Lima, Peru is far from Jakarta, but they have a lot in common: noise, heat, corruption, crazy traffic, exotic fruit, tasty local cuisine, extreme wealth, extreme poverty, street vendors, people from small towns who've come to make their fortune (they don't, mostly), guys hanging out of buses shouting destinations, taxis that honk at you whenever you walk down the street, rampant black-marketeering, etc. In fact, I think I was more prepared for Jakarta because I'd traveled to Lima to visit my beloved brother-in-law Jose.
So it's eerie to have a quake hit Lima just a week after one struck here. Theirs, of course, was much more severe. Fortunately Jose's family is OK (he and Cathy live in the States now). Let's hope the tectonic plates have worked out their differences for a while.
2 comments:
Thanks Trish!!!
I rememeber my chidhood in Lima with the ocassional earthquake here and there. My mother used to say "The earth is dancing!" and she would get up and dance with us. That's how we got used to earthquakes. This last one though is like nothing I have seen before. Thankfuly all the poeple we know are ok. It is heartwarming to see the people in Peru organizing themselves and traveling through destroyed roads and floods to reach the affected cities and help, even just by making breakfast for the people now living on the streets. The goverment for some reason, despite the helicopters and planes, can not get there faster that a bunch of neighbors on a truck.
Isn't that always the case? It seemed that way after the Jakarta floods; whole neighborhoods moved into mosques or tarp cities and pooled their money to buy food, and people who weren't flooded organized their own relief efforts. It was pretty impressive.
"The earth is dancing," eh?! I guess I don't mind if it waltzes a little, but when it starts shaking like Shakira or Inul Daratista, I want out!
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