fauna (and for its ever-present vistas of Villarrica).

So, until I get back in reach of internet and then head out backpacking in Patagonia, here´s to a lovely semester that has, in some ways, come to a welcome end, and to the relaxed start of a 5-week adventure (and to the start of the World Cup in less than 3 days).

Población La Victoria: 52 años de la lucha

Less than two years ago, one of Chile's most iconic poblaciones (the common term for poor neighborhoods or barrios) marked it's first half-century - 50 years since the very early morning of when a thousands of residents of the most destitute parts of southern Santiago moved to take an overgrown fairground that the government had slated for the construction of a wealthy housing community. The dawn of October 30, 1957, found over 3,000 people already setting up tents and organizing resources after having crept past the cordon of policemen charged with keeping these very pobladores from realizing this populist project, which had been brewing for over a year as the conditions in the city's poorest communities deteriorated rapidly.

Nearly 52 years later, the residents of the Población La Victoria - named for "la victoria contra la miseria" ["the victory over misery"] - still frame their history and their present identity in terms of "la lucha", or "the fight". There is an enormous pride that comes from living in this barrio, despite it's economic poverty - an enormous pride to being a "victoriano", which, besides signifying someone from La Victoria, translates roughly to "victor" - "one who is victorious". Murals plaster the walls of the población, documenting the community's vicious fight against the dictatorship of Pinochet and its militant leftist leanings, and the barrio is also home to South America's first community TV station, which runs a pirate signal with programs and documentaries about the history of La Victoria, the resistance during the dictatorship, and political events and movements today, in addition to running a small community communications night-school which focuses on training young victorianos how to tell the stories of their community and how to keep memories alive.

I've been lucky enough to spend almost all of the past week in this incredible community, observing and participating in the elementary school that the victorianos founded two years after the creation of La Victoria. Despite its nationalized curriculum and all of the red tape required by the state to run the school and receive the money for its operations, this school manages to retain the sense of being "victoriana": the kids are proud to be from this community, and moreover, the gate to the school is almost always open. Parents move freely throughout the school, kids run in and out of the director's office all day, and the community itself still takes enormous pride in what the school signifies for La Victoria and in the principles it was founded upon - the idea that education is in itself a part of the fight against the forces that drove the pobladores to organize and create this community 52 years ago - a fight that reached its peak under the dictatorship but which continues to be relevant in a country with one of the highest indices of economic inequality in the world.

The Warmup: Parque Nacional La Campana - Sector Granizo

When Charles Darwin landed in Valparaíso on the coast of Chile in 1834, he headed inland to a bell-shaped summit that, at 1,880 m (or some 6,200 ft.), jutted up from the ridges of the Andes that make their way from the border with Argentina towards the coast. From the top of this mountain, Cerro La Campana, he said that you could see Chile "as in a map", so it was to the park built around this peak, Parque Nacional La Campana, that I headed with a friend to finally take a serious trip into the Andes and break in all my new gear before I set out traveling and backpacking for 5 weeks when my program ends June 8.

From Santiago, the park's gateway town, Olmué, which is a lovely little place in it's own right, is only a 2-hour bus ride that costs about $10 round trip. From there, after some empanadas and fresh fruit juice (I decided to go for the "tuna", a sweet cactus fruit with a flavor kind of similar to honeydew), you can catch a smaller bus (60 cents) to within a kilometer of the entrances to 2 of the 3 sectors of the park: Sector Cajón Grande and Sector Granizo. After an accidental detour to the Cajón Grande entrance, we headed to Sector Granizo, planning to camp Sunday night and possibly head up La Campana on Monday until we found out that the last third of that particular trail was closed because of the earthquake. Still, we set up our tent and explored a little before cooking up a delicious dinner of curried rice with mushrooms and sautéd onions and bell pepper and hitting the sleeping bags.

I have to hand it to CONAF, the Chilean government's parks and conservation branch: they've done a wonderful job with this park. The campsites in Sector Granizo are strung out along a series of trails and usually built in rough terraces so that they're spacious without intruding too much on the landscape, and the actual trails achieve a similar effect: well-kept and well-planned without feeling too touristy or too intrusive. And between the wildlife - we saw a giant, tarantula-like spider, some wild cows, and a variety of hawks - and the incredible views, you could really spend a few days here even though the trail system isn't all that extensive. But since the route up La Campana was closed, we headed up Sendero Portezuelo, where the trails from all 3 sectors of the park meet in a saddle right below a huge, rocky peak, offering incredible views back towards the east and into and past the valley of Sector Ocoa (see picture above), one of the two places left in the country where you can see wild Chilean palms.

Unfortunately, we were a little pressed for time and had to bound back down the way we came, but with the park opening up to ridge after ridge of dry, arid mountains, I'm hoping to make every effort to make my way back before I head back to the States. For now, I'm back in Santiago with happily backpack-bruised hips and a small taste of what I'm in for when I head out on my own a month from now.

¿Camping?

[So the picture here is entirely irrelevant, I just like it. It was on the wall in the radio station that I talked about in my last post. I guess in some way, the poster is somewhat related to what I'm writing about, but we'll see how it turns out.]

Unfortunately, preparing for a camping trip here in Chile (or at least in Santiago) isn't quite as easy as making the hop over to LL Bean or, in Asheville, as dropping by Diamond Brand, Black Dome, or even Mast General Store to pick up a large spoon to cook with or a canister of white gas. "Outdoors" stores here are "[insert a general topic] and Camping". "Deportes y Camping" [Sports and Camping] or "Armería y Camping" [Firearms and Camping]. In the last 5 hours, I've been in 2 fishing stores, 2 firearms stores, and a host of general athletics stores only to realize that the stoves and faded sleeping bags stuffed into the corners of their displays are the only "camping" equipment that they carried.

That said, walking back from the grocery store, where I managed to find a spatula and the ingredients to make brownies for my host mom's birthday tomorrow (she's been asking me to make them ever since I got here), I was thoroughly frustrated. The display in a pharmacy caught my eye - kitchenware - so I slowed my angry power-walk a little, went inside, and headed toward the back, where I managed to find absolutely nothing that I needed. It was only about 5 minutes after I had left the store when I realized the ridiculousness of what I had been doing and started to laugh: there I was, a pale, crazy-haired gringo (I hadn't showered yet) in the kitchenware section of this cramped pharmacy towering about a foot (at least) over clustered chilean women who were just trying to buy some silverware or pick out a good kitchen set while I was scrambling through every corner trying to find a large spoon, with my backpack, heavy with the brownie-fixins, swinging around and probably connecting with a few unfortunate ladies.

So, now that I'm happy again and laughing at myself, I'm going to put off working on my independent study project and go rummage through a bunch of shady auto-parts stores to try to find some white gas for my camp stove.

Siempre hacia la victoria

In the US, it seems that Buenos Aires has an almost mythical draw and is often postured as a cultured, European city in one of the only developed (more or less) countries in a continent that is still struggling to catch up to countries who have had so much influence over the region since its "discovery". You could spend hours or days pulling apart that characterization of the city and of the continent, but I can definitely say that BA is one of the most vibrant and interesting, and modern, cultural centers of South America, although great poverty exists in plain site as soon as you move away from the center of the city and the wealthier, more fashionable neighborhoods of Barrio Norte and into areas filled with victims of South America's great economic inequality and Argentina's financial meltdown in 2001 and 2002, which left almost 60% of the country below the state's (already low) poverty line.

That said, something of an educational revival is happening in certain parts of these stricken areas - a revival with notable community-driven projects that are completely unique in their approaches to education. One of the most powerful examples of these new ideas about education comes from the barrio of Barracas, a working-class neighborhood in the southeast of Buenos Aires. Formed in 2004, la Escuela de Recuperación de Enseñanza Media de Barracas is a school dedicated to the education of students who have dropped out of school for more than four months and want to return to finish "high school". The school is located in a fábrica gráfica - essentially a factory for printing - that was taken by the workers during the financial crisis almost ten years ago, and there has not been enough time or money to change the austere feel of the classrooms, but this location offers the opportunities that make this school so unique. The factory still functions (large windows inside the school overlook the operation) and collaborates with the students to create a magazine every year, with the hope of adding more projects in the coming years. Even more interesting is the community radio that operates out of the top floor of the building, just above the school, which offers workshops to the students and broadcasts oral projects created by certain classes every year. (A few dedicated students also work in the station before or after school.) Finally, a medical center occupies the building next to this school, and despite early apprehension, the two institutions have begun to collaborate, creating a learning environment entirely inseparable from its spacial context and the resources offered by the community on this small city block. This is a school that fiercely and openly challenges the all-too-apparent realities of public education in the poorer parts of Buenos Aires - a school that, as graffiti on the walls pronounces, is looking "siempre hacia la victoria": "always towards victory".

"Bienvenidos a la fiesta
fiesta de chileno roto
que después del terremoto
se despertó de la siesta..."

Thanks to this little arts-school "marching band" that passed by our house a couple of days ago, I have something small to write about. As for my other experiences in the past month, including a week living with an indigenous Mapuche family outside of Temuco, that'll have to wait a few days (and hopefully not weeks). As for now, I'm off to Buenos Aires.

La Fería

Between the buses that careen around the city, the children, the street dogs, and everything else that happens in cities these days, Santiago is a place full of noise - probably not the bustle of New York or Boston, but it's by no means a quiet place, and, on Saturday and Sunday, the city gets louder (and probably a bit bigger) when huge open-air markets sprout up in plazas or commandeer entire roads. This is not your dirt-cheap-t-shirts-brand-name-knock-offs-kitschy-snow-globe-filled tourist trap, but a veritable supermarket spilled out into the street. Micheal Pollen's most vivid wet dreams have nothing on this collection of fresh, local, dirt cheap veggies and fruit. There are, of course, the odd stalls selling baby toys or women's underwear, and the vendors on the outskirts who have strange assortments of simple-but-lovely hand-made jewelry, books (the Kama Sutra sidling up to motivational books that have made friends with their neighbor, Pablo Neruda), and garage-sale-worthy knick-knacks. These ferías have become neighborhood institutions, and I've heard people argue the merits of one over the other, but wherever you are in Santiago, it seems like the entire community makes it out over the weekend to buy a week's worth of colorful, mouth-watering produce that ranges from avocados and peaches to giant orange-green vegetables and vibrantly violet beans I have never seen before. However, the strangest part has to be the fish stalls that are usually nestled in the center of the fería and are impossible to miss, if only because you can smell them from a block away. The variety of seafood isn't anything like what's on offer in the side-corridors of Mercado Central, where you can buy sea-urchins to compliment your squid (beak included) and meter-long eels, the sight of these fishmongers selling off yesterday's large, slippery catch to the small crowd packed around the small booths is itself a reason to rush to your closest fería this weekend. While in the US, those who can afford it are trying to buy local and fresh and are finding it hard to keep track of the carbon footprint on those organic apples that were actually imported from a South American mega-orchard (probably via China, like everything else these days), Santiagüinos have got it figured out: buy food for a couple of days at a time, buy a little meat from the butcher around the corner, and stock up on Saturday with a week's worth of local, in-season produce.

Solidaridad

Sitting with my family at the table after dinner this evening, drinking tea and mopping up a puree of avocado with a piece of bread, I watched as the country's exiting president, Michelle Bachelet, gave her last address to the nation ahead of tomorrow's change of government. Bachelet's past is almost inconceivable - her father, a general in the Air Force and a member of Salvador Allende's cabinet dead in Villa Grimaldi, one of Pinochet's major torture centers and holding pens, before she and her mother were tortured in the same compound, only to join in the resistance against the dictatorship after their release. Moreover, as an agnostic, single mom of 3 children from two different fathers, her political prospects in the US would amount to almost nothing. However, she is leaving office with a personal approval rating of upwards of 85%, an astounding, almost inconceivable figure, and in her final address, she spoke of one word that characterized the nation's response to February's earthquake and which seems to me to speak to what Bachelet embodies to most Chileans: "Solidaridad". Solidarity.

When given the chance, Chileans will emphasize how united their country is, and the earthquake and its aftermath has given them a chance to express this sentiment in very real terms. I was lucky enough to volunteer at a chapter of the Chilean Red Cross here in Santiago last Friday, and they literally cannot handle enormous number of clothes that had been donated in the week following the quake: they are now only accepting donations of certain non-perishable foods to send to the more affected regions further south. That same night, at 10pm, a 24-hour campaign began to raise money to help shelter the hundreds of thousands of displaced Chileans - most figures are above 1 million, this in a country with a population of only 17 million. The next day, street corners in certain parts of town were filled with young volunteers dressed up in circus-like garbs, faces painted, waving enormous Chilean flags and collecting donations for this effort: Chile ayuda a Chile ("Chile helps Chile"). By the end of the night on Saturday, after an endless procession of companies, families, workers' unions donating thousands of dollars each on a continuous telethon broadcast on nearly every television station, the "Chile ayuda a Chile" effort had collected more than double its goal of 15 mil millones de pesos, or a little more than US$30 million. I woke up the next morning to find that in all, the Chilean people had raised an amount equivalent to between 60 and 70 million US dollars in only 24 hours.

The earthquake has begun to fade from the news, and has all but disappeared from international and American news sources, but that has certainly not diminished the country's recognition of the difficulties faced by those most affected by this disaster. With the country's first conservative government since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship set to take power tomorrow, the process of recovery could not have came at a more strenuous time, as many people seem to be waiting apprehensively, hoping that the country doesn't back away from the progress it's made in the past 20 years. However, it is also very true that much of the credit for the recovery efforts can go to Chileans, independent of what happens with the country's new president.

Pictures From Mi Barrio

In Chile, Life...

In addition to this gaping hole, the quake did serious damage to this aging church, only a block from where I attend classes.

For a good, brief look at where things stand here in Santiago, and in Chile as a whole, here's a great editorial from Chilean author Alberto Fuguet which appeared in The New York Times today:
"In Chile, Life Between the Tremors"

El Terremoto: Pt. 3

It seems that this earthquake was all the more frightening because it came less than two months after the disaster in Haiti, which I'm sure will be placed along with Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunamis as one of the largest natural disasters of the century up to this point - and rightly so, because it's sure to make a historical impact on the modern development of Haiti as an entire nation. I was somewhat surprised at how intact everything seemed in Santiago, both immediately after the quake and when I woke up the next morning; although, Chileans will point out that many parts of their country have learned from a history of devastating earthquakes, including a one in 1960 rated at 9.5, the world's largest quake on record. It seems like English-language news reports have picked up on Chile's general preparedness for this kind of disaster, and it's important to note because, at least in Santiago, it seems important to how Chileans have reacted to this entire situation.

Of course, the first order of business after waking up was to contact family to let them know everything was fine, but after that, everyone in the house simply sat down in the dining room slowly eating breakfast, drinking tea or coffee, and watching the TV. The power in our part of Santiago had been restored sometime in the very early morning, and the phone lines in the region were still doing pretty well, but everyone simply seemed shocked. The news reports that came in that morning were mostly from Santiago and from nearby cities like Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. Parts of these areas had certainly been damaged, but the situation was fairly good considering the magnitude of the quake: coverage centered on a cycle of streets, buildings, and images that were shown over and over again, because at that point nothing was coming out of the areas closer to epicenter of the quake - no phone calls, no photographs, no video footage. All of this slowly trickled onto the news stations as the days went on, and it really wasn't until today, the 28th, the day after the earthquake, that those of us in Santiago could actually see what had happened to the city of Concepción, the country's second-largest city that was about 70 miles from the epicenter of the quake. I can only imagine that's why the number of deaths attributed to the earthquake has more than doubled since last night and is still climbing, and that's why, despite exhaustive media coverage, we had to wait until today for a real picture of the quake's impact.

Around noon, I went out with my host parents to by bread, because unlike Americans, Chileans (at least those in Santiago) tend to keep a sparsely-stocked kitchen, instead stopping at the local grocery store and carnecería, or butcher shop, every day or two to pick up food for the next few meals. My host family had already been out to buy bread, but the closest grocery store was closed, so I went with them to find an open panadería, a basic bakery that mostly just stocks bread, simple packaged food like rice and pasta, and soda. Incredibly, there was almost no damage to the buildings on our block, and even though there were small piles of rubble and plaster - at least one on every block - it seemed like all the damage in the surrounding blocks was only superficial. The house I'm staying in is near the point in Santiago Centro where middle-class apartments and row houses give way to lower-class immigrant communities. The change isn't drastic, and the general aesthetic is the same, at least to someone who's only been in the country a few days, but the buildings in these communities seem older, which means they aren't as structurally sound. Here, the damage thankfully wasn't anything like the pictures from Haiti, which, at least to me, seem to have become the images most associated with this kind of disaster; instead, as we went along, we could see where parts of buildings' facades had simply crumbled off, showing the stacked stone infrastructure - corners of other buildings had cracked or separated, and every couple of blocks a portion of the sidewalk had been marked off with white caution tape surrounding large piles of fallen rubble and drawing the eyes to crumbling facades or to doors with large steel beams leaning against them, a telltale sign that the worst of the damage was inside.

There were plenty of other people out in the streets as we made our way to the panadería, although everyone seemed fairly calm and mostly just curious to see what had happened to the city. The police were also out, and we were passed by two carabineros, or policemen, on horse and two in a car before we reached the panadería, where another carabinero stood just across the street, obviously watching over the long bread line that stretched out onto the sidewalk. Since that morning, the sky over Santiago had been a dark, murky gray from the dust that had risen from the quake combined with the black smoke that gushed from a large, burning building on the outskirts of the city. However, by now the air was beginning to clear, and the dusty smell that surrounded the area where we were was beginning to fade (or I had simply gotten used to it).

We waited somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes at the panadería before we finally came away with enough bread to last us for a few days. The store was constantly making new batches of pancita, which in this case meant something akin to large, flat biscuits. Every 10-15 minutes, someone would emerge from the bakery in the back of store with a wicker basket of this pancita, and then everyone towards the front of the line would stuff as much as they needed into small plastic bags until all of it was gone and the wait began again. In line, we had plenty of time to follow the news over a small TV that had been set up on top of a pastry cabinet and to inspect the store. There was an enormous crack in one of the corners, and towards the back, the ceiling had cracked, damaging a light and leaving a large chunk of plaster bending away from the ceiling; in the refrigerators, like anything you'd see at you're local gas station, the most of the drinks had fallen down and no one had bothered that morning to sort out the piles of bottles on every shelf.

We took a different way back to our house to pick up some meat and rice, and here the damage was worse. There were buildings that simply had ragged holes in them, some with rubble coming out of their doors, and we passed families who had dragged all of their belongings out into the street, whether because of the damage to their house or because of the very real fear of a small crack turning into a collapsed wall or ceiling during one of the more than 60 aftershocks, most of them rated over 5.0, which have continued into today (one of them woke me up this morning and another interrupted my afternoon siesta yesterday). But without a doubt the worst damage I saw was when I went out with my host parents again in the evening to buy candles, just in case the power went out that night with one of the aftershocks. Only about three blocks from our house, I looked up and saw, next to what I thought was a deserted lot, the entire top floor of a hostel; we could see the furniture and the lamps hanging from the ceiling in colorful paper shades - seemingly undamaged except for the fact that the rooms were missing an entire wall. Then, I realized that the building next to it had completely collapsed - that the lot next to the hostel had been a three or four story building and was now just an enormous pile of rubble that had exposed the innards of the two buildings next to it.

Despite the fairly obvious reminders of the quake - the large cracks or holes in buildings, the large piles of rubble, and the people camping out on the sidewalk or in the green-ways between the two sides of the larger streets - life has returned to normal here in the capital fairly quickly, at least in this part of the city. Cars are back on the streets and the people on the street have somewhere to go besides the nearest collapsed building; I went to a large street market, una fería, with my host parents this morning, and even though almost an entire block was cordoned off because of damages just 20 or 30 yards away from the first stretch of stalls, the market was packed with people buying fresh fruits, vegetables, or fish. Many supermarkets and the Chilean equivalent of convenience stores opened today after remaining closed on Saturday, although policemen and guards at the entrances to many stores only let a certain number of shoppers in at a time and served as a reminder that this was the first time that many people were able to buy supplies after the earthquake. There are still certain parts of Santiago without power, and parts of the Metro system, including the entirety of the city's second most important line (Línea 5) are still closed, but they open tomorrow, and, although there are exceptions it seems like most of the city will begin the month of March and the work week with a sense of normalcy.

However, things are much worse further south, especially in Concepción, where victims of the quake began sacking grocery stores this morning because food and potable water simply aren't available. Now that news reports and footage are finally coming out of Concepción and the surrounding region of Bío Bío, it seems like most of the country, and certainly much of Santiago, has turned its attention south. The phone lines out of Concepción are still down, or at least my host father still isn't able to reach his sister in the city, and I only know what everyone else does - the news reports and the footage on TV - so, at least at this point, I don't have anything more to say about the earthquake. If there's more to say or I have the time, I'll continue posting, whether about the earthquake or other interesting parts of life here in Chile, but for now, it's back to life in Santiago.

El Terremoto: Pt. 2

I had never experienced an earthquake before: I'd slept through a few tremors in North Carolina coming from the mostly inactive fault line in Georgia, but never anything like this, and I was expecting chunks of our house to begin falling off at any second. The power shut off almost as soon as the earthquake started, and with the first tremors, sirens began going off all around the city, adding to the noise of the quake and the rattling of the house and crash of ceramics and a hefty, wooden wall-hanging in my room. But once the earthquake stopped and we all came out of our rooms to make sure everyone was alright and to inspect the damage, I was honestly surprised; the ceramic vase that held our toothbrushes in the bathroom had toppled to the ground and smashed and there were a couple of other small ceramic pieces that had fallen as well, but the most damage was in the living room, where a ceramic candle holder had fallen off a shelf and smashed a glass table in one corner, which we didn't discover until cleaning up in the morning.

The house I'm staying in has three stories that, by American standards, would be cramped, but which have been industriously organized to exactly fit the needs of my host family. The front door opens into the living room, and a short hall leads back into a small kitchen and then a homey dining room, which is the center of the house's activities, with a TV and a computer. My room is on the second floor, between the main bathroom and the bedroom of two of the family's three sons (the third is studying cello in Paris right now); the third floor, which is smaller than the other two, is simply a bedroom, where my host parents sleep.

After calling out each others names, someone found a flashlight and I found my headlamp, and we all met going down the stairs and into the living room, where we started searching the house for cracks, damages - anything that was broken. We cleaned up the largest pieces of the broken ceramics and then opened the front and back doors; the former opens onto a small street and the latter onto the parking lot and the very small plaza made by the three perpendicular blocks of houses. There were people all over the place, some forced out of their houses but most like us, simply curious about how the rest of Santiago had fared. Cars and bicycles flew down the streets, even though it was almost 4 in the morning, but if nothing else, the open doors let in a little light.

We spent about 2 hours awake after the earthquake, most of that simply sitting in the living room as my host family tried to reach relatives or waited for friends and family to call. The phone lines in Santiago and to the north were mostly open, but anything further south was cut off. And even though I've heard that some people were able to use their cell phones immediately after the quake, it must have been a short window, because the cellular network had crashed from too many calls all at once by the time anyone in my family turned on their phones. In those couple of hours, we had visits from neighbors, and we went out into the parking lot where someone had started up his car and had the radio on. That was when we first found out what had actually happened - that the earthquake was rated at 8.3 (that rating was bumped up to 8.8 during the day), and that it was centered about 200 miles from Santiago in the Región Bío Bío. I think the size of the quake took us all by surprise: we knew it was fairly large, but nothing like that. As violent as the quake had been in Santiago, we were lucky we were so far away from the epicenter.

As all of this was going on there were a number of aftershocks, most of which were rated at over 5.0 on the Richter scale, and one over 6.5. In fact, more than 20 hours later, we're still getting some aftershocks, although, with a couple of exceptions, they've been much weaker and less frequent. Eventually, with the power still out and communication almost completely shut down, we all went back to bed.

(Hopefully I'll have the rest tomorrow.)

El Terremoto: Pt. 1

When I haven't been cleaning up broken glass and ceramics, waiting in line at the panadería, or walking around, I've been glued to the TV, like just about everyone else in Chile, especially here in the capital of Santiago, where the transportation systems are completely shut down, leaving people to walk around, inspecting the damage to their barrios, or to stay at home and, if they have power, which most of the city does by now, watch the news. I've been following the US coverage of the earthquake here in Chile, and I've been surprised by the lack of real, on-the-ground English-language coverage, so I thought I'd throw in my story and my two cents while I wait for Santiago to come to life again.

. . .

I'm not really sure what time I fell asleep last night (the 26th), but it was probably a little after midnight. I had been hanging out with the 20-year-old son of the family I'm staying with here in Santiago, and we came back fairly early by Chilean standards. He went to sleep while I watched the first half of a comically-Spanish-dubbed Black Hawk Down in the house's dining room. My host family lives in the Chilean equivalent of a row house in Santiago Centro, the central barrio of Chile's capital, which is home to 5 million people, or 1/3 of the country's population. By the city's Metro, the house is only two stops away from the Plaza de Armas, where the Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia founded the city in 1541. Unfortunately, because of the age of the buildings around Santiago's historical center, many were damaged in the earthquake, most notably the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, whose facade has crumbled and cracked in many places and whose front steps are strewn with stone and bricks.

I must have woken up right at the beginning of the earthquake, a little after 3:30 am local time (1:30 am EST), because it simply felt like an enormous truck was passing by on the street outside; I could feel and hear the ceiling, floor, and windows shaking, and it didn't seem like anything too unusual until I realized that it wasn't stopping, but was instead slowly getting stronger. Somewhere I had heard that Chile has a long history of earthquakes, so, maybe a quarter of the way through the 90-second quake, I finally realized what was actually happening. At this point, I wasn't too worried: seismic shifts and tremors are fairly common, and, because the house had been shaking steadily, but not violently for about 30 seconds I figured this was just a small earthquake that was going to die down any second.

Suddenly, the shaking reached the point where the house itself began to rattle, along with anything standing on shelves or hanging on the walls. Somewhere, sometime, I remember being told that if you're in a house during an earthquake, the best thing to do is to stand in a doorway, I guess because they are some of the strongest, most protected points in a building. This flashed into my head, and I was worried enough to get out of bed, snatch a pair of pants, and head to the door of my room. It was while I was stumbling around in the dark, trying to pull on my pants, that everything began to move - not just shake and rattle, but move up and down, side to side - it was like something that you would find in an amusement park, except I wasn't strapped into a safety harness and, since this was only my fourth night in the country and second night with my family in Santiago, I had no idea how sturdy my house was.

I found out later from my host mom and from one of her other sons how violent this part of the quake actually was. She said that, out of her window, she and her husband could see the buildings across the street bending, swaying, and moving up and down. Her son, who is a bartender in another barrio of the city, told us this morning that the street outside of the bar moved like it was water - like waves in an ocean. I honestly didn't see any of this, because as the house was bucking up and down and moving in ways that houses should never move, I was trying to pull on a pair of pants and make it to the bedroom door, where I finally stood in the quake's last few seconds, as it this violent tossing and bucking slowly began to trail off and the house rattled and shook for maybe 15 or 20 seconds until everything was finally still.

(More coming a little later.)