The Night the Earth Shook

I walked to my room feeling an uncomfortable unsteadiness. As I came to the doorway I noticed there was something eerily different- even in the dead of night my room had never been so dark.
I quickly flipped the light switch up and down, up and down. Right as it dawned on me that the electricity was out, the shaking began.

Thinking about it now, it's impossible to say how much time passed. It's one of those moments in life that posses the ability to take hours as the feelings pass through your body, but in reality occur in a matter of minutes. All I know is I felt the first tremors that then quickly erupted into the shaking and moving of my home and all things inside.

I distinctly remember the darkness shifting into a weird mix of light and movement and noise. SO MUCH NOISE. Everything in the house was clanging together creating a sound that was felt impossible to think through.

However, all that drilling in grade school and as I tried to process what was happening as well as what I needed to do, one thing came to mind- go to the basement.

Well, 2 things.
1. there was no basement
2. The basement thing was meant for tornadoes which had been the majority of the drills we had during school because anything else was pretty unlikely in the midwest.

Anyway, I went along with this plan the best that I could and through the shaking crawled down the stairs all the while covering my head, not trusting anything to stay on the walls.
Once I reached the bottom of the stairs, like so many times thus far, my brilliant Spanish consistently failed me and all I could think to yell was HOLA. Again HOLA.
To my surprise it worked and suddenly my host brother was there, grabbed my hand and pulled me into the main doorway of the house.

Kind of weird to say, but it was an incredible moment. One foot in the house, one outside into the street, and holding onto the doorway watching our world shake.


Everything changed that night. In that night and the hours that followed we became family, we became friends, and Chile became a different country.