Tsunami!? Again.

I woke up at 1:30 to a phone call from Brandi, my field director, and I knew something must be wrong, because she doesn’t usually call just to check-in in the middle of the night. Hmmm. I answered my phone and just heard, “Jessie,” in a sort of worried tone. Then the line went dead. Oh jeez! Was an axe murderer running around outside my house?  What was going on? Then she called again. This time I heard, “Jessie. Tsunami...” The line went dead again. “Oh boy! Not this AGAIN!” I thought to myself. After a third attempt the call finally worked. There was a massive earthquake in Chile and we had a tsunami warning. It was to hit at 8:51. 

(At around 1am, the Sa (village oxygen tank bells) had actually rang as a warning, but I slept through those.)

We actually knew about the earthquake. Rosemary’s friend in Japan heard about it on the news and called to tell her, but we didn’t think that it would travel so far and effect us. 

Since Rosemary and Kate had stayed over, I went and woke everyone up and relayed the news. I live as far inland as you can get and pretty high up, so we were pretty safe. At 6am, though, Kate woke me up. We were going to head further up the mountain and go to Cynthia and John’s house. Some of our other friends that live on the water were already there. 

We walked the 40 minutes to Cyn and John’s, and it looked like the 4th of July. At 6:30 am there were thousands of people lining the streets. Everyone from the coastal villages had come up to safety and had brought blankets and chairs and food to ride out the tsunami.  

We stayed up at Mapusaga Fou until about 9:30 am when we figured it was safe. The radio was not broadcasting anything, but we figured we weren’t hit. 

As it turns out, we did get the effects for the quake. Our harbor emptied and filled 7 times (just like when our 9/29/2009 tsunami hit).  (Note: This is really creepy to watch. Literally almost all of the water is sucked out to the deepest areas and the reef becomes completely exposed. It’s like a vacuum sucking out the ocean’s water before it slowly refills.)  The force of the water, however, was just not strong enough after traveling for 4,000 miles to make huge waves. After finding that out, it was definitely a good idea for all of the island to move to high ground. Just a bit more force and we could have had another disaster on our hands.