About a year ago Pilar, the psychologist I met in Dichato where she is involved in community recovery programs with the most affected of the 2010 tsunami victims, told me “In ten years Dichato will be reinvented, more attractive than ever and with better services for
It was a little over three years ago that my plan to spend a night in the small, tidy coastal village of Dichato was frustrated when I decided instead to continue on to a hotel a few kilometers further south in Chile’s third largest city, Concepción. What transpired that night
“The New Coastal Panorama of Maule”, reads the title of the article in El Mercurio’s Vivienda Y Decoración magazine section that greeted us the day we arrived in Chile. Beautiful pictures of architecturally interesting buildings situated right at water’s edge in the small fishing villages
“We are never satisfied with a response to a disaster, because it is, after all, a disaster”.* To retrace the route I took alone about a year ago, the day before the earthquake, Gerry and I left Dichato, drove inland a bit through Coelemu and
“We are never satisfied with a response to a disaster, because it is, after all, a disaster”.* Driving down the Pan-American highway across the Maipo Valley, as you leave the snarl and smog-producing Santiago traffic, you can’t help but feel the tension release from the
Arriving in Chile this year for our annual visit, I began immediately to ask family and friends how the reconstruction was going a year after the terrible earthquake and tsunami that hit the central coast of Chile on February 27, 2010. I perused the press
The long Chilean winter of 2010 is over, the new Pinera administration is in full swing, the center-left opposition is trying to reorganize after their defeat, the bicentennial celebration is over, and the miners are out of the hole (one was even running in the
When the February 2010 tsunami washed inland over much of the small fishing village of Loanco, in the Maule province of south central Chile, many homes were totally destroyed, the fishermen lost all of their boats, motors, and nets, and even their new tractor for
Here’s a little story that tells a lot about the ebb and flow of life. Although it leaves me wondering a bit if there is more ebb than flow, here it is. My Peace Corps group arrived in Bothell, Washington, to begin our orientation for
Almost three months have passed since Chile’s record-setting earthquake; 8.8 on the Richter scale, more than 2 and a half minutes of agonizing length, and followed within the next couple of hours by several horrific tsunamis. On that February 27, 2010, the world stopped for