At 2:30 in the morning, I had returned home from a Chilean barbecue full of dancing and salty spiced meat. Tired out, I fell into a deep sleep in my small room.

Next thing, screams. A nightmare, I was sure; the world was blurred. Unseen crashings from behind frantically shaking walls. I don’t remember well what happened, my memory only contains an instant of trying to stand braced against the wall as lights flashed around me. I think the lights, I remember, were my panic.

Darkness; my door was open and I was searching for my keys. “Chris! Chris! Las llaves!” shouted my host mom.

“Espera!” was all I could force out. “Espera!”

We were downstairs and the key scraped jagged circles around the lock to the gate out of our apartment. My whole body was shaking – I thought the earth was still bucking and I couldn’t let us out as my host mom continued to shout, “Chris! Chris!”

We were out. Darkness, except for the first headlights stabbing out of side streets. I remember, it was pitch black in the stairwells too; I don’t know how we made it down together.

I looked around quivering. My host mom was sobbing, barely breathing and babbling to God. The earth seemed to be still now. A few wide-eyed people came out of the apartments along the street, and I realized my sweatshirt was on backwards.

My host mom tried to ask a gentleman from the second floor what had happened. He was stoic. “Muy fuerte,” he said, shaking his head and looking up at the building. “Muy, muy fuerte. Y largo.” Almost unfeeling.

We stood with bare feet on broken concrete. The world was still blurred around me, half due to my sleep-dazed mind and half due to forgetting to grab my glasses. I realized why my mom was still so distraught – her elderly mom, “la abuelita”, lived alone in the top floor of an old apartment building across the city. Our building was strong, but hers could be in any condition.

I tried to ask the gentleman how bad it was and what had happened.

My host mom suddenly told us we could not wait. We ran back up the obscured stairwell, expecting the walls and ceilings to rend themselves at any moment. Inside, we struggled to find things with the dim light of my cell phone. I grabbed shoes, wallet and glasses and helped her find a jacket and blanket to keep warm. Our nerves were firing in every direction.

Down in the street again, I put my shoes on and we started off. My host mom was crying and praying as we crossed side streets without stoplights. “Por favor Dios en el cielo!” she whimpered as we scurried around broken glass. “Mi mama, Senor, por favor.” She was distraught; I shook as we continued like desperate pilgrims, all holding hands.

The only light came from headlights. They blinded us. Our feet kicked tinkling glass and small chunks of concrete across the sidewalk. People walked alone or in small groups in all directions. When falls of debris covered our path, we swerved into the edge of the street.

We walked thus for 30 minutes. I tried to tell my host mom to breathe. She lapsed into silence for a time and then began her strained pleading again. “Oh Dios en el cielo ayudanos, por favor Senor!” Breathless, tear-stained pleading.

Near Plaza Italia waterfalls of clear, dark water poured from the upper stories of a building and ran unchecked through the street.

We entered the side street where her mother lived. She was convinced she would see crushing rubble perched where the apartment had been, but instead I felt like I had finally re-entered a world capable of love. Two neighbors called down at us from a second-story window and after a rapid exchange my host mom was looking to the sky and thanking God. Her mother was safe; the buildings stood unaffected.

(BREAK HERE)

We paused for a few moments in the street to talk to the neighbors. We heard snippets on the radio. It was a magnitude 8 or maybe 9. The center was somewhere to the south. Everything was hearsay, guesswork. Friends appeared, left again.

Then we were off again to the apartment of more family. The streets were full of people huddled under blankets, staring up at cracked buildings or trying to beg a ride with passing cars. My host mom was calm now, but tear-stained.

At the next apartment, fifteen minutes later, we stood shouting “Lucha! Lucha!” up at the second-floor window. We still held sweaty hands. Nothing. We went around front and eventually the doorman let us in.

Inside the apartment we found comfort from the dark, crowded, dusty night. An aunt carrying a soft candle let us in, gave us seats, and offered us tea and coffee. Around 10 of us sat in a circle, grateful for a respite of safety and family. My host mom’s white-haired mother had a large, frail, severe presence; she was calmer than the rest of us.

Stories flew back and forth across the room, then worried musings about family in other parts of the country. Roberto kept trying to get the cell phones to work, but they refused. The grandmother said things in her nasal, nonchalant way, almost making light of the night in the way she recalled past earthquakes.

Everyone had seen sights. Everyone had different information, from the excited and eager-to-talk niece (who had held her crying mother and then hurried them out of the building) to the uncle who had sequestered himself upstairs in his boxers and ratty polo shirt to devote himself to the radio.

We sat thus in a circle for several hours, sipping tea and wondering.

The grandmother held a cell phone aloft in her stiff old hand that relayed the radio channel over its small speakers. At one point Michelle Bachelet suddenly came on a live feed to reassure the nation around us that the situation was a catastrophe, but that help was radiating out as planned.

Later, Camilo shouted up from outside and he came in bearing more stories of people in the streets. He was in a discotheque an hour before the quake and wondered what he would have done had it struck while he was inside, crammed in with hundreds of other people with only a small doorway for an exit.

Then Adolfo came. He was dressed in a bedraggled suit and breathing hard. He saw his grandmother, kissed her and began to sob. For the time he was much reduced, and only later could he half-return to his normal self, laughing from his sweaty, teared face and telling nearly irreverent stories about the wedding reception he had been dancing at when the quake struck.

Adolfo was anxious to go to the department to see the damage that had been hidden from us by the dark and our panic. Roberto knew the bike had fallen over; my host mom thought the TV had fallen off of its shelf. Everyone convinced him to stay for a bit longer while he sobered up. And dawn was hopefully on its way.

Before long, though, he was on his feet. I told him I would go with him. We were out the door and halfway down the block when a shout held us up. My host mom and Roberto joined us wrapped in the blanket and we began again together.

The first dust gray light tried to reveal what was lying on the sidewalks. More broken lamp glass and building facades thrown about.

Right as we reached Avenida Providencia, a few lonely stoplights came back on. We walked into the neighborhood of Providencia. A dirty, dirty pall dirtied the atmosphere. Lights returned to some buildings. We were together, quiet, even laughing a little about what we might find. And still we hurried.

The stairwell, rendered harmless by electric white lights, was stripped of the twisting, jerking shape it had taken in my memory. On the second floor my host mom pointed to a cracked tile in the floor and pencil-thin cracks in the paint on one of the walls.

The apartment looked scattered. Potted plants had fallen, spilling dirt across the floor. My host mom’s cat collection was sown across this field. Two large speakers lay prone. Yet a cabinet top filled with framed pictures of family appeared untouched.

In the rooms the debris was similarly random. A beer bottle had fallen from the top shelf in Adolfo’s room to land softly on his chair, while several models on the same shelf stolidly stood their ground. The only evidence in my room was a thin pool of water scattered about the base of a nearly full glass on my desk.

Only then did I realize that the entire time my shorts had been on backwards.

We sighed, up righted things and thanked God in our hearts. News was pouring in from around the country, but we soon fell into an exhausted sleep in front of incessant television updates showing more cars crushed under concrete and a continually rising death toll.

-Chris Rurik ’11- Stanford student with the Chile Bing Overseas Program