Costa, Sierra y Selva

I arrived home in Trujillo on Thursday morning to respond to emails and phone calls following the earthquake that struck Peru Wednesday evening. I was walking in Lima when it struck, and because I was moving I didn’t notice the shifting at first. I noticed the power lines waving in the air and, puzzled, stood still. If you’ve ever felt the world go restless under you feet, you will know how alive the earth suddenly feels and how small you really all. And you feel dizzy.

Sensational TV news in Lima followed limeños as they tried unsuccessfully to call their friends and family and to tell them what everyone was already beginning to take for granted: that they were okay and that the world really didn’t do much more than sneeze. The camera pans again and again on a middle aged woman in dusty black shoes and a tight black sweater lying on her back on the sidewalk where she fainted during the tremor. A bystander tries to resuscitate her by massaging her hand. I watch her over and over as the camera lacks anything of greater interest to show an audience that waits in hungry suspense for something dreadful to appear on their screen.

But as the focus shifts from the Capitol (the center of all life in Peru) and onto the south the tone changes, and the voice of the reporter becomes the voice of the mourner. My experience was far removed from that of the citizens of Pisco and Ica in the south. All day yesterday and today the rescuers have been pulling the bodies from what remains of Pisco’s downtown area, where adobe buildings crumbled as the 9.0 earthquake rocked the city for a full two minutes. Over five hundred people have been counted dead, and the number continues to rise.

There is a darkness on the front page of the newspaper today, a single photograph of a son supporting the head of his mortally wounded mother in his lap, his face a dark mockery of childhood kissed by grief. It reaches the entire width of the page, a simple image worth more than any declaration of shock or sympathy that the reporters could ever offer. The greatness of the politicians and world powers and celebrities that normally crowd the front page in a mad rush to be noticed seems to fall into a dead ringing in the ears in the darkness of tragedy. They just don’t seem to matter…at least not right now. Perhaps they’ll be back clamoring tomorrow.

I’m not sure what this means for our country, but most of our tragedies up til now have been self afflicted. We rob each other, hate each other, murder each other and we all feel helpless to change this. The government has proven to be largely ineffective, poverty breeds poverty, sin sin. And as the nation goes on strike time and again demanding milk from a dry cow, I am reminded of the Psalmist who says, “Do not put your trust in princes, Nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; In that very day his plans perish” (Psalms 146:3-4). We need to hear that we are to ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country.

And now the nation is struck by a tragedy not of our own making, and there is a general push for another handout. My prayer is that in this tragedy, the eyes of the children will be turned to their Father, and I don’t mean the state.