On Thursday April 10th a 6.2 earthquake hit my
community of Nagarote shaking the whole town for 45 seconds straight, followed
by a long, powerless night of aftershocks.
In a city like San Francisco, a 6.2 earthquake would probably do very
little to no damage due to the structural design of the buildings, but in a
developing country like Nicaragua, where the majority of the homes are
patch-worked together in a very simple way, an earthquake of this magnitude can
be devastating. In Nagarote and the surrounding
communities, 2000 families lost their homes and over 200 people were hurt. One woman died. Nagaroteños spent a dark and scary night
waiting and sleeping outside for fear that their homes would collapse on them during the many aftershocks. Earthquakes continued to strike for over a
week, a 6.6 in Rivas, then a 5.6 in Managua and hundreds of 3.0 to 4.5, keeping everyone
on edge.
Last July Nagarote celebrated its 50 year anniversary of cityhood. My sitemate Chelsea and I joined in on the
festivities of a very proud and united city.
They completely remade the central park transforming it into an elegant
and peaceful location. They made major
improvements to the city like repainting the church, creating rentable food
kiosks, adding more public garbage cans, paving new pedestrian sidewalks,
adding lights, and displaying beautiful decorative flags, making it a vibrant
and beautiful place to visit and live.
Forty-five seconds was all it took to set them back so far, to undo so
much of the progress it has recently achieved.
Walking through the streets about a week after the earthquake, we passed
piles and piles of shattered cement and roofing on the sides of the road, homes
spray painted with giant red X’s, inhabitable, ready to be demolished, and
homes with entire chunks of their walls or roofs missing. All the picture frames that once hung in the
living room of my home sat in a dusty pile cracked and broken. The TV in my room was no longer sitting on
the wooden shelf, because it fell and shattered. Giant cracks ran from floor to ceiling and in
some parts of the kitchen the sun shinned brightly down on our faces because
parts of the roof were missing. I walked
into my next door neighbor’s house, a family that has a 13 day old baby, and as
I stepped through the door frame, I instantly entered the backyard, because
there house no longer had walls.
I visited the homes of all my former neighbors and
counterparts listening to their stories.
“Gracias a Dios nada grave paso a nuestra casa” “Gracias a Dios estamos bien” (Thanks to God
nothing horrible happened to our house. Thanks to God we are ok). So many of their homes suffered serious
structural damage with huge fresh cracks running from ceiling to floor, but as
long as their homes were still standing, they were grateful to God for sparing
them. “Vamos a seguir adalante”, (we will move forward) everyone kept telling
me, smiling and relaxed, certain that they will rebuild and press on working together as a
community. Their positivity both
inspired and completely broke me. These
beautiful people are some of the hardest working people I have ever met and
they struggle every single day to provide for their families and fight against
the thrills of poverty. They fight
against obstacle after obstacle to improve their economic situation, to live a respectable
life and here they are facing another huge setback. The average person lives on two dollars a day
in Nicaragua struggling against a constantly devaluing currency, inflation, rapidly
rising food costs and electric prices, extremely high unemployment, a sub-par
education and health system, a history of unstable government and war, sickness, disease and every possible natural
disaster. Amongst all of this continued hardship,
they maintain their resilience, their inspiration to do better and never once
will you hear them complain. Their
strength, endurance and positive spirit is incredible. They face adversity with such grace.
If you would like to donate to a Nagarote earthquake relief
fund, you can do so through an NGO I worked with while living in Nagarote, The
Norwalk Nagarote Sister City Project.
To donate to the earthquake relief fund, go to
www.sistercityproject.org and hit donate, or send a tax deductible check made
out to N/NSCP to PO Box 382, Norwalk, CT 06852
