February 28, 2010
As I said, there were many replicas, so we didn’t sleep much… but that was the least of our problems today, because today was the day we were going to travel to Concepción. Rodrigo and I made breakfast, and as we were cooking, I remember thinking how awesome it was that in South America they always use propane stoves for cooking… because if they used electric stoves, it would have been so much more difficult.
We ate very well at the cabin because we’d gone to the grocery store on Friday to stock up the cabin for the weekend. The fridge was still a little cold, so the food kept well. We also had plenty of water, enough in the facets to last the day for cleaning dishes and boiling water.
After our breakfast we went to the boat to see the damage around the lake. We discovered 3 houses down from us was a house on the edge of a hill that had a landslide and completely opened the bottom of it exposing its insides. We saw its furniture all along the hill. The nice resort across the lake from us had a cement basketball court destroyed on the edge closest to the lake, and the lodge appeared really shaken up. Other houses lost their foundation, more slides, and so on. It appeared as if we got it really cheap…. And after hearing about all the chaos in Concepción, we knew we did.
We put the boats on land, took their fuel (because we couldn’t buy gas), ate lunch and headed for Concepción. We thought the people were exaggerating the damage on the highways… but they didn’t. The road was cut in some places… Rodrigo didn’t quit biting his nails the entire 3-hour trip! He was driving a really nice car (just like Tia Corrie and Uncle Ed’s)… talk about nerve racking! There were places in the mountains that had trees completely across the road, where they had to cut them for people to pass through. Luckily there were few people traveling… or it would have been a lot scarier.
There was damage everywhere and we knew that it was worse on the inside of the houses. As we were driving we saw many people in tents… tons of places were newly homeless people could sleep. There were trucks with water and food for them… but it appeared as if these people had nothing but hope. There were many families walking toward these camping areas to find a place to stay the night. The more we saw, the more realized it was chaos and a huge devastation.
When we made it to Concepción, we could feel the stress and franticness of the city immediately. I kind of wanted to go back to the lake and wait for people to calm down, but we continued. One company was donating all of their bottled water to the people, however, there were people everywhere robbing too. Grocery stores… pharmacy’s… big stores like Macy’s… computers… cell phones… you name it!
When we finally made it to Rodrigo’s family (not the same side of the family as Jaime), his aunt, grandma, uncle and cousins all met us with tear-filled eyes, so happy to see we made it. As assumed, there was no cell service, electricity, internet, or running water. So we just settled in, told our story, and heard their stories.
One lady, who lived in the neighborhood, had a lot of fish. She must have worked for a fishing company or something. Anyway, it was all going to go bad, so she gave it away to the neighborhood… It was really nice to see the generosity and community there.
That night, we needed to get some more water. So Rodrigo, Sebastian (Rodrigo’s cousin), a friend and I walked with bottles for 3 kilometers to get some water the firefighters were giving away. Rodrigo said, “Had you ever imagined you’d ever have to go look for water?” “No” I said. There we heard the firefighters were running low too… and we knew that many company’s were starting their business on fire to collect insurance (evidently there’s no earthquake insurance… only fire). After we got our water, we hurried home because there was a curfew on the city for 9PM. The only problem was, there was no military to enforce it.
When we made it home, everyone was very frightened because they heard people were going to bombard and rob the neighborhoods in the night. Our neighborhood made barricades so no one could get in. We also wore white so that we could be identified by our neighborhood as a member. There were fires everywhere so that we could all see. There were something like 10 false alarms… nothing happened. I didn’t hear that anything at all happened. I think people were kind of overreacting and paranoid, but I guess better safe than sorry. Rodrigo’s family was trying not to give me much information so that I wouldn’t get scared, but Rodrigo told me everything anyway!
By this time, Rodrigo and I were vey uneasy because we couldn’t communicate with our parents. We had a plan that we’d go to the heart of the city to look for a reporter to call my parents, and have them call his parents. Sounded like a perfect plan, and something for us to do…
I slept pretty well that night because I was exhausted… and there were only 4 or 5 replicas.
That was something terrbile and today people from Chile are still trying to bounce back. When it happened, I was actually in a trip in Argentina. I heard the news in my room of the hotel boutique in palermo holywood I was staying in. Argentineans were shocked but they wanted to do everything to help Chile and they did.
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