I had planned this week to regale readers with details of my wonderfully enlightening trip to Chile, and I still will do that, as well as post a photo slide show of the tour. But the trip had a somber aftermath, with the devastating 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the country early Saturday morning.
Fortunately for our tour group, we had taken off from the airport in Santiago only five hours before the quake hit. We were unaware of the event until we deplaned in New York and were standing in line at Customs. There, television monitors tuned to CNN alerted everyone to the tragic news. Five minutes later, I received the first of several texts on my cell phone, this one from my niece, asking if I was all right.
It was a surreal moment, even more so because, 24 hours earlier, the New York contingent on the trip had joked about wishing we could stay in Chile a couple of extra days because of the storm that was dumping more than a foot of snow on the New York area. While friends and relatives were worried about our safety, our thoughts were with our new Chilean friends and whether they had survived the devastation. This included one of the writers on the tour, who had planned to remain in Chile for a few extra days to tour some wineries.
I spent much of Saturday tuned to news channels as I decompressed from the trip, listening for news about areas of the country we had visited. By Monday morning, we had learned that most of the people we had met had been in contact with at least one person from the group to let us know they were all right, including the San Francisco writer who had stayed behind.
In my experience, visiting a country changes your perspective on that region. It no longer is a “foreign” country. A bond has been established, friends have been made and memories have been created. That certainly is true of Chile, where everywhere we went we encountered friendly, warm and open people.
As a result, this event touched me much more deeply than, say, the earthquake in Haiti, a country I’ve never visited. So now, as I write to you this week about my experiences, I know they will be tempered by the images of destruction and loss I’ve seen over the weekend. Even before Saturday, this was a trip I will never forget. My heart goes out to all my new friends and their families, that they remain safe and their country recovers quickly.