All Shook Up

So, there are earthquakes in Guatemala. Monday night after dinner I was sitting around the dining table with my host mother (Ana Maria) , my host sister (Ana Maria) and Ria talking about who knows what, as has become our custom, when suddenly everything in the room started shaking and the walls themselves seemed to be moving...EARTHQUAKE! Being from Wisconsin, I have not experienced a whole lot of earthquakes in my life and was more curious about it than fearful. While the other women sitting at the table showed more than a little concern for the situation. The next day a fellow student at Celas Maya from California shared with me how she instructed everyone in her hostel to get in a doorway, and while some of them moved closer to the doorways none of them took her all that seriously.

This reminded me of my first summer living in Chadbourne at UW-Madison when we had a tornado warning and everyone was instructed to get to the basement. As usual we had an outside group staying in the building, and it was impossible for us to get them to comply with this request. However, I remember one particular gentleman from Connecticut who was petrified by the idea of a tornado, not because he had ever experienced one, but precisely because he had no knowledge of them outside of what he´d seen in movies or television.

The unknown can generate such different responses from people -- fear, curiousity and indifference to name a few. What makes us respond the way we do? I am not one to take potentially serious situations lightly, but for some reason my only thoughts during the earthquake were along the lines of "huh, so this is what an earthquake is like. Interesting.¨ We have had a couple more earthquakes since Monday. I slept through one of them and the other is a faint memory, which I think I only noticed long enough to roll over and fall back asleep. For all of you living in earthquake prone areas, though, I would be stocking up on water, canned foods, first aid supplies, etc. It´s always good to be prepared in the event the shaking turns serious.

For anyone interested, I posted a link to the scientific info related to Monday`s earthquake. It was a 6.1 which seems fairly significant to me. Quetzaltenango is about 80 miles from the epicenter.