John and Linda Cobb(Photo: © SAMS/CMS)From Huelquen, south of Santiago, former SAMS mission partners John and
Linda Cobb describe the experience of Chile's earthquake
Two people were killed just down the road when their adobe house collapsed on them and many of that type of house in the area is now unusable and must be demolished.
Delayed shock
Our house stood up wonderfully well, a tribute to modern design and to the builders. Apart from a lot of broken glasses and crockery, and a badly shaken cat who was asleep in the study and must have woken to find it raining books as over three hundred of them fell off the shelves, we suffered very little damage.
Even so, both Linda and I had mild attacks of delayed shock two or three days later. A pupil of Linda’s told her that, when he finally contacted his mother 48 hours later once the telephones were back, he discovered that she had eaten nothing since the quake, despite having a full larder. She lives on the 15th story of a block of flats and, apart from the jolting, her bedroom must have oscillated through an arc of 40 or 50 feet since tower blocks are built to be flexible.
What is it like being in a big shake?
I don’t know how many of you have ever heard a spin-drier vibrating with a load that is badly off centre: imagine being inside without the spin, just the jolts; or in an airplane which suddenly hits really heavy turbulence.
Being in a big quake is a bit like that; you get really shaken up with short sharp jolts for anything up to a couple of minutes.
One of the really wearing things is the trail of after-shocks. When a tremor comes, there is absolutely no way of knowing if is going to turn into another quake or not.
The slight rattle of the windows, the creak of the roof timbers probably mark the passing of another minor tremor, but they might just be the beginning of another big quake and the adrenalin begins to flow again as one gets ready to move fast if necessary.
We feel particularly affected by what happened on the coast because we were on holiday there only a month ago.
We are more or less back to normal now. The electricity and mains water are functioning, but we have no telephone yet apart from our mobiles.
A farmer brought round water in a large tank behind a tractor for a couple of days and, while we were queuing for it and exchanging news with our neighbours, Linda commented that she was off to the village to buy some bread, only to be told that no one was baking yet. Well, we had plenty of pasta and potatoes, so that was no real hardship. Ninety minutes later, the daughter of the people who live across the road arrived with a big smile and four freshly-baked large rolls to help us out!
A hundred acts of kindness
This story leads me on to a comment: from what I have seen on the internet, the overseas news has concentrated on the looting that has taken place.
For every incident of that type that has hit the headlines, there are hundreds of examples of kindness and solidarity, some very small like the one I have just described, others much bigger like the university student who got some friends together, filled a couple of pickup-trucks with bread and food plus drinks, and drove down to the coast where he and his family had spent the summer to feed people who had absolutely nothing left after the tsunami.
The quake may be news for a few more days, but it will take years to rebuild and there are a lot of memories which will be very, very difficult to heal: please keep praying.