Earthquake

It was August 15th, 2007, 6.40 pm when the earthquake began; it lasted three minutes, but seemed endless. The power went out suddenly and lightning struck the desert of Lima, making people scream. I remember my grandmother telling me to pray, the apocalypse was here! I lived in “La Punta”, a peninsula in Callao, with my grandmother and my mother. Callao used to be twice its size, until a violent tsunami buried half the city after a similar earthquake. Rumors that the sea retired meters away spread through the whole neighborhood, since we knew that it would come back more furiously. People took the few things they had and ran without knowing where to go. The only place where my family could go was my aunt’s house –across from a shelter for people in the neighborhood. It took all of us until the next day to realize the human impact of the 7.9 degree earthquake: destroyed highways, inhabitable houses and fear in the streets. The entire country was shaken, morally destroyed. The news of a fallen port in Ica and the death of 510 people shocked us.

Before this earthquake, I used to think that “charity” meant giving money to the poor kids who circulate in every corner in Lima, where I am from; but it wasn’t until this earthquake changed my life. I was only 14-years-old, but I knew that I held some responsibility to help. My family in Lima wasn’t wealthy, but at that moment we were better off than the people in Ica. We waited a couple of days, but it only became clearer that we could not turn our backs. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

The next day, my sister collected money from friends and family in the United States. I went from classroom to classroom in my middle school collecting money. My mother also collected money from her friends. In total, we collected more than 2,000 dollars (what a regular police officer makes in a semester). With that money we bought blankets, pots, buckets and canned food. When I told my mom that I wanted to go to Ica to help distribute the donations, she asked me:

* “Carlos, why do you want to go?”

I responded: “If I don’t go, I know I will regret it when I am an adult.” I felt that the experience would change my life, and it certainly did.

Just as in the Haitian earthquake, all the help went to the epicenter ignoring the surrounding places that received damage as well. The epicenter was in “Pisco”, but the whole state of Ica was destroyed. Help from all around the world came for Pisco, but other parts from Ica were ignored.

In the bus to Ica, we saw children everywhere with their hands opened waiting to receive something, they were waiting by hundreds in the airports or bus terminals to receive anything from the tourist. When we arrived, my mother asked the cab driver to take us to a town where people would appreciate our donations the most. He drove us to a place called “Los Molinos,” a small farming town. What we saw was stunning: churches, schools, houses, everything had crumbled. There were people dead on the streets and hundreds of homeless people waiting to receive any kind of help. It took us about four hours to share everything we had, but afterward there was still a feeling of emptiness, of not having done enough.

On the bus back home I began to wonder about my life, the good fortune I had for living in a house that didn’t crumble, the luck I had studying in an intact school while their schools had been destroyed. I was happy to do something to help them rebuild their lives, but today I realize that it was my own life that had changed the most. That day I realized that I had the power to help people. I had the ability, the resources and the responsibility to change people’s lives. And I achieved all this by realizing that my “home” in the phrase “Charity begins at home” wasn’t the corner of my house where I gave alms to the poor kids, but my whole country, Peru.